Thanks Mom, for everything.  You may not be an imposing figure walking down the street, but you’re far tougher than the average tiger.  No matter how much life surprises you and tosses you things you weren’t planning on, you find a way to pull it all together and make it all right.  And it’s important you realize your contributions and sacrifices do not go unnoticed or unappreciated.  Your strength is inspiration to us all.  I’m proud of you, and I hope you have a wonderful day.

The trouble, of course, is that when you view everyone else as subordinate, you tend to believe they have nothing to teach you.  I’ve written before about how there are countries out there with proven successes in achieving exactly the goals we’re trying to achieve in healthcare and education, but we are not even seriously studying or talking about these foreign models.

Now comes evidence that Iceland has done wonders in solving their housing market issues as well as getting their financial system back in order following the 2008 meltdown of both.  In a nutshell, Iceland took over its banking industry rather than just bailing it out as we did here in the US.  It then forgave any mortgage debt above 110% of a home’s value for all its citizens.   This dramatically reduced the debt burden for most households and kept consumer spending from plummeting. It then instituted extensive new regulations on the banking industry to prevent another 2008-style catastrophe.  Further, it has actively pursued criminal charges against almost 300 banking executives who were directly responsible for decisions leading up to the crash.  The result?

Iceland’s $13 billion annual economy declined 6.7 percent the following year, in 2009, but has since rebounded and will expand by 2.4 percent this year and in 2013, the OECD estimated. Meanwhile, in the rest of debt-ridden Europe, the economy will collectively expand by a paltry 0.2 percent this year and only 1.6 percent the next, OECD estimates said in November.

Housing is now just about 3 percent below values in September 2008, just before the financial collapse. So improved is the nation’s economic and fiscal outlook that Fitch Ratings in February raised the country to investment grade with a stable outlook, stating the country’s “unorthodox crisis policy response has succeeded.”

By comparison, the US is projected to grow at 2.2% in 2012, the housing market remains underwater, and the banks are returning to many of the same policies that led to the crash in the first place.

It’s not clear that what happened in Iceland is directly applicable to the US.  Perhaps those programs and policies would not function here as well for one reason or another.  But the crime is that we are not even talking about it—not even trying to learn from their experience.  The mainstream press has given Iceland almost no coverage.  Politicians are not discussing what happened there and debating its applicability to our economy.  As far as the US is concerned, Iceland doesn’t exist.

Is this because we’re too proud to admit a bunch of foreigners have something to teach us?  Or is it because the special interests have a stranglehold on the media and the politicians and are suppressing stories that would lead to policies unfavorable to their moneyed interests?  It’s not clear.  But what is clear is that other countries are solving problems that we need to solve, and we’re idiots if we can’t find something to learn from them.

Much like the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, CISPA cloaks itself with a title that’s hard to be opposed to.  Cyber-terrorism is a very real threat, and who in their right mind would be against a measure to protect us from a cyber-attack?  Ahhh… if only it actually achieved that goal.

What CISPA actually does is provide immunity to ISPs and online  service providers for responding to government requests for information about the cyber-activities of anyone related to cybersecurity, cyber crime, protecting people from harm, protecting children from exploitation, and national security.  Note that the bill does not compel companies to turn over such information, and because it’s a voluntary request, it requires no court approval or any other sort of burden of reasonable cause.  But keep in mind that during the post 9/11 illegal wiretapping scandals, AT&T, Verizon, and other companies were only too willing to hand over your data.  So much so that there were efforts to prosecute the telecom companies for violating citizen’s rights, which ultimately required that the telcos be granted immunity.  Under CISPA, they will have permanent immunity as CISPA explicitly states that companies may provide requested information “notwithstanding any other provision of law.”  In other words, CISPA trumps all other laws.

CISPA would “waive every single privacy law ever enacted in the name of cybersecurity,” Rep. Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat and onetime Web entrepreneur, said during the House debate. “Allowing the military and NSA to spy on Americans on American soil goes against every principle this country was founded on.”

