What is the mainstream media? Media that informs and in general shares and reflects the perspectives of the mainstream.
What if you don't like the mainstream media? That means that you probably don't like mainstream America.
What if you don't like mainstream America? That likely means that you're an ideologue of either the right or the left.
What is an ideologue? Someone who believes fervently and emphatically in certain principles or statements about politics, economics, government, or any combination thereof.
What is an ideologue of the right? Someone who is likely to be excessively pro-market economically and anti-government politically, and who probably perceives themselves as victimized by those who hold different views.
What is an ideologue of the left? Someone who is likely to be excessively anti-market economically and probably, but not necessarily, pro-government politically, and who probably perceives themselves as victimized by those who hold different views.
Is there any way the mainstream can mollify ideologues of the right or left? No, they're hopeless.
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Tuesday, September 04, 2012
PAUL RYAN, CLOSET WUSS?
Republican VP candidate Paul Ryan has a reputation as a fitness buff. He allegedly is in the Congressional gym at the crack of dawn, performing a supposedly grueling routine of jumping about. Those who say they have seen his abs have expressed a degree of admiration that makes some listeners a bit uncomfortable.
Well, maybe Paul is a rugged he-man type. But he certainly is not the fastest marathoner among current and past Republican VP candidates. Yes, a certain Sarah Palin holds that distinction, edging him out with a 3:59 to Paul's over 4. That's hours in case you're not familiar with running times.
Oh, and in case you missed it, Paul originally claimed a sub-three hour marathon time. An hour-plus error may not sound like much to nonrunners, but don't try to convince a committed runner that Paul merely misspoke.
So anyway, Paul's reputation as a fitness freak has suffered just a tad. First, he claims an accomplishment he did not achieve. And second, he came in, well, second to Mrs. Palin. Could it be that Paul is in truth a Closet Wuss? Just asking.
Well, maybe Paul is a rugged he-man type. But he certainly is not the fastest marathoner among current and past Republican VP candidates. Yes, a certain Sarah Palin holds that distinction, edging him out with a 3:59 to Paul's over 4. That's hours in case you're not familiar with running times.
Oh, and in case you missed it, Paul originally claimed a sub-three hour marathon time. An hour-plus error may not sound like much to nonrunners, but don't try to convince a committed runner that Paul merely misspoke.
So anyway, Paul's reputation as a fitness freak has suffered just a tad. First, he claims an accomplishment he did not achieve. And second, he came in, well, second to Mrs. Palin. Could it be that Paul is in truth a Closet Wuss? Just asking.
Saturday, September 01, 2012
PATENT OFFICE FLIPS SUPREME COURT THE BIRD
David Kappos, the Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, has in effect flipped the U.S. Supreme Court the bird. In a recent web-posting, Director Kappos all but explicitly said that he does not intend to have his agency fully abide by two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on patent law. In the decisions, the Court attempted to clarify the limits on what processes are patentable under U.S. patent law, specifically under Section 101 of Title 35 of the U.S. Code. But Director Kappos seems unimpressed with the Court’s efforts.
Processes are one of the four categories of inventions or discoveries that Section 101 lists as eligible for patents. The other three categories are machines, manufactures, and compositions of matter. The process category has become a venue for thrust and parry over the patentability of some Information Age developments such as increases in business method patents, software patents, and patents on various intangibles.
The Court’s recent decisions were Bilski v. Kappos in 2010 and Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories in March of this year. In the Bilski decision, the Court held that a process for hedging against the risk of price changes in the energy market was an abstract idea and consequently not a patentable process under Section 101. All nine Justices agreed with this result but were not in agreement with the rationale. Consequently, three different opinions were written, and one member of the Court, Justice Scalia, performed a judicial minuet in picking portions of two of the opinions to agree with.
In the Mayo decision, a unanimous Court held in a single decision that simply applying a law of nature did not amount to a patentable process. Findings by researchers that identified correlations between a drug (thiopurine) used to treat autoimmune diseases and harmful levels of metabolites in the bloodstream constituted the law of nature. The process for which a patent had been granted had three steps: first, administering the drug; second, determining metabolite levels in the bloodstream; and third, informing the doctor that metabolite levels above or below specified thresholds indicated a need to decrease or increase the drug usage. To the Court, this process was no more than stating a law of nature and adding the words “apply it,” and was not sufficient for the grant of a patent.
The Patent Office has provided guidelines to its Patent Examiners on applying the Court’s rulings in the examination of patent applications. Nevertheless, nebulous, wordy, unclear descriptions of processes and intangibles continue to pour forth from the Office each week as approved patents. Perhaps a reason is that the Patent Office’s heart is not really into the curtailing of process patents.
In late July 2012, Director Kappos posted an entry in his Director’s Forum. The title of the entry was “Some Thoughts on Patentability.” A recent decision of a lower federal court, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, had contained language and an analysis that arguably downgraded Section 101’s role as a threshold test of patent eligibility. The decision was CLS Bank International v. Alice Corporation.
Director Kappos described the court’s decision as saying that other sections of patent law did the substantive work of disqualifying inventions not worthy of a patent and that Section 101 was merely a general statement of the type of subject matter eligible for patenting. Moreover, the exceptions to patent eligibility recognized by the Supreme Court—laws of nature, natural phenomenon, and abstract ideas—should arise infrequently. The Director’s solution to the patent eligibility issue was more tightly drawn patent applications.
“Anything under the sun that is made by man" is one view of what can be patented under U.S. patent law. The phrase was in a report of a U.S. Congressional Committee and in 1980 was noted with apparent approval by the U.S. Supreme Court. The view that patentability encompasses pretty much anything is the predominant view in the U.S. patent community of inventors, patent lawyers, the Patent Office, and corporate holders of multiple patents. To adherents of this view, including apparently Director Kappos, the patent eligibility issue should be of little concern. After all, if properly and fully described, anything made by man should be patentable.
