WWBD What would Biden do?

 

While we await the election, think of changes from a Biden win.  Revoke USMCA?  It is a treaty passed by the US Senate and would require 2/3 to revoke.  Moreover it was ratified by Mexico and Canada who both agreed it was helpful to themselves, in other words a win/win/win agreement.  USMCA will remain in effect. 

            Second, the matter of admitting new states might admit Puerto Rico.  But Republicans are in favor there at this time.  DC statehood is unconstitutional—Art. 2, Section 8, paragraph 17—which give Congress full power of governance of the seat of government.  Any statehood would be challenged.  Of course Congress could take away the seat of government from DC and make it a state. A friend of mine suggests an alternative of Salina, Ks.  I snicker since I know the city very well and it actually would make some sense.  Central location. A decommissioned  AF base on the west side of town and it is the intersection of important interstate highways.  Moreover, today’s sky-high cost of living would be averted since west of Salina is Lincoln County, a vast grassland area of only 3000 citizens. Then too, a move would give the Feds a chance to downsize some departments seriously.  Ahem. 

            Even crazier is the suggestion that US Virgin Islands be a state. Tiny population and area, Enormous debt. Or the proposed Micronesia.  In the middle of the islands, Chinese have seized a reef and put in a facility whose purpose would be to kill satellites and disrupt the Pacific in war.  We’d need to evict ‘em.  What’s more, most of Marshall Islanders I know are huge Trump fans. Art. 4 sect. 3 says you can’t merge two states nor split a state. So ideas like splitting CA into 5 states would be challenged constitutionally. 

Third item.  Article 3 governs the Judiciary Branch and explicitly says they have power over ALL judicial cases in the United States. What if someone brought suit against a SCOTUS packing?  The present court would then have jurisdiction and could argue and rule their own ideal concerning number of members.  And as I understand, many of the justices like 9 people—enough to sit around a table and hear everybody’s opinion yet diverse enough to provide majority opinions.  SCOTUS might just nix a court packing. And certainly it would provide a backlash among many citizens. 

Next is the idea of eliminating the Electoral College.  That takes a constitutional amendment of 2/3 of both houses of Congress and ¾ of the states.  But there are 13 states with less than 1.4 million people who get a lot of clout from the Electoral College.  Their dislike would make it almost impossible to repeal Art. 2, Sect. 1.  What about the notion of a bunch of states signing onto “whichever way the popular vote goes, our electors will support that candidate.” Won’t work.  Art. 1, Sect. 10 says no special compacts allowed between states.

Enough of this constitutional stuff. Could Biden resurrect Obamacare?  He’d need the votes to reinstate the individual mandate and penalties.  This is politically very unpopular and as of this writing it looks like a Senate which is closely split will happen this election. Re-enacting taxes on “Cadillac healthcare plans” would drive the unions into Republican arms.  How then could Obamacare be fully funded? Stop funding Medicaid expansion in 37 states and break them? This stuff gets real expensive and real ugly real fast.

Could they enact the massive tax Biden proposes?  Yes, but the political fallout would be bad. Look for everyone to get out their Tea Party signs again. What if he opens the borders and lets in a flood of illegal immigrants and gives them citizenship?  The Hispanics who worked hard to establish themselves will revolt.  So might the new conservative Afro-American movement.  Can he ban fracking? Yes, but directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing have both been common practice separately since the 1960s.  You could ban the drilling but that would nix all offshore platforms.  You could ban the hydraulic pressure fracturing but that would kill practically every revival of an old field in the country. And the idea of getting rid of fossil fuels is far-fetched.  Trying to make electric vehicles universal without market advantage might work for the rich, but the bottom quintile in income drive old iron.  Find out what they say if you raise gasoline prices to 5 bucks.

Can I be excused if I think a lot of this talk is hot air?  

