Detailed Abstractions

Come on…. we can’t find any good justices to nominate to SCOTUS?  This is what… the third (including the previous administration) uninspired justice nominated in just 5 years.

For such a prestigious and life long appointment, we should expect much better (via Cato here):

Elena Kagan, President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, seemed to shock many people when she dodged questions about the Declaration of Independence during her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee…

DA posts here & here

Via Freakanomics here, which will hopefully put to rest the idea that nurses go on strike to “help” patients, from the NBER paper:

…Controlling for hospital-specific heterogeneity, patient demographics and disease severity, the results show that nurses’ strikes increase in-hospital mortality by 19.4% and 30-day readmission by 6.5% for patients admitted during a strike, with little change in patient demographics, disease severity or treatment intensity….

Robert Reich via Salon.com here demonstrates once again how much politics effects his economic analysis.  According to him, this whole economic mess, including a potential backslide can be blamed solely on deregulation:

…starting in the late 1970s, and with increasing fervor over the next three decades, government did just the opposite. It deregulated and privatized. It increased the cost of public higher education and cut public transportation. It shredded safety nets…

Which he believes is causing greater wage disparities:

…We’re back to the same ominous trend as before the Great Recession: a larger and larger share of total income going to the very top while the vast middle class continues to lose ground….

Because with deregulation, of course, companies can become EVIL:

…Companies were allowed to slash jobs and wages, cut benefits and shift risks to employees (from you-can-count-on-it pensions to do-it-yourself 401(k)s, from good health coverage to soaring premiums and deductibles)….

I submit what Mr. Reich fears is freedom – freedom of business owners to hire and fire as they wish, freedom of employees to change jobs easily (401K allows this, pension does not), just freedom.

Secondarily, you can see in his writing that the only thing the government has ever done wrong, is by not getting involved enough.  He doesn’t mention government meddling, deficit spending, enormous new health care expenses, entirely new federal agencies which more money will be needed, idiotic regulations like a moratorium on all oil drilling due to one company’s failure….

Nope, for Mr. Reich, it’s all because the government hasn’t taken enough control over the little people.

Via Cato here, more news on the Obama Administration’s transparency:

The Social Security’s trustees’ annual report is, by law, supposed to be published by April 1. This year, however, the trustees have postponed its release indefinitely. The program’s financial condition continues to remain hidden from public view — and by many accounts will continue to be so until the end of the fiscal year….

Wonder if Reich views this as an issue?

In other administration news, WSJ Online is reporting (here):

The federal government is launching an expansive program dubbed “Perfect Citizen” to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants, according to people familiar with the program….

As a concerned citizen, you might ask yourself… how will this work?

…The surveillance by the National Security Agency, the government’s chief eavesdropping agency, would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack, though it wouldn’t persistently monitor the whole system, these people said….

& herein lies the problem…. the internet wasn’t designed to predict or prevent attacks, so the question becomes – how do they plan to do this?

Do they plan to redesign the internet?  Or do they plan to spy on all computers connected?  Combination of both?*

In this age of “transparency” I’m sure we can find out:

….Defense contractor Raytheon Corp. recently won a classified contract for the initial phase of the surveillance effort valued at up to $100 million, said a person familiar with the project.

An NSA spokeswoman said the agency had no information to provide on the program. A Raytheon spokesman declined to comment….

Ahhhh…. that clears it up.  The administration bent on transparency is implementing a secret program to monitor most internet activity without telling anyone what it is.

Please note: I do agree that say specific intrusion detection techniques and encryption would be left out of the public.

But for this administration, the transparent, no more Patriot Act administration, to task the world’s number one cyber-spy agency to secretly monitor internet activity of American citizens without telling those citizens exactly what it’s doing – well, whatever it is, it’s not transparent.