But as evidenced by its two recent patent decisions, today’s Supreme Court does believe that patentability has limits. The Court is not certain about what those limits are, but seems certain they exist. And as a majority of the Justices recognized in Bilski, the difficulty of finding the limits has been exacerbated over the last several decades as the Industrial Age has given way to the Information Age. The Industrial Age was a time of tangibles, of physicality, of inventions and improvements thereof that in most cases could be seen, felt, and handled. But in the Information Age, intangibles, both as processes and as products, have become commonplace.
The problem with considering intangibles no different than tangibles for patent purposes is that when an “invention” is only an intangible process or product, the necessary limiting and defining descriptions become much more difficult to achieve. The degree of detailed certainty that can be provided for a tangible invention is in many cases unreachable for an intangible invention.
A saying one sometimes comes across in the patent world is that a patent is an invention and words describing the invention. But with intangible processes or products, the invention and the words describing it merge all too easily, resulting in a patent being granted for just the words. Perhaps those words are entitled to some sort of legal protection. But providing the degree of protection that a patent enjoys seems far too generous.
The Supreme Court has decided that Section 101 has a substantive role to play in patent analysis. Director Kappos appears to have a different view. And the output of the Patent Office seems to reflect his view. Among the patents granted each week are a substantial number that involve vague intangible processes or products. So, Honorable Justices, just because you say what the law is doesn’t mean everybody’s listening.
Processes are one of the four categories of inventions or discoveries that Section 101 lists as eligible for patents. The other three categories are machines, manufactures, and compositions of matter. The process category has become a venue for thrust and parry over the patentability of some Information Age developments such as increases in business method patents, software patents, and patents on various intangibles.
The Court’s recent decisions were Bilski v. Kappos in 2010 and Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories in March of this year. In the Bilski decision, the Court held that a process for hedging against the risk of price changes in the energy market was an abstract idea and consequently not a patentable process under Section 101. All nine Justices agreed with this result but were not in agreement with the rationale. Consequently, three different opinions were written, and one member of the Court, Justice Scalia, performed a judicial minuet in picking portions of two of the opinions to agree with.
In the Mayo decision, a unanimous Court held in a single decision that simply applying a law of nature did not amount to a patentable process. Findings by researchers that identified correlations between a drug (thiopurine) used to treat autoimmune diseases and harmful levels of metabolites in the bloodstream constituted the law of nature. The process for which a patent had been granted had three steps: first, administering the drug; second, determining metabolite levels in the bloodstream; and third, informing the doctor that metabolite levels above or below specified thresholds indicated a need to decrease or increase the drug usage. To the Court, this process was no more than stating a law of nature and adding the words “apply it,” and was not sufficient for the grant of a patent.
The Patent Office has provided guidelines to its Patent Examiners on applying the Court’s rulings in the examination of patent applications. Nevertheless, nebulous, wordy, unclear descriptions of processes and intangibles continue to pour forth from the Office each week as approved patents. Perhaps a reason is that the Patent Office’s heart is not really into the curtailing of process patents.
In late July 2012, Director Kappos posted an entry in his Director’s Forum. The title of the entry was “Some Thoughts on Patentability.” A recent decision of a lower federal court, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, had contained language and an analysis that arguably downgraded Section 101’s role as a threshold test of patent eligibility. The decision was CLS Bank International v. Alice Corporation.
Director Kappos described the court’s decision as saying that other sections of patent law did the substantive work of disqualifying inventions not worthy of a patent and that Section 101 was merely a general statement of the type of subject matter eligible for patenting. Moreover, the exceptions to patent eligibility recognized by the Supreme Court—laws of nature, natural phenomenon, and abstract ideas—should arise infrequently. The Director’s solution to the patent eligibility issue was more tightly drawn patent applications.
“Anything under the sun that is made by man" is one view of what can be patented under U.S. patent law. The phrase was in a report of a U.S. Congressional Committee and in 1980 was noted with apparent approval by the U.S. Supreme Court. The view that patentability encompasses pretty much anything is the predominant view in the U.S. patent community of inventors, patent lawyers, the Patent Office, and corporate holders of multiple patents. To adherents of this view, including apparently Director Kappos, the patent eligibility issue should be of little concern. After all, if properly and fully described, anything made by man should be patentable.
But as evidenced by its two recent patent decisions, today’s Supreme Court does believe that patentability has limits. The Court is not certain about what those limits are, but seems certain they exist. And as a majority of the Justices recognized in Bilski, the difficulty of finding the limits has been exacerbated over the last several decades as the Industrial Age has given way to the Information Age. The Industrial Age was a time of tangibles, of physicality, of inventions and improvements thereof that in most cases could be seen, felt, and handled. But in the Information Age, intangibles, both as processes and as products, have become commonplace.
The problem with considering intangibles no different than tangibles for patent purposes is that when an “invention” is only an intangible process or product, the necessary limiting and defining descriptions become much more difficult to achieve. The degree of detailed certainty that can be provided for a tangible invention is in many cases unreachable for an intangible invention.
A saying one sometimes comes across in the patent world is that a patent is an invention and words describing the invention. But with intangible processes or products, the invention and the words describing it merge all too easily, resulting in a patent being granted for just the words. Perhaps those words are entitled to some sort of legal protection. But providing the degree of protection that a patent enjoys seems far too generous.
The Supreme Court has decided that Section 101 has a substantive role to play in patent analysis. Director Kappos appears to have a different view. And the output of the Patent Office seems to reflect his view. Among the patents granted each week are a substantial number that involve vague intangible processes or products. So, Honorable Justices, just because you say what the law is doesn’t mean everybody’s listening.