The Trouble with polls

 

Polls this year seem to be at odds with observations.  Let me offer some insights about polls based on my experience as a campaign manager.  First, only about 1/3 of people will respond to a poll.  That’s not a problem as long as the poll manages to get a good sampling.  But what if one partisan group refuses much more often than the other? Then getting a good sample is very very hard.  That seems to be the case of R’s who don’t like pollsters.  Perhaps that is the perception that polls are conducted with bias for biased news organizations—to give the answer that media group wants.  Whatever the case, it is playing havoc with polls today.

            Secondly, in the past pollsters used land line telephones. With a copy of the county voting records in hand, a pollster could ask his questions and then assign a likelihood of voting based on that person’s voting history.  A respondent who had voted twice in the last 4 elections got a .5 weighting factor compared with someone who always votes.  But how can the people be polled accurately if they have cell phones or won’t identify themselves?  If no person or address corresponds to the person interviewed, the pollster cannot judge likelihood. 

            What happens if the respondent lies?  Trafalgar Group seems to have circumvented this somewhat by asking how that person sees their neighbors voting.  This can be telling if the voter is leery about answering correctly.

            Turnout is a huge factor in elections.  Only about 2/3 of all registered voters vote in a general election.  If one side turns out more of its base, that, not an overarching popularity may win. Base voters usually don’t split their vote and so there is more of a coattail effect in recent elections with a lot of partisanship.

            To check their prediction, pollsters often conduct polls of people right after they have voted.  But here, the trouble seems to be that many folks are particularly elusive about sharing who they voted for right after casting a vote—voting in secret is a well-guarded right!  These Exit Polls have been wrong in about half of recent elections.

            There are indirect polling measures that can give a predictive picture.  If an incumbent is at 47% approval or above, they are likely to be re-elected.  But if approval falls below, to 43 or 44%, they are likely to lose; 50% they are sure to win.  Evidently about 3% of people will say, “I don’t approve of this guy, but I’ll still vote for him.”  An incumbent is a known quantity.  If he polls low approval or in the low 40s against a challenger, that says that even though there may be a lot of undecideds, the one thing they have decided is that they aren’t going to vote for the guy they are saddled with now. In the old days the Right Track/Wrong Track polling told a similar story but has become unreliable.  Evangelicals will answer that the country is on the wrong track even if their guy is the incumbent.  They are reacting to the general moral malaise, not the candidate.

            Independents are somewhat enigmatic.  They vote only half the time as partisans.  They consist of many differing types of attitudes.  At least 20% are “hidden partisans”—people who hide the fact that they are, say, Democrats, in the midst of their Republican friends to claim superiority in open-mindedness.  Or their father is a harsh man who wouldn’t stomach them registering with the other party. Other Indies have a weird stew of issues.  Some have a premier issue that neither party addresses, like cockfighting or feral hogs.  Some have R ideas about fiscal budget balancing with D ideas about social issues.  They are people without a party.  Some are anti-political and simply refuse to listen until the last minute.  Hence Independents don’t vote all the time.

            So this year?  Clearly there are a lot of Trump voters who won’t talk to a pollster and maybe not even their overbearing friends.  Trump needs to get his approvals up over 47%, however.  Turnout?  That’s a big unknown. 

            One final note that belies the usual media message that the polls are tightening as we approach election day.  It’s B.S.  By October 1 all but 3% of people have determined who they are going to vote for.  By one week away, it’s only 1% of people still truly undecided.  The reason the media says piously that polls are tightening is to to squeeze more ad money out of the candidates.  They make an enormous haul during election season and they are pumping everybody dry, to make a few more bucks, and pollster play along with the game by making it seem like polls are tighter.

Game on!

What baseball player spoke to larger crowds than he played for?  Billy Sunday was born in Ames, Iowa in 1862.  His father fought in the Civil War and died without ever seeing Billy.  His mother, destitute, sent Billy to an orphanage along with his brother. Billy made it through high school and went to Marshalltown where he played on the state champion baseball team there.  The Chicago White Sox saw his skills and signed him in 1883. 