Yet all this begs the question, will it make us safer?  After all, in the last decade Americans have repeatedly shown that they are willing to sacrifice considerable freedoms in the interest of domestic security.

The fundamental issue would seem to be that this is a bill about cyber-security. Yet the allowances to deploy the law for purposes such as protecting children from exploitation seem pretty hard to defend as essential to preventing cyber-terrorism.  Still, it’s hard to argue that protecting children is a bad thing.

Moreover, the issue would seem to be the relative ease by which potential cyber-terrorists could thwart the efforts enabled by CISPA.  VPN tunnels and anonymous proxy services are well known technologies, and would make it impossible for anyone monitoring network traffic to even determine who was talking to whom, much less eavesdrop on the conversation.  You could certainly argue that the average citizen might not have the geeky skills to set up such a secure Internet connection.  But certainly anyone with the mad tech skills to conduct cyber-terrorism is going to be able to handle an encrypted network tunnel.  Don’tcha think?

So who are we catching here?  One possibility is that this is all just more security theater.  We’ll spend a lot of money and politicians will use CISPA as a campaign slogan, but it will have very little net impact on security.  Another possibility is that CISPA will be exploited for less noble purposes, unrelated to cyber-terrorism.  Instead of hunting down Chinese hackers, it will be used to hunt down your spouse streaming an illegally broadcast Celtics game on her laptop.

The bottom line is that this bill will not accomplish what it purports to.  The bill is highly focused on domestic surveillance, and there is no evidence that we are at risk of a domestic cyber-attack from citizens with poor tech skills.  Further, there are ample laws on the books now that allow the government a pretty wide berth to eavesdrop on citizens when they can show cause.  And those laws have already been routinely circumvented in the name of national security.  If anything, we need to be shoring up the Fourth Amendment, not tearing it to shreds.

Just because technology provides the means to unobtrusively invade our personal privacy does not mean we should be surrendering those rights.

Fortunately, while CISPA started out with bipartisan support, it has become a partisan issue.  It may have been passed by the House, but its chances of getting through the Senate are slim, and Obama has already threatened a veto.  Yet this is no time for complacency.  These sorts of bills just keep on coming, and sooner or later, one of them will slip through.

Be vigilant.

Hilary Rosen vs. Ann Romney

CNN contributor Hilary Rosen set off a faux firestorm Wednesday when she accused her celebrity look-alike Ann Romney of having not worked a day in her life.

The RNC, on behalf of all stay-at-home moms (who have recently been placed on the Endangered Species List anyway), is outraged, outraged I tell you!  Romney’s response was a bit more nuanced, saying, “Motherhood is the most important job there is.” —which is somewhat akin to responding to the question, “What time is it?” with the answer, “Morning is my favorite part of the day.”

I’m sure that managing multiple households and the staffs of servants therein has its challenges.  Hell, I’m sure driving a couple of Cadillacs can be more than a little confounding all on its own. Which is really more the point Rosen was trying to make.  She was saying that Romney can’t relate to the problems of women who are not so well off.

The expression “You’ve never worked a day in your life” is often hurled at the well to do by those less fortunate.  I’m sure there’s more than a couple of coal miners who would claim I’ve never worked a day in my life. Hell, I’m pretty tempted to say the same of Mitt.  And I’d even bet there’s a fair number of stay-at-home moms who would second Rosen’s assertion that Ann Romney hasn’t.  It’s all relative.

To read the attack on Ann Romney as an attack on all stay-at-home moms is to buy into the notion that somehow Ann is just Harriet Nelson, if only Ozzie had owned a mansion.  I’m not buying it.

Would any of you ladies out there care to sign up for an episode of “Wife Swap” with Ann Romney?  I’ll bet you cope with her life a lot better than she copes with yours.

Trayvon Martin - 17-yr old shooting victim

The news channels, the newspapers, and the Interwebs remain abuzz over the tragic Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida.  An online meme of pictures of people in hoodies has taken hold as a collective call for justice.  And a current CNN poll finds that 73% of Americans are calling for the arrest of Martin’s shooter, George Zimmerman.