Monday, August 13, 2012
PAUL RYAN AND THE BATTLESHIP WISCONSIN
Mitt Romney’s introduction of Paul Ryan as his running mate occurred in an appropriate setting. The location was Norfolk, Virginia, and the retired battleship Wisconsin was in the background. Once the premier naval weapon, battleships are long past their heyday. In the 21st Century, battleships are an anachronism.
And that’s what the philosophy, intellectual underpinnings, worldview, economic predilections, and general outlook of today’s Republican Party, and conservatives, are: anachronisms. No one expressed it better than William F. Buckley, Jr. did in launching the conservative journal National Review in 1955: standing “athwart history, yelling Stop.”
So vote for Mitt and Paul. Return the nation to the past. Launch more battleships. Never mind that the Information Age is rendering pure Capitalism quaint, pure Socialism a chimera, the past just history. Don’t look forward; it’s too frightening. Grasp the past. Yes, that’s an ideal campaign slogan: Grasp the Past! Mitt and Paul, Back to the Future!
And that’s what the philosophy, intellectual underpinnings, worldview, economic predilections, and general outlook of today’s Republican Party, and conservatives, are: anachronisms. No one expressed it better than William F. Buckley, Jr. did in launching the conservative journal National Review in 1955: standing “athwart history, yelling Stop.”
So vote for Mitt and Paul. Return the nation to the past. Launch more battleships. Never mind that the Information Age is rendering pure Capitalism quaint, pure Socialism a chimera, the past just history. Don’t look forward; it’s too frightening. Grasp the past. Yes, that’s an ideal campaign slogan: Grasp the Past! Mitt and Paul, Back to the Future!
Friday, July 27, 2012
SUPREME COURT ADOPTS DATA IN-DATA OUT PATENT TEST
In these times of super-partisanship, all major decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court are along the lines of five-to-four, right? Conservatives on one side, liberals on the other, a swing vote or two determining the outcome?
Well, it is certainly easy to have this impression. But even in this period of extreme dogmatism, all nine justices occasionally find themselves in agreement on a case, and not merely a case of little import. One such instance occurred this past spring. In a unanimous decision, the Court just might have taken a positive step toward easing a significant economic conflict. That conflict is between an Industrial Age patent system on one hand and the realities of the Information Age on the other.
On March 20, 2012, the Court decided the case of Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc. Justice Breyer delivered the Opinion of the Court. There were no dissenting opinions. There were not even any concurring opinions, those ramblings in which a Justice or Justices say in effect, “We sorta agree with you, but. . . .” In short, everybody was on board.
In the decision, the Court held that a process of applying researchers’ findings about the proper dosage of specific drugs was not entitled to a patent. The drugs were thiopurine drugs to treat autoimmune diseases. The process involved three steps: (1) an “administering” step in which a doctor administered a drug to a patient, (2) a “determining” step in which the doctor measured the resulting metabolite levels in the patient’s blood, and (3) a “wherein” step in which the doctor was to increase or decrease the drug dosage if the metabolite level was outside a specified range.
This three-step process, in the Court’s view, was nothing more than stating an unpatentable law of nature—the researchers’ findings—and adding the words “apply it.” Something more was needed before the application of a law of nature qualified as a patentable invention.
An observer’s first reaction might be, “So what’s the big deal?” The big deal is that the process patent in the Mayo case is an example of what a sizeable portion of the patent system has become in the Information Age: words, sometimes precise but more often vague, describing how to do something that involves a substantial degree of intangibility. Business methods patents are one variant of the group. Another common term is software patent, which at an unpatentable level is just a computer program. But add a little hardware, and U.S. Patent Office Examiners, striving to meet performance goals, are often persuaded.
Included in Information Age patents are financial arrangements and manipulations that result in exotic financial products, business and managerial analysis procedures that purport to optimize operations, and scoring and ranking exercises that lend an aura of certainty to murky decision-making.
U.S. patent law authorizes patents for processes, machines, manufactures, and compositions of matter. In an outburst of exuberance, a Congressional Committee report in 1980 stated that “anything under the sun” was patentable. Realizing this was not quite the extent of the patent concept, the Supreme Court over the years has narrowed patentability to exclude laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas. But the boundary between what is and what is not patentable remains ill-defined. Indeed, as the predominantly tangible Industrial Age has given way to the intangibles of the Information Age, the boundary has become more and more opaque.
In 2010, the Supreme Court, in Bilski v. Kappos, 561 U.S. __, 2010, grappled with the boundary’s location. The Court affirmed a lower court decision that a process involving a form of financial derivative, specifically a hedging transaction in the energy markets, was not patentable. All nine Justices agreed on the ultimate result, but they took several paths to that result.
Four Justices—Kennedy, who wrote the opinion of the Court, Roberts, Thomas, and Alito—said as little as possible. They defined the proposed patent as an abstract concept and rejected it for abstractness. But they did not hold that business methods in general were unpatentable. Business methods presented special Information Age challenges—the opinion specifically recognized the existence of the Information Age—but the four Justices found no general prohibition on the granting of patents for business methods.
Four other Justices—Stevens, who wrote a concurring opinion, Breyer, who joined in that opinion and also wrote another concurring opinion, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor—took a more expansive view. They would have prohibited business methods patents outright. Justice Scalia joined a portion of Kennedy’s opinion and a portion of Breyer’s opinion. The portions of Kennedy’s opinion and Breyer’s opinion that Scalia joined were portions that did not raise questions or concerns about patents for business methods. Interestingly, the portions of Kennedy’s opinion Scalia did not join were also the only portions of the opinion that referred to the Information Age. Perhaps a Constitutional Originalist and the Information Age don’t mix well.
Thus, although everyone agreed on the ultimate outcome, the varying rationales made for a rather messy situation. The one point of agreement in the rationales seemed to be that a machine-or-transformation test provided a useful and important clue for determining whether some claimed processes were patentable, but it was not the sole deciding factor. The machine-or-transformation test for an invention that involves a process is if (1) the process is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing. But to emphasize, the machine-or-transformation test only provided a clue regarding patentability.