            One Sunday, Billy and his pals went to a bar in Chicago and got drunk.  He sat down on a curb and heard a Gospel band across the street playing songs he remembered his mother singing long ago in their little shack.  He began to sob.  One of the band members saw his tears and invited him to a Mission downtown.  Sunday staggered to his feet and told his teammates, “I’m going to Jesus Christ.  We’ve come to a parting of our ways.”  They all laughed except one friend who knew the story of his life and he encouraged Billy to go. And there at the Mission, Billy found his Lord, Savior and Friend.  The next day when he got to the ballpark, he was surprised to see his friends supporting what he had done.

            He joined a Presbyterian church and became a regular Bible Study attendee at the local YMCA. He married the sister of the equipment manager and batboy of the White Sox.  A decade later, he retired and began to work for the Y. J. Wilber Chapman, a traveling evangelist hired him as advance man.  A few years later, Chapman stopped traveling and began to hold evangelistic services in Garner, Iowa. Billy filled in and became acclaimed, getting many invitations to guest preach.  Soon he was doing evangelical revivals and other events.  As word of his thunderous preaching spread, he ventured from Iowa to the Midwest to the East Coast.  At the end of each service, Billy did a version of the altar call, asking people who wanted to become believers to come forward and commit their lives to Christ.  For 40 years he preached almost daily, to an estimated 100 million people.  In one crusade in New York City, he had 98,264 people who came forward “on the sawdust trail to the cross” as he called it. Hundreds of thousands put their faith in Jesus Christ because of his crusades.  In the audience was a young man who was also named Billy, Billy Graham.  15 years after Sunday, Graham began his crusades, which had a striking resemblance to those of Billy Sunday—rousing gospel music and choirs, a sermon that went straight to the heart and asked for a response in faith, and a call to come forward and commit to Jesus Christ.

            A friend of mine accompanied Dr. Graham at Kansas State University briefly when he had a crusade in Manhattan (1973?).  He  asked, “Dr. Graham, if you could not preach to enormous crowds like you do, what would you do in a little local church?”  He nodded thoughtfully and replied.  “I would find someone else who believed and spend a lot of time together spurring each other on in faith, for six months.  Then we would split and each find another or witness to another, and do the same thing all over again.  Just keep multiplying and as Billy Sunday said, ‘Game on!’” 

Bede

 

Were it not for one book by a monk whom we know only by his nickname, British history would be almost unknown from about 500 to 750 AD.  That was when illiterate barbarians overran the isle, city life almost vanished, and paganism re-established.  The man’s short name was Bede or Bedae, Saxon for ‘commander’.  When he wrote the 5-volume Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 730, he put a brief autobiography in the last chapter. 

            Bede was born on the monastery lands of Monkwearmouth—at the mouths of the Wear and Tyne rivers in Northumberland (far north England)—about 672. His parents put him in the monastery at age 7 where he grew to be the most learned scholar in Europe. In 686, a plague broke out and the monastery was moved to nearby Jarrow.  All the senior priests died.  But Bede, age 14 and his teacher, Ceolfrith, had memorized the liturgy until it could be taught to new monks. Consequently he was awarded the office of deacon, then priest  several years before normal. He wrote 60 books and was a premier translator who made Old English versions of texts of early church fathers from Latin and Greek that helped his fellow monks. He worked out the date for Easter, wrote theology and farming practice, mathematics, and Codex Laudianus (recopied book of Acts in Latin by Bede) which is in the museum at Oxford. He also is an unnamed copier of Codex Amiatinus, the earliest-surviving complete manuscript of the Latin Vulgate Bible (in Florence, Italy).