Based on the publicly known elements of the case I personally think Zimmerman was carrying out some sort of misguided, and maybe racially motivated, vigilante justice.

I’m personally horrified that laws exist that allow a person to use deadly force in self-defense when there is reasonable belief of a threat, without an obligation to retreat first. It seems that’s just begging for situations like this to happen.

And I find it unbelievable that a 250 pound 28-year old man driving an SUV and armed with a semiautomatic pistol felt threatened by a 17-year old pedestrian who weighed all of 140 and was armed only with Skittles.  There’s no indication he was a trained ninja or the apprentice of a Sith Lord.  So what reasonable threat could Martin have posed?

Further, it’s not at all clear the Sanford Police have handled the case well, or even within established guidelines, and the investigation and intervention by higher legal authorities seems absolutely warranted.

Yet I’m also very aware that these are my opinions based on a very possibly slanted news cycle, and based on absolutely no legal expertise with how the Stand-your-ground law in Florida is adjudicated.  I completely get why everyone is up in arms about this.  I very much want due process and justice to occur here.

But I also want to be very careful that we don’t create a vigilante mob of public opinion to go after a man because he himself was a vigilante.  Those two wrongs will not add up to a right.  Zimmerman should be arrested and subsequently tried based on the merits of the case and the law of the state.  He should not be arrested because a CNN poll says it’s the will of the people.

We also need to be ready and aware that the result of all this could be a repeat of the Casey Anthony verdict.  Justice may be served, and yet not serve up the verdict the public wants.  It may well be that the Florida law, however misguided, allows for exactly what happened.  If that turns out to be true, I would hope for and support the repeal or modification of that law.  But that wouldn’t make Zimmerman guilty after the fact.

In the end, we are a country of laws. The implications of that are not always what feels right. I remain hopeful this is not one of those cases.

Certainly, the number of women in tech is not on par with the number of men. Although, there are way more of them now than when I entered the field 30 years ago, and it’s continuing to trend up. Yet parity remains a ways off and it’s quite reasonable to question why a field with lots of open jobs is having trouble attracting and keeping women in this economy.

Parr cites some examples of highly insensitive actions and downright hostile workplace issues as his reason for concluding that the male dominated field is simply not a welcoming place for women.  While I agree those issues exist to varying degrees at different employers and schools, I do not agree that this is the core issue.

In full recognition that I’m treading way out on a politically incorrect limb here, I think the core issue is that while women are every bit as capable as men in the tech field, far too few of them have it in their blood.  And in the tech field, that blood passion makes a difference.

A critical minority of the tech field is made up of tech geeks—people who live and breathe tech.  These are people who leave work and go home to their other tech projects.  They fix computers, create apps, build crazy gadgets, put up websites, and learn new languages and tools just for fun.  They own spudgers and Arduino boards and they don’t know why you can’t wire a simple TTL circuit to access the firmware controller on your hard drive.  And yes, they are almost exclusively guys.

I don’t know why they are almost all guys, but it starts early.  When my son was a toddler, I recall taking him to a friend’s house who had a daughter the same age. Both children were the offspring of two parents with engineering degrees. Yet while my friend’s daughter was excited that she would get to play with someone new, my son was looking forward to a whole house full of different toys.

In school, there were girls who were excellent engineering students. But when their hair dryers died, they called on the guys to fix it.  If repairing a hair dryer was a lab project, I have no doubt that any and all of them would have aced the assignment.  But this was not something they had to do, and they seemed to lack the innate drive many of the guys had to dive in and figure it out for fun.

This is in no way to suggest that girls aren’t capable of doing tech jobs. They absolutely are.  But there’s a motivational tech spark that, while not present in all guys, is almost exclusively present in guys.  Yes, I have known the occasional female tech geek, but they are few and far between.

What complicates the tech field is that it evolves at such a rapid pace.  Tools and techniques you learn in school are often obsolete before you graduate.  It’s virtually impossible to stay abreast of the field if you only work at it during business hours. One answer is to be a workaholic, and those come in both genders.  But the easier answer is to be a geek. Then you’re not working after hours, you’re playing.  Same result; less stress.