So Bilski left much uncertainty in its wake.
One approach to bringing a little more clarity to the question of what is and what is not patentable might be the application of a data in-data out test. Data, incidentally, is a fundamental pillar of the Information Age. In a data in-data out test, if the subject matter of a patent application consists primarily of introducing data into a system—system being broadly defined—applying or otherwise manipulating the data, and then extracting a largely intangible result of predominantly data, then the threshold of patentability has not been achieved.
And without saying expressly that was what it did, that indeed was what the Supreme Court appears to have done in Mayo. The Court’s explicit analysis was centered on whether the process in Mayo was a patently permissible application of a law of nature, or merely a statement of the law of nature with the directive to “apply it.” But the Court’s analysis also lends itself to a data in-data out interpretation. For example, on pages 10-11 of the slip opinion, the Court says: “The upshot is that the three steps simply tell doctors to gather data from which they may draw an inference in light of the correlations.” The process’ data in? “gather evidence.” The process’ data out? “an inference.”
The Court discussed two precedents in depth: Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175 (1981), and Parker v. Flook, 437 U.S. 584 (1978). Each precedent involved a process of three steps. And each three-step process involved a basic mathematical equation that, like the law of nature in Mayo, was itself not patentable. In Diehr, the process was determined to be patentable. In Flook, the process was determined to be not patentable. The Court’s analysis in each case can be viewed in data in-data out terms, with the difference in the results being attributed to a greater tangibility component in Diehr.
Diehr’s process was a method for molding raw, uncured rubber into various cured, molded products. The three-step process used a known mathematical equation, called the Arrhenius equation, to determine when to open the mold’s press. The three steps were: (1) continuously monitoring the temperature on the inside of the mold; (2) feeding the resulting numbers into a computer, which would use the Arrhenius equation to continuously recalculate the mold-opening time; and (3) configuring the computer so that at the appropriate moment it would signal a device to open the press. The Mayo Court appeared to attach great significance to the output in Diehr being not just data but the automatic opening of the press at the proper time.
Flook’s process was a method for adjusting “alarm limits” in the catalytic conversion of hydrocarbons. Operating conditions such as temperature, pressure, and flow rates were continuously monitored in the conversion process. When the operating conditions exceeded certain alarm limits, inefficiency or dangers were indicated. The three-step process amounted to an improved system for updating the alarm limits. The three steps were: (1) measuring the current level of the variable, temperature for example; (2) using an apparently novel mathematical algorithm to calculate the current alarm limits; and (3) adjusting the system to reflect the new alarm-limit values. Unlike in Diehr, the output of the process in Flook was somewhat removed from anything tangible. The output was simply adjusted alarm limits. The connection to hardware, to a means for setting off an alarm, was unclear.
So one can argue that another way to describe the state of the law regarding patentability is that a pure data in-data out process does not appear to be patent-eligible. But if a bit of hardware is added for the data out to interact with, then perhaps a patent is warranted. The caveat to this perhaps idealistic view concerns the field of business methods patents. Here, the data out may be an intangible such as a financial instrument, a customer rating, a fraud score, or an optimization selection. One can argue from Flook, Diehr, Bilski, and Mayo that a predominately intangible output in a process should not result in a patent. Unfortunately, each week the Patent Office awards a number of patents for data in-data out processes that have little tangible output and involve not much more than general purpose computers running particular software.
A saying one sometimes hears around the Patent Office is that a patent is an invention and words describing the invention. But in many patent applications in the Information Age, the words predominate. The invention is an intangible, an idea, a series of steps, an abstraction. Maybe some legal protections are desirable for these types of inventions. Perhaps a copyright. Perhaps an entirely new concept. But ramming the intangible innovations of the Information Age into the largely tangible-oriented patent system of the Industrial Age is not a particularly pretty sight.
Well, it is certainly easy to have this impression. But even in this period of extreme dogmatism, all nine justices occasionally find themselves in agreement on a case, and not merely a case of little import. One such instance occurred this past spring. In a unanimous decision, the Court just might have taken a positive step toward easing a significant economic conflict. That conflict is between an Industrial Age patent system on one hand and the realities of the Information Age on the other.
On March 20, 2012, the Court decided the case of Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc. Justice Breyer delivered the Opinion of the Court. There were no dissenting opinions. There were not even any concurring opinions, those ramblings in which a Justice or Justices say in effect, “We sorta agree with you, but. . . .” In short, everybody was on board.
In the decision, the Court held that a process of applying researchers’ findings about the proper dosage of specific drugs was not entitled to a patent. The drugs were thiopurine drugs to treat autoimmune diseases. The process involved three steps: (1) an “administering” step in which a doctor administered a drug to a patient, (2) a “determining” step in which the doctor measured the resulting metabolite levels in the patient’s blood, and (3) a “wherein” step in which the doctor was to increase or decrease the drug dosage if the metabolite level was outside a specified range.
This three-step process, in the Court’s view, was nothing more than stating an unpatentable law of nature—the researchers’ findings—and adding the words “apply it.” Something more was needed before the application of a law of nature qualified as a patentable invention.
An observer’s first reaction might be, “So what’s the big deal?” The big deal is that the process patent in the Mayo case is an example of what a sizeable portion of the patent system has become in the Information Age: words, sometimes precise but more often vague, describing how to do something that involves a substantial degree of intangibility. Business methods patents are one variant of the group. Another common term is software patent, which at an unpatentable level is just a computer program. But add a little hardware, and U.S. Patent Office Examiners, striving to meet performance goals, are often persuaded.
Included in Information Age patents are financial arrangements and manipulations that result in exotic financial products, business and managerial analysis procedures that purport to optimize operations, and scoring and ranking exercises that lend an aura of certainty to murky decision-making.