            So how did Bede fill in English history? “In 409,” he wrote, “the Romans ceased to rule Britain.” They abandoned the province—too far away, not enough troops.  Primitive and pagan Scottish Picts and Irish Celts began to attack the Bretons, now 3 centuries peaceful.  In alarm, Breton leader Vortigern, 449, invited Jutes (from today’s Denmark), Saxons (Elbe River area), and Angles (Schleswig) to help repel the warlike Celts.  Word went back quickly to the German coast that Britain was free for the taking. For a century and a half the Teutonic invaders swarmed in, fought often, until a combined group defeated the Brits at Deorham, 577.  Eventually many Celts fled to the mountains of Wales, Cornwall and across the Channel to Britanny. Unlike the barbarian invasion on the continent, there was little assimilation.  The Germans divided the island.  Jutes were a small group that established Kent (extreme SE England just across from Calais).  Angles formed 3 kingdoms—Northumberland (just south of Scotish border), Mercia (Midlands), and East Anglia (SE).  Saxons had 3 more—Wessex, Essex, and Sussex. Essex surrounds the lower Thames River and included the Roman fort of London. Since it was one of the few cities left, British became known as ‘Saxons’. “Bede”(his nickname) is Saxon, not Northumbrian, and he wrote in Old English which is close to the Frisian-Saxon dialect of German. The Heptarchy, as the 7 kingdoms were called (finally united in 829), was first pagan with German-Norse gods and culture with little experience in agriculture. Bede recounts successions of the kings, wars, and expansion of Christianity as well as telling about the barbarian way of life turned Christian. This differed from the continent because there was little left of Roman Law or methods. Amazingly,1500 years later, many royal titles still reference the Heptarchy.  Harry was Duke of Sussex. There’ll always be an England.

            Re-evangelism started over a century after the Heptarchy with Augustine of Canterbury (599) converting Kent and ended with Wilfrid converting the last of the Saxons about the time of the plague.  It took 87 years and was advanced primarily out of Canterbury on the SE coast and Northumbrians who had been early converts in the north. Irish monasteries and Rome generously provided the texts for the monastery where Bede was educated and worked.  That is how he became such a scholar in such a distant place.

            The man Bede never mentions is Arthur. That comes from a somewhat fanciful history-sermon of St. Gildas, a Welsh monk about 546.  It is thought he may have made up the Celtic character “to break the heathen and uphold the Christ”.  Was there a real Arthur or not? If there was, he was not king of all England nor living in a Camelot palace, but a Celtic warlord from the 500s when they lived in huts, amid recurrent famine. This brings up a salient point.  Bede was, as best we can test, very accurate-- unusual for ancient historians who wrote fibs to laud their kings and heroes. “You will know the truth and the truth shall set you free,” said Jesus of the gospel.  Christians have ever since loved truth and made it the standard for good investigation.  Humble Bede was given an added title of ‘Venerable’ a century after he lived.

Just do what the scientists say

 

Uncle Joe wants to “Just do what the scientists say.”  (concerning COVID) Are those the economic scientists who just want to open the economy?  Or the oncologists who worry that USA had only about half the cancer screenings this year? Or are we talking about psychiatrists who are concerned about the skyrocketing number of addictions, suicides, and marital crimes during the shutdowns?  Or the federal medical bureaucrats who only want to solve a pandemic with quarantines? 

The trouble with the thinking of most people is that they think “Science” is a monolithic body of knowledge that has been decided.  It’s not.  Sometimes a ‘principle’ is equally agreed upon, but more often there is a minority who see the data set differently. Sometimes everybody agrees but most feel there is scant proof, so support for a ‘theory’ is a mile wide but an inch deep.  Or everyone agrees but then an upstart theory upends the comfortable ideas.  Most grievously, the general population things that there is only one pat way to solve a problem or to see the results.  This is due to the fact that they struggled in science class and having simply solved the problem once, threw up hands over any further notions.  Let me illustrate. 

A friend of mine was given a take-home test and the lone question was “How can one, using a barometer, find the height of a tall building?” Well, my buddy knew what the instructor wanted as an answer, but being a scientist, he tried to think of a few alternatives. The professor read his first answer and decided to give him a second chance.