*side bar* To get an idea of cybersecurity threats, how difficult it is to detect without intruding on personal computers, and just an overall great article about a real life cyber-mystery, I highly recommend The Enemy Within published by The Atlantic:

When the Conficker computer “worm” was unleashed on the world in November 2008, cyber-security experts didn’t know what to make of it. It infiltrated millions of computers around the globe. It constantly checks in with its unknown creators. It uses an encryption code so sophisticated that only a very few people could have deployed it. For the first time ever, the cyber-security elites of the world have joined forces in a high-tech game of cops and robbers, trying to find Conficker’s creators and defeat them. The cops are failing. And now the worm lies there, waiting ……

The full article is well worth the time.

Before Mr. Putin and others in the Russian government decided against freedom for all and started moving back towards an authoritarian regime, they talked a lot about pushing Glasnost.

This Russian word has been in their language for quite some time, but more recently, Mikhail Gorbachev changed the meaning.  In the 1980′s, he used the word in policies, speeches, and everywhere he could to push new changes in the Communist government.

The word was used to describe the new government system as being more transparent and more open.  Worldwide people knew the word and used it as a synonym for openness.  Mr. Gorbachev used the word to hopefully shape policies that would’ve reduced corruption and increased citizen engagement.

Fast forward to the 2008 US Presidential election and things looked much the same.  After going through a war time President, where secrecy is always valued more highly than during peace time, most Presidential candidates argued that transparency was missing in Washington.

Voters readily agreed with these statements and should’ve.  Using basic human conditioning, logic, & game theory, we know that transparency does indeed reduce corruption and increase engagement.  Anonymous actions and transactions are some of the ways the corrupt around us succeed.  Looking at Enron, socialistic governments, even your neighbors, will help prove this concept.

Even President Barak Obama pushed this openness and transparency.  He even pushed so hard during the campaign, that it became a cornerstone of how his administration would be better than others.  In the first 100 days, we even saw glimmers of hope that this would happen:

President Obama embraces openness on day one

Vowing transparency, Obama OKs ethics guidelines

MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES

FDA transparency committee set up under Obama openness pledge

& many, many more

Naturally, like all things, the devil is in the details.  Since Mr. Obama’s changes in the very beginning to certain rules and such, we have very much witnessed an administration that is just as willing to hide details from the public as were previous administrations.  The main difference lies, not in whether any given administration is open, but only in what facts they wish to conceal.

As proof of this assertion, look no further than the Clunker for Cash programs.  The program, designed to remove old cars off the road, has looked extremely successful.  In just 11 days, more than 250,000 older cars were removed from the US and replaced with more fuel efficient and cleaner cars.

This also helped spark demand in the auto industry which was a welcome side benefit during the recession.  From all accounts, the program was successful and is potentially something we should continue to fund going forward.

Why then the refusal to share information (here) about this prized program?

The Obama administration is refusing to release government records on its “cash-for-clunkers” rebate program that would substantiate — or undercut — White House claims of the program’s success, even as the president presses the Senate for a quick vote for $2 billion to boost car sales.

It seems odd that an administration which has proactively bound their belief system to the ideas of transparency and openness would prevent the distribution, of what seems like innocuous, information.

Since we have no proof, I don’t wish to use conjecture or speculation about to why the admin is refusing to deliver the information they claim makes their case for refunding the program, but the possible reasons are almost endless.  Some include:

They could knowingly be hiding damaging information.  IE- the data doesn’t support their current contention.

They might not be able to really get the full set of information they are claiming they have… IE – they spoke earlier than they should’ve about the program using incoming information instead of complete information.

They might have all the information they will likely get, but it might not contain specific data to help resell the program.  IE – we know it was used 250K times on these types of cars, but do we know whether this actually increased demand, got people to trade-in cars they wouldn’t have otherwise… etc, etc

But whatever the reason for the refusal, you would think in an “open” administration, at the very least, should communicate the reason the data has been delayed (and not denied from an open administration) and when the data should be available to the public.

Of course when the current makeup of our politicians includes several hundred incumbents who have voted on both the Patriot Act & more recently, health care reform, without ever having enough time to read it…. and with current celebrity obsessed population being more enamored by style than actual substance…I don’t see any trends that positive change in true transparency is on the way for the US.