U.S. patent law authorizes patents for processes, machines, manufactures, and compositions of matter. In an outburst of exuberance, a Congressional Committee report in 1980 stated that “anything under the sun” was patentable. Realizing this was not quite the extent of the patent concept, the Supreme Court over the years has narrowed patentability to exclude laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas. But the boundary between what is and what is not patentable remains ill-defined. Indeed, as the predominantly tangible Industrial Age has given way to the intangibles of the Information Age, the boundary has become more and more opaque.
In 2010, the Supreme Court, in Bilski v. Kappos, 561 U.S. __, 2010, grappled with the boundary’s location. The Court affirmed a lower court decision that a process involving a form of financial derivative, specifically a hedging transaction in the energy markets, was not patentable. All nine Justices agreed on the ultimate result, but they took several paths to that result.
Four Justices—Kennedy, who wrote the opinion of the Court, Roberts, Thomas, and Alito—said as little as possible. They defined the proposed patent as an abstract concept and rejected it for abstractness. But they did not hold that business methods in general were unpatentable. Business methods presented special Information Age challenges—the opinion specifically recognized the existence of the Information Age—but the four Justices found no general prohibition on the granting of patents for business methods.
Four other Justices—Stevens, who wrote a concurring opinion, Breyer, who joined in that opinion and also wrote another concurring opinion, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor—took a more expansive view. They would have prohibited business methods patents outright. Justice Scalia joined a portion of Kennedy’s opinion and a portion of Breyer’s opinion. The portions of Kennedy’s opinion and Breyer’s opinion that Scalia joined were portions that did not raise questions or concerns about patents for business methods. Interestingly, the portions of Kennedy’s opinion Scalia did not join were also the only portions of the opinion that referred to the Information Age. Perhaps a Constitutional Originalist and the Information Age don’t mix well.
Thus, although everyone agreed on the ultimate outcome, the varying rationales made for a rather messy situation. The one point of agreement in the rationales seemed to be that a machine-or-transformation test provided a useful and important clue for determining whether some claimed processes were patentable, but it was not the sole deciding factor. The machine-or-transformation test for an invention that involves a process is if (1) the process is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing. But to emphasize, the machine-or-transformation test only provided a clue regarding patentability.
So Bilski left much uncertainty in its wake.
One approach to bringing a little more clarity to the question of what is and what is not patentable might be the application of a data in-data out test. Data, incidentally, is a fundamental pillar of the Information Age. In a data in-data out test, if the subject matter of a patent application consists primarily of introducing data into a system—system being broadly defined—applying or otherwise manipulating the data, and then extracting a largely intangible result of predominantly data, then the threshold of patentability has not been achieved.
And without saying expressly that was what it did, that indeed was what the Supreme Court appears to have done in Mayo. The Court’s explicit analysis was centered on whether the process in Mayo was a patently permissible application of a law of nature, or merely a statement of the law of nature with the directive to “apply it.” But the Court’s analysis also lends itself to a data in-data out interpretation. For example, on pages 10-11 of the slip opinion, the Court says: “The upshot is that the three steps simply tell doctors to gather data from which they may draw an inference in light of the correlations.” The process’ data in? “gather evidence.” The process’ data out? “an inference.”
The Court discussed two precedents in depth: Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175 (1981), and Parker v. Flook, 437 U.S. 584 (1978). Each precedent involved a process of three steps. And each three-step process involved a basic mathematical equation that, like the law of nature in Mayo, was itself not patentable. In Diehr, the process was determined to be patentable. In Flook, the process was determined to be not patentable. The Court’s analysis in each case can be viewed in data in-data out terms, with the difference in the results being attributed to a greater tangibility component in Diehr.
Diehr’s process was a method for molding raw, uncured rubber into various cured, molded products. The three-step process used a known mathematical equation, called the Arrhenius equation, to determine when to open the mold’s press. The three steps were: (1) continuously monitoring the temperature on the inside of the mold; (2) feeding the resulting numbers into a computer, which would use the Arrhenius equation to continuously recalculate the mold-opening time; and (3) configuring the computer so that at the appropriate moment it would signal a device to open the press. The Mayo Court appeared to attach great significance to the output in Diehr being not just data but the automatic opening of the press at the proper time.
Flook’s process was a method for adjusting “alarm limits” in the catalytic conversion of hydrocarbons. Operating conditions such as temperature, pressure, and flow rates were continuously monitored in the conversion process. When the operating conditions exceeded certain alarm limits, inefficiency or dangers were indicated. The three-step process amounted to an improved system for updating the alarm limits. The three steps were: (1) measuring the current level of the variable, temperature for example; (2) using an apparently novel mathematical algorithm to calculate the current alarm limits; and (3) adjusting the system to reflect the new alarm-limit values. Unlike in Diehr, the output of the process in Flook was somewhat removed from anything tangible. The output was simply adjusted alarm limits. The connection to hardware, to a means for setting off an alarm, was unclear.
So one can argue that another way to describe the state of the law regarding patentability is that a pure data in-data out process does not appear to be patent-eligible. But if a bit of hardware is added for the data out to interact with, then perhaps a patent is warranted. The caveat to this perhaps idealistic view concerns the field of business methods patents. Here, the data out may be an intangible such as a financial instrument, a customer rating, a fraud score, or an optimization selection. One can argue from Flook, Diehr, Bilski, and Mayo that a predominately intangible output in a process should not result in a patent. Unfortunately, each week the Patent Office awards a number of patents for data in-data out processes that have little tangible output and involve not much more than general purpose computers running particular software.
A saying one sometimes hears around the Patent Office is that a patent is an invention and words describing the invention. But in many patent applications in the Information Age, the words predominate. The invention is an intangible, an idea, a series of steps, an abstraction. Maybe some legal protections are desirable for these types of inventions. Perhaps a copyright. Perhaps an entirely new concept. But ramming the intangible innovations of the Information Age into the largely tangible-oriented patent system of the Industrial Age is not a particularly pretty sight.
Friday, April 20, 2012
EATIN' DOG
If you were one of the several million or so Americans who passed through Southeast Asia back in, oh, ’60 to ’73, you might’a eaten a little dog meat. Of course, present-day anti-Obamaists who are trying to make an issue of the President eating dog meat in his youth in Indonesia would probably not have been so adventuresome. No, many of these present-day anti-Obamaists would likely have been part of the Dick Cheney crowd of pudgy boy tough guys who talked a helluva war but when it came to their own service, preferred the deferment approach. Or if they did happen to end up in Southeast Asia, never made it out of a U.S. military mess hall.
Yes, dog meat was a staple in Southeast Asia during those years. And if you found yourself in a rural area, you might even have gorged on field rat from time to time. Vietnamese troops would often catch and roast the rodents while on operations, and any Americans who happened to be accompanying them (the Vietnamese troops) were often invited to participate. Hey, it tasted like chicken.
So if anti-Obamaist followers of a certain stuff-shirt, pressed-jeans, slick-haired 2012 Presidential candidate want to make an issue of eating dog, go for it. As for this child, he’s branching out. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.
Yes, dog meat was a staple in Southeast Asia during those years. And if you found yourself in a rural area, you might even have gorged on field rat from time to time. Vietnamese troops would often catch and roast the rodents while on operations, and any Americans who happened to be accompanying them (the Vietnamese troops) were often invited to participate. Hey, it tasted like chicken.
So if anti-Obamaist followers of a certain stuff-shirt, pressed-jeans, slick-haired 2012 Presidential candidate want to make an issue of eating dog, go for it. As for this child, he’s branching out. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
“Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” How Quaint.
A half-century ago these words of John F. Kennedy inspired much of a generation. The words would seem to be timeless. But until recently, his classic defense of the separation of church and state would also seem to have been timeless. Then a serious conservative candidate for the Presidency of the United States, Rick Santorum, characterized Mr. Kennedy’s defense of the separation of church and state as a cause for vomiting. So how might present-day conservatives feel about John F. Kennedy’s exhortation to ask what you can do for your country?
In a recent column in The Wall Street Journal, Lawrence B. Lindsey chastised Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for using the phrase "privilege of being an American" (February 29). Mr. Lindsey, a former Federal Reserve governor and a member of George W. Bush’s administration, argued at length that what Americans have are not privileges but rights. Moreover, the principal right of Mr. Lindsey’s focus seemed to be the right to not be taxed. Absent from Mr. Lindsey’s civics lesson was any mention of responsibilities and obligations that might be part of the citizenship equation.
Perhaps in this age of it's-all-the government's fault, the absence is understandable. Still, one can occasionally feel a bit of nostalgia for those long ago times when high school civics classes and youth organizations left the young and impressionable with the thought that citizenship and obligations were not mutually exclusive concepts.
The responses to Mr. Lindsey’s column ran the gamut from, yeah, we’re taxed too much, to yeah, we’re taxed way too much. But then, the editorial pages of the Journal are not a place where one is likely to find much support for collective action by the citizenry, which is another way to describing what government and taxation actually are.
So what opinion might Misters Santorum and Lindsey, and other present-day conservatives, express about “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country”? Well, let’s just say that altruism, a sense of collective responsibility, and civic obligations do not seem to rank very high among the virtues admired by 21st Century American conservatives. Now if President's Kennedy's exhortation came with tax cuts. . . .
In a recent column in The Wall Street Journal, Lawrence B. Lindsey chastised Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for using the phrase "privilege of being an American" (February 29). Mr. Lindsey, a former Federal Reserve governor and a member of George W. Bush’s administration, argued at length that what Americans have are not privileges but rights. Moreover, the principal right of Mr. Lindsey’s focus seemed to be the right to not be taxed. Absent from Mr. Lindsey’s civics lesson was any mention of responsibilities and obligations that might be part of the citizenship equation.
Perhaps in this age of it's-all-the government's fault, the absence is understandable. Still, one can occasionally feel a bit of nostalgia for those long ago times when high school civics classes and youth organizations left the young and impressionable with the thought that citizenship and obligations were not mutually exclusive concepts.
The responses to Mr. Lindsey’s column ran the gamut from, yeah, we’re taxed too much, to yeah, we’re taxed way too much. But then, the editorial pages of the Journal are not a place where one is likely to find much support for collective action by the citizenry, which is another way to describing what government and taxation actually are.
So what opinion might Misters Santorum and Lindsey, and other present-day conservatives, express about “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country”? Well, let’s just say that altruism, a sense of collective responsibility, and civic obligations do not seem to rank very high among the virtues admired by 21st Century American conservatives. Now if President's Kennedy's exhortation came with tax cuts. . . .
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Sunday, October 30, 2011
TIME TO HANG IT UP
Cranky has been running marathons and ultramarathons for thirty-five years. Actually, the running faded away about fifteen years ago. What he’s been doing since then is more like shuffling. Anyway, after his latest effort—this year’s Marine Corps Marathon—he’s decided it’s time to call a halt, unless someone is willing to pay him big bucks. A la Dave Letterman, here are the ten reasons why.
1. He’s being passed by old men and obese women.
2. His times from his prime days have more than doubled, for a marathon from a little over three hours to well over six hours.
3. The hurt doesn’t start building after ten, fifteen, or twenty miles. The hurt starts right away.
4. His knees have no cartilage left; it’s bone on bone.
5. The water points are invariably out of water by the time Cranky arrives.
6. He’s tired of reading about some seventy or eighty year-old still running marathons. Good genes are something you are born with, not something that necessarily warrants effusive praise.
7. He’s too tired to oogle the young lady spectators.
8. The young lady spectators are preoccupied with young men spectators and young men runners.
9. He snaps at people who ask what his time was.
10. Finishing at the back of the pack and still being a basket case just ain’t much fun.
1. He’s being passed by old men and obese women.
2. His times from his prime days have more than doubled, for a marathon from a little over three hours to well over six hours.
3. The hurt doesn’t start building after ten, fifteen, or twenty miles. The hurt starts right away.
4. His knees have no cartilage left; it’s bone on bone.
5. The water points are invariably out of water by the time Cranky arrives.
6. He’s tired of reading about some seventy or eighty year-old still running marathons. Good genes are something you are born with, not something that necessarily warrants effusive praise.
7. He’s too tired to oogle the young lady spectators.
8. The young lady spectators are preoccupied with young men spectators and young men runners.
9. He snaps at people who ask what his time was.
10. Finishing at the back of the pack and still being a basket case just ain’t much fun.
Friday, September 30, 2011
PATENT REFORM? A LONG WAY TO GO
On September 16, President Obama signed into law the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, which made various amendments to the nation’s Patent Act (codified at 35 U.S.C §1-376). Ballyhooed as a patent reform measure, the America Invents Act really only touches the surface of patent reform. The fundamental challenge that the Information Age has thrown at the patent system was largely unaddressed. That challenge is where to draw the line between what is and what is not patentable.
For much of the Industrial Age, the line required a significant degree of tangibility for an “invention” to be patent-eligible. The requirement was not an explicitly written legal provision; it just flowed naturally from the primary focus of Industrial Age innovation, that focus being physical things.
Then in the latter half of the 20th Century came the Information Age. Tangibility gave way—not completely, but significantly—to bits and bytes, to different combinations of those bits and bytes, to software instructions for computers, to many “inventions” that consisted mostly of descriptions about how to do something rather than descriptions of a something itself. Indeed, in a number of cases, the descriptions, which after all were just words, were pretty much the whole “invention.”
This change in focus from the tangible to the intangible presented difficulties for a patent system that had long viewed patents as having two components: an “invention” and words describing the invention. In the intangible world of the Information Age, the words describing the invention often became the invention itself.
Section 101 of the Patent Act lists four categories of patentable objects: “any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter.” The process, also called the method, category is where many Information Age, intangible innovations fall on the patent spectrum. Business method patents is a non-legal term frequently applied to many patents in the process category. Another informal term often encountered is software patents. The term, which has no precise generally accepted definition, refers to innovations that consisted solely or mostly of computer instructions.
In July 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision, Bilski v. Kappos, that dealt with the patentability question, the question of what might fall beyond the bounds of process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter. The “invention” involved was a method of hedging against risk in the energy market. The key claims as identified in Justice Kennedy’s opinion of the Court were 1 and 4. Claim 1 contained a series of steps describing how to hedge risk. Claim 4 put the concept articulated in claim 1 into a mathematical formula.
All nine of the Supreme Court Justices agreed that no patent should be granted for the described hedging process. The point all nine justices apparently agreed upon was that the process was abstract and therefore not patentable. But there was no single rationale that could provide much-needed guidance to the Patent Office and the patent and business communities. Four Justices—Kennedy, who wrote the opinion of the Court, Roberts, Thomas, and Alito—said as little as possible. They defined the proposed patent as an abstract concept and rejected it solely for abstractness. But they did not hold that business methods were unpatentable. They conceded that business methods presented special Information Age challenges—the opinion explicitly recognized the existence of the Information Age—but the four Justices found no general prohibition on the granting of patents for business methods.
Four other Justices—Stevens, who wrote a concurring opinion, Breyer, who joined in that opinion and also wrote another concurring opinion, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor—took a more expansive view. They would have prohibited business methods patents. Justice Scalia joined a portion of Kennedy’s opinion and a portion of Breyer’s opinion. The portions of Kennedy’s opinion and Breyer’s opinion that Scalia did not join were portions that cast degrees of doubt on patents for business methods. Interestingly, the portions of Kennedy’s opinion that Scalia did not join were also the only portions of the opinion that referred to the Information Age. Being a firm Constitutional Originalist, perhaps Justice Scalia objects to the Information Age.
The bottom line was that the Court in Bilski provided only minimal guidance on the question of where the patentability line should be drawn. The Court did condone a machine-or-transformation test for process or method patent claims: was a process tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or did the process transform a particular article into a different state or thing? But the Court emphasized that the machine-or-transformation test was not the sole test for determining patentability under §101of the Patent Act; the test was simply a useful and important clue or investigative tool.
So, the Supreme Court punted in 2010 when presented with an opportunity to clarify the bounds of patentability. Would Congress do better in the first comprehensive patent reform act in almost sixty years? Well, no.
Perhaps the most talked about provision of the America Invents Act is the change from a first-to-invent system to a first-to-file system for determining who is entitled to a patent. The United States had been alone among industrialized nations in having a first-to-invent system. By moving to a first-to-file system, the United States will, proponents hope, reduce administrative and litigation costs patent applicants and holders can incur in a first-to-invent system, and in a world of disparate systems. Adoption of the first-to-file system was accompanied by a number of conforming changes to other provisions of the Patent Act, including §102 on novelty and §103 on non-obvious subject matter. These changes, and the change to a first-to-file system in general, are of interest to patent practitioners down in the weeds of the patent world, but they have little significance to the broad question of what types of innovations should or should not be granted patent protection, protection that in essence amounts to a limited-term monopoly.
Another much discussed aspect of the America Invents Act is the broadening of post-grant reviews. A rationale for the expansion of post-grant reviews is that the complexity of technology and the large increase in the number of patent applications has resulted in the granting of many patents that on one grounds or another should not have been granted. Under the America Invents Act (section 6), post-grant reviews may be sought on any invalidity ground during the first twelve months after a patent is issued or reissued.
A narrower provision of the America Invents Act (section 18) allows post-grant review of the validity of certain business method patents. The covered patents include ones that claim a method or corresponding apparatus for performing data processing or other operations used in the practice, administration, or management of a financial product or service, except that patents for technological inventions are not covered. Interestingly, the provision includes the admonition that amending or interpreting the categories of patent-eligible subject matter set forth in §101 of the Patent Act are not a permitted result of a post-grant review of a financial product or service patent.
The only direct narrowing of patentability under the American Invents Act concerns tax strategies. A small subset of business method patents, tax strategy patents are, as the moniker suggests, patents on tax strategies, or more accurately, on ways to avoid or reduce taxes.
Protecting tax strategies through the patent laws had aroused enough politically powerfully opposition that Congress was willing to curtail the practice. But Congress was apparently leery of opening a can of worms, which would have been the case if it began tinkering with the categories of patent-eligible subject matter in §101 of the Patent Act: processes, machines, manufactures, and compositions of matter. Consequently, Congress took the approach of saying that any future tax strategy patent applications would be deemed insufficient to differentiate them from prior art. In other words, future tax strategies would not be considered novel or non-obvious inventions warranting patent protection.
So Congress has joined the Supreme Court in punting on the fundamental question that the Information Age poses for an Industrial Age patent system: as predominately intangible innovations proliferate and become the mainstay of economic activity, where is the line to be drawn between what is patentable and what is not patentable? For the time being, drawing that line will be the province of, principally, two entities: the Patent Office and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which is the federal appeals court that deals with patent matters at the appellate level.
The Patent Office itself does not speak with one voice. Policies and guidance are issued at a centralized level, but patent examiners can be all over the board in interpreting the policies and guidance, particularly in the fuzzy field of business method patents. The internal Patent Office appeals body—the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences, which the America Invents Act renamed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board—attempts to bring a modicum of consistency to examiner decisions, but the effort is never-ending and only partly successful.
Thus for those seeking patent protection for innovations with a significant degree of intangibleness, the years ahead will likely be a time of considerable uncertainty. The principal beneficiaries of the uncertainty? The patent bar, of course.
For much of the Industrial Age, the line required a significant degree of tangibility for an “invention” to be patent-eligible. The requirement was not an explicitly written legal provision; it just flowed naturally from the primary focus of Industrial Age innovation, that focus being physical things.
Then in the latter half of the 20th Century came the Information Age. Tangibility gave way—not completely, but significantly—to bits and bytes, to different combinations of those bits and bytes, to software instructions for computers, to many “inventions” that consisted mostly of descriptions about how to do something rather than descriptions of a something itself. Indeed, in a number of cases, the descriptions, which after all were just words, were pretty much the whole “invention.”
This change in focus from the tangible to the intangible presented difficulties for a patent system that had long viewed patents as having two components: an “invention” and words describing the invention. In the intangible world of the Information Age, the words describing the invention often became the invention itself.
Section 101 of the Patent Act lists four categories of patentable objects: “any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter.” The process, also called the method, category is where many Information Age, intangible innovations fall on the patent spectrum. Business method patents is a non-legal term frequently applied to many patents in the process category. Another informal term often encountered is software patents. The term, which has no precise generally accepted definition, refers to innovations that consisted solely or mostly of computer instructions.
In July 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision, Bilski v. Kappos, that dealt with the patentability question, the question of what might fall beyond the bounds of process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter. The “invention” involved was a method of hedging against risk in the energy market. The key claims as identified in Justice Kennedy’s opinion of the Court were 1 and 4. Claim 1 contained a series of steps describing how to hedge risk. Claim 4 put the concept articulated in claim 1 into a mathematical formula.
All nine of the Supreme Court Justices agreed that no patent should be granted for the described hedging process. The point all nine justices apparently agreed upon was that the process was abstract and therefore not patentable. But there was no single rationale that could provide much-needed guidance to the Patent Office and the patent and business communities. Four Justices—Kennedy, who wrote the opinion of the Court, Roberts, Thomas, and Alito—said as little as possible. They defined the proposed patent as an abstract concept and rejected it solely for abstractness. But they did not hold that business methods were unpatentable. They conceded that business methods presented special Information Age challenges—the opinion explicitly recognized the existence of the Information Age—but the four Justices found no general prohibition on the granting of patents for business methods.
Four other Justices—Stevens, who wrote a concurring opinion, Breyer, who joined in that opinion and also wrote another concurring opinion, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor—took a more expansive view. They would have prohibited business methods patents. Justice Scalia joined a portion of Kennedy’s opinion and a portion of Breyer’s opinion. The portions of Kennedy’s opinion and Breyer’s opinion that Scalia did not join were portions that cast degrees of doubt on patents for business methods. Interestingly, the portions of Kennedy’s opinion that Scalia did not join were also the only portions of the opinion that referred to the Information Age. Being a firm Constitutional Originalist, perhaps Justice Scalia objects to the Information Age.
The bottom line was that the Court in Bilski provided only minimal guidance on the question of where the patentability line should be drawn. The Court did condone a machine-or-transformation test for process or method patent claims: was a process tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or did the process transform a particular article into a different state or thing? But the Court emphasized that the machine-or-transformation test was not the sole test for determining patentability under §101of the Patent Act; the test was simply a useful and important clue or investigative tool.
So, the Supreme Court punted in 2010 when presented with an opportunity to clarify the bounds of patentability. Would Congress do better in the first comprehensive patent reform act in almost sixty years? Well, no.
Perhaps the most talked about provision of the America Invents Act is the change from a first-to-invent system to a first-to-file system for determining who is entitled to a patent. The