Prof: You say you could attach a string onto the barometer, go to the top on the building and let out the string until it just touches the ground. Pull it back up and measure the length of string.  That will be the height of the building. Well, that would work, but I was wanting an answer that was remote to the building. 

Friend:  Then tie the string to the building’s corner and walk down the street letting it out as you go.  Keep sighting the top of the building with a 45-degree square.  When the top aligns with the sighting, you have just made a 45 degree right triangle and the height of the building is equal to the amount of string you have let out at that point.

Prof: Well, of course, but I want to know how you would do this by something other than triangulation.

Friend: Sure.  Measure out a length of string and attach the barometer at the end like a pendulum.  Swing the pendulum and measure it’s period at the bottom of the building.  Then go to the top of the building and do it again.  The difference of the periods is proportional to 2 X pi X length of string divided by g, the gravitational acceleration.  And g decreases by the gravitational formula depending on the distance from the center of the earth. Difference in distance from earth’s center for each case is the height of the building.

Prof: Yes, but I wanted an easier way.

Friend: Easy peasy.  Just go the janitor’s room in the basement and say, “Janitor, here I have one fine barometer.  It can be yours if you can just tell me the height of this building.”

Prof, no exasperated: I want to know the way to do it using atmospheric pressure!

Friend:Yes, measure pressure at the bottom of the building using the barometer and at the top.  Use pressure proportionate relationship to radial distance from earth center to find two distances and the difference between them is the height of the building.

Prof: Finally!  Why didn’t you say that the first time?

Friend: You method is too damn pat.  Pays to think about different ways to solve a problem.  That’s called Good Analysis.

 

The Historic "Frozen" and its lessons for today's partisan politics

 There’s a story from British Royal history, an analogy to “Frozen”, that holds lessons for D’s and R’s today.

Henry VIII fought with the pope over annulment of his marriage to Katharine, and bought support from the nobles by seizing church lands (1/4 the kingdom) then distributing it. They had a daughter, Mary, who quite Catholic like her mother, was put on house arrest. Minions of the king tormented the teenage girl telling her that any minute Henry would have her executed.  Parliament declared her a bastard.  But Henry died leaving only a 10 year old boy, Edward, as heir and he died 6 years later. Some  Protestant nobles conspired to enthrone Lady Jane Grey, a distant cousin, the new queen since she was Protestant.  She didn’t even want to be queen and ruled only 10 days when Mary declared herself queen, gathered Catholic allies, and marched on London. Princess Mary, after 22 years of patience in her humiliation surely would make a gentle queen, it was thought by Catholic England which comprised 90% of the population in 1553.

But Mary, who wanted to be a unifier, was frail, poor health, looked old beyond her years and didn’t have the political skill to handle the partisanship.  (Like Biden?) She relied on advisors who wanted REVENGE. She started with the idea of tolerance, that the Catholics would persuade the Protestants back into the Papal church.  No luck.  Every noble family now owned church lands they have to give up.  Worse, she arranged herself to be married to the Spanish king Phillip.  The Protestant nobles knew that if the Spanish came in, they would be hunted down like pirates.  The English people as a whole were terrified that Spain would make Britain a colony like they were trying to do with Netherlands—England’s woolens trading partner.  She flubbed one initiative after another until the people began to taunt her in public.  She outlawed Protestantism.  Executed  hapless Lady Jane. And at that point, several Protestant dukes, preferring to die in battle rather than on the block revolted.  Mary’s troops won the short civil war, but then she began to retire to make babies with Phillip and leaving enforcement in the hands of her Catholic advisors.  Thus began the infamous 4 year holocaust.  Elizabeth, her half sister and 15 years younger was implicated with the conspirators, but Mary wavered.  Had her sister done anything wrong?  Mary failed to get pregnant and her health was declining amid ailments that could not be treated in those days.  She went to the Tower, met a sister who like her, was bastardized by Parliament and persecuted and innocent of charges.  They both had developed a deep personal faith in captivity, though Elizabeth didn’t show hers in public. Mary, now reconciled, let her out of prison.  In 1558,as she lay dying, she sent Elizabeth the crown jewels and her blessing to succeed. This, rather than the rightful heir, Mary Stuart of Scotland, also a Catholic. Mary, desperate to have someone’s love, finally found her soul mate in a half sister.

Because of the 4 years of terror, Mary inadvertently earned the nickname “Bloody Mary”.  But she had been out of her league in the highly partisan politics of the day.  Not so Elizabeth.  She was sharp-tongued but fluent in 5 languages, sensed politics like no other monarch before or since. In this red-haired 18 year old girl lived the heart of an emperor.  After a quick harsh put-down of rebellious Catholics, she turned tolerant.  She was conservative and didn’t tax the nobles which they loved.  Athletic like her father, she tirelessly rode her horse and led a retinue from shire to shire drawing enormous crowds at every stop. (Sound like Trump?)  The people had gotten a taste of Catholic excess and started turning Protestant.  By her death 45 years later, the country was 2/3 Protestant, 1/3 Catholic.  Using her language skills she flirted courtship with just about every eligible continental monarch, thus keeping larger countries at bay, thinking they might marry into her kingdom. And England stayed out of war.  But to the English, she constantly reminded them of their prosperity and that she had chosen to marry her country.  Her speeches were compelling, riveting, and it united the entire nation against the Spanish Armada. 

At this writing, we don’t know if Biden or Trump will win.  But if Biden and the Democrats take over, if Biden leaves government to the Leftist advisors, and the country gets a whiff of socialism, it will cause angst and rebellion politically that will haunt the Dems for years.  If Trump wins and gets more mellow in a second term while still doing inspiring stuff, he has a good chance of being like Elizabeth, even if his economy goes south.  We will just have to see how this plays out.  

Oct 1 1949

 

Oct. 1, 1949 was one of the most monumental days in history but nobody notices. Just one week before, President Truman announced “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.”So how did they get the secrets of atomic bomb?  Ask the Rosenburgs. Or maybe ask the 1527 communists who had infiltrated the federal government.  Our cryptologist women of the Venona Project would later discover 406 of them as Soviet operatives.  (McCarthy’s estimate of 51 was far too low.)  The opening of the Soviet Union’s KGB files provided the rest of the names.  On Oct. 14, 11 communist leaders were found by federal court to have conspired to overthrow of USA. Lesson: This is what happens when you aren’t guarded about communist and fascist fanatics.  Nations such as China can destroy us. So can clever  socialist rioters in cahoots with sympathetic government officials.

Oct. 1 began a nation-wide steel strike that didn’t end until Nov. 11.  No wages agreed to but the union managed to get a massive increase in pensions, thus setting the stage for future contract agreements by unions.  Hence, part of the financial disasters in many manufacturers we have seen recently played out. They were due to the fact that current management kicked the can down the road, letting their company become pension providers in such extremum that they could no longer remain solvent in some future date.  Lesson: the same can be true of a country which promises more than it can deliver. On Oct. 26, 1949, the Minimum Wage Act was voted into perpetual continuance raising from 40 cents per hour to 75.

Sept. 7- Oct. 1 most of the Pacific Islands were transferred from military control to the US Interior Dept. as Territories. The month before Congress passed a program to encourage Alaska development and future statehood. USA was never colonial-minded and already plans were being made for these tiny populations to choose whether to remain territories or commonwealths or some other arrangement. Lesson: a wise move. By January we would be involved in arguments about protection of Taiwan-Formosa. Truman didn’t want it; R’s did. A colleague who was born there and immigrated declared that the R’s made a helluva wise move.

Finally, a couple days later, Congress appropriated funds for reforestation and revegetation of national forests and range lands—some argue, the first true environmental legislation.