Over time, the demands of this rapidly changing field result in a large number of non-geeks migrating to management, support, or other tech-adjacent jobs.  Those are valuable jobs that need to get done, but the women in those jobs don’t contribute to the number of women in tech.  And so, over the years, the non-geeks tend to self-select out of the field.  As a result, the number of senior level non-management tech jobs filled by women is very small.

I will grant up-front that I have no scientific evidence or data to back this up.  It’s based entirely upon having spent decades in the tech field, where I worked with, and went to school with, lots of different men and women.  Perhaps my experience is unusual, but I suspect it’s not.  (Just in case I’m going to put on my flame-retardant underwear before I hit the Publish button.)

Moreover, both gatherings are hopelessly misnamed.

The Rally for Religious Freedom is actually motivated by the new mandate from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that requires all employers provide free contraceptives through their health plans.  Further, it’s organized by two anti-abortion groups, the Pro-Life Action League and Citizens for a Pro-Life Society.  So the freedom they are advocating for is the freedom to observe their religious laws over secular ones.  While I suppose you can argue that’s freedom of a sort, it’s certainly not the sort enshrined in the First Amendment.  And let’s be clear, while cloaked as an “all faiths” gathering, this is a Christian rally.

Meanwhile, the Reason Rally is advocating for the acceptance of atheists as normal non-threatening members of society.  In part. the hope is to also encourage more atheists to come out of the closet by making them less alone.  While that’s a noble goal, a good place to start might be to name your rally something that doesn’t imply that all theists are irrational.  The concepts of faith and reason extend far beyond the notion of God.  Rejecting God doesn’t make you incapable of having faith in anything, nor does accepting God make you immune to reason.

What’s also interesting is that both groups are positioning themselves as the victims.

The Christians, despite being in the vast majority, feel the secularists are launching a war on their religion.  This is as comical as the claims that the LGBT movement is destroying the family.  Just because you don’t get to impose your values on everyone else does not translate to a conspiracy to deprive you of your beliefs.

The atheists, who actually are a minority struggling for acceptance, are staging “the largest gathering of the secular movement in world history” in an effort to appear less threatening.  They are trotting out speakers like The God Delusion author Richard Dawkins, who is a perennial lightening rod for those fearing so-called militant atheism.  Granted, when atheists get militant, they tend to write books rather than buy guns, but it’s hard to see this as a vehicle for winning the hearts and minds of those who fear you.  This is much more like the secular version of showing up in ass-less chaps and chanting “We’re Here! We’re Queer! Get used to it!”

In the end, expect a lot of noise in the news cycles about each event, expect a fair bit of manufactured outrage, expect a lot of unhelpful rhetoric, but don’t expect too much productive to come of it.

Okay, maybe we should mind a little… The GOP’s message is that Obama is responsible for high gas prices and he should do something about that.  And that something is to “drill, baby, drill“.  Unfortunately, those damned liberally biased facts stand in stark opposition to the GOP’s message.  As the chart on the right shows, oil production under Obama has risen at a substantial rate, and contrasts markedly with the steady decline of production under George Bush.  In fact, the number of oil rigs in production in the U.S. has reached a 24-year high, according to oil field services company Baker Hughes. In 2005, domestic production was 1.89 billion barrels. This year, experts say, production is expected to surpass 2 billion barrels.

Further, there’s no correlation between domestic oil production and gas prices.  The chart on the left shows instead that the two numbers seem to roughly track.  If we assume (moronically) that correlation is the same as causation, the obvious policy would be to stop domestic production in an effort to bring prices at the pump down.

Another nail in the coffin of the failure to drill position is the U.S. Energy Information Administration report that the U.S. exported 430,000 more barrels of gasoline than it imported for the month of September. This is an historic change, because we’ve been a net importer of gasoline, mostly from Europe, since the 1960s. We are not domestically constrained on gasoline supply.

Another inconvenient truth is U.S. net petroleum imports have fallen to about 47% of the nation’s consumption, down from a record 60.3% in 2005, Energy Information Administration statistics show. It’s been 15 years since the nation’s reliance on foreign oil has been this low.

So does Obama deserve all the credit for this?  No, absolutely not.  While he’s called for ending the $40B in annual subsidies to big oil, so far the money flows unabated.  While there was a brief moratorium on deep water drilling after the BP oil spill, that was long ago lifted.  Obama subsequently opened up drilling in the Arctic to the howl of environmentalists, and also agreed to open leases for drilling off the eastern seaboard, despite his reputation on the right for shutting down oil exploration.  Obama may not be responsible for the boom in production, but it’s not at all clear how you can claim he’s a hindrance to it.  There might be a claim that he could do more to spur drilling, but there’s no evidence he’s done anything yet to impede drilling.  If anything, his policies lean the other way.

Meanwhile, in reality, the major reasons for increases in domestic oil production lie with recent advances in geologic imaging allowing accurate identification of underground oil deposits, as well as the development of new extraction techniques making previously unprofitable wells productive.

The impact of energy efficiency should also not be underestimated. Not only are our homes, cars, and appliances cleaner and greener, but advances in technology have reduced the need for travel. More of us are telecommuting to work, or using GoToMeeting instead of jumping on a plane.

Hmmm… domestic production is up, domestic use is down, and gas prices are still rising.  That doesn’t sound like the supply & demand model we learned about in school!  But wait, I’ve heard rumors that the US is not the only country on the planet.  Maybe there are other players here influencing the market.

It turns out that growing industrialized counties like China and India are consuming an ever larger portion of the global oil supply.  In aggregate, the global demand is expected to barely keep pace with global production.  So there’s minimal excess capacity in the market, and that helps keep prices high.  Granted, additional production will definitely help this problem.  However, if China and India continue growing at their current rate and eventually consume oil at rates approaching what we do in the U.S., the need will far outstrip the supply of oil on the entire globe.  So long term, most of us have to find an energy alternative to oil anyway.  The only way “Drill, Baby, Drill” solves this problem is if the US becomes entirely oil self-sufficient, and then detaches itself from the global oil markets.  And that flies directly in the face of the GOP position on open, free, and unregulated markets.  Can you imagine the cries when the law is passed that prevents Exxon from exporting?

And speaking of free markets, oil speculators are in no small part responsible for the current price spike.  Almost 70% of the current oil commodities market is driven by speculators.  Why is speculation driving prices up?  Primarily, the speculation that there is an imminent military intervention in Iran that will dramatically impact the delivery of Mid-East oil.  Meaning, the increased saber-rattling toward Iran is helping drive prices up by driving speculation of a coming supply crunch.  Keep in mind that while Obama has offered stern warnings to Iran, the current GOP Presidential contenders (excluding Ron Paul) have all promised to attack Iran if they don’t fall in line to U.S. demands.  Commodities speculation is fairly unregulated, and it seems highly unlikely the GOP would support such financial regulation.  Meanwhile, their militaristic approach to foreign policy exacerbates fears that are driving the free market in the direction they claim to not want it to go.

Mitt Romney is on record saying that rather than bail out the auto industry, the market should just have been allowed to run its natural course.  That’s what’s best for the markets and ultimately best for America. Why then, is it not best for the markets and best for America to let gas hit $5/gallon if that is the natural course of things?  Why should the government intervene on gas prices?

If your mantra is, shut up and take your medicine while the markets sort it out, then shut up and take your medicine.

If you are part of, relate to, or support one of the groups below, you should know how the GOP feels about you or your loved ones:

• Women – unscrupulous homicidal baby incubators who left unregulated and controlled would be hurling infants off seaside cliffs in hormonal rages.
• Gays/Lesbians – an affront to God, family, and good clean living; they won’t rest until they’ve turned everyone gay and destroyed the institutions of marriage and parenthood.
• Immigrants – the illegal ones are job-stealing leeches on the underbelly of society that should be deported just as soon as the crops are in; the legal ones are sketchy too—they talk funny.
• Scientists – a cabal of liberal tree-hugging geeks in white lab coats bent on corrupting children, destroying religion, and crimping oil industry profits; except the ones working on smartphone technology—they’re okay.
• Atheists – an evil, amoral, hedonistic scourge sent by Satan to lead the weak of faith straight to Hell and plunge America into darkness… which would be bad, unless it’s the End Times.
• Poor People – lazy, shiftless, unmotivated, drug-addled drains on society; they need to get off their asses and out in the fields for sub-poverty wages so we can send all the damned illegals back home.
• African Americans – entitled and lazy, they will resort to crime and drugs if they don’t get their food stamps and welfare checks; except pro athletes—they’re valuable.
• Muslims – terrorists… all of them; this is America dammit, and we do not sit idly by while some freedom hating loonies with exploding underwear try to rob us of our religious freedom.
• Hispanics – see Illegal Immigrants; and even those that are legal are only hear to try and figure out how to sneak all their friends and relatives over the border.
• Future Seniors – current seniors are good to go; future seniors had better cinch up their Depends because this notion that you should have health care and a government pension is unsustainable; but don’t worry, if you do it right during your working years, then you’ll be rich enough to enjoy retirement; if you didn’t… well, try to die unobtrusively.

…and I’m sure I missed a few groups, or maybe the GOP just hasn’t gotten around to them yet.

I can’t fathom how alienating all these groups will help the GOP in the election as these groups represent some significant portions of the population.  Their only election day salvation would seem to be  keeping all these undesirables from the polls.  Oh yeah, that’s already under way.

Use as directed (by doddering old men)

The overreaction by the left is giving me a headache. Sure, Foster Friess made a stupid remark when he said,

“This contraception thing, my gosh, it’s so inexpensive. You know, back in my days, they’d use Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.”

He says it was a joke, and I believe him.  Apparently I’m the only one who remembers hearing this joke some 40 years ago.  It was a play off of what was then a new form of birth control called “the pill”.  People would joke back then that the only way the pill would be 100% effective is if you held it between your knees.  And I remember hearing the aspirin variant as well.

This certainly doesn’t excuse the reality that this was not the time or the venue to make such a lighthearted remark.  So, Friess rightly gets a dope slap for that.  But MS-NBC, the Huffington Post, and other liberal leaning outlets have been beating the poor guy to death over this.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully support contraceptives being included in everyone’s health coverage.  I live in one many states that already have such rules in place.  It’s sheer lunacy that we have national politicians arguing that contraceptives are harmful to women or that anyone can opt out of providing any form of health coverage as long as they site their moral conviction as the reason.

Further, Friess is the single key monetary backer of Rick Santorum’s Super-Pac, which already calls his sanity into question.  And if you watch his post-remark explanation from last night, he seems more than a little bewildered, not only about why he’s on TV, but also about the positions of the candidate he supports.  It’s not clear he’s firing on all cylinders, but he has a big-ass checkbook and a Supreme Court ruling that says he can use it—which is a whole different messed up thing.

However, at its core Friess was simply advocating for abstinence.  After all, that’s the point of the aspirin between the knees, right?.  Keep your legs closed ladies.  Because everyone (who’s never had much sex) knows that you can’t have sex if your knees are touching.

All these same reporters and pundits who are apoplectic over Friess’ remark, are the same folks who for decades have listened with a straight face as politicians and advocacy groups pushed abstinence based programs in this country.  Despite mountains of evidence that abstinence is a failed strategy, it still gets the courtesy of consideration from news media on the left and the right alike.

Why go off the rails now, and against a 72-year old man who has a cute way of saying he thinks we should be teaching abstinence instead of providing contraception?  Sure, that’s a dumb idea.  But it’s been a dumb idea for a long long time.  It’s a little late to get your shocked face out now.

The left often (and properly IMHO) chastises right-wing media for blowing small issues out of proportion.  For taking a minor incident and playing it and replaying it until it becomes a thing.  But in this case, the left is guilty of the same behavior.  Lead by example. There is a big story here on women’s health and healthcare in general.  Foster Friess is not the story.  Cut the old guy some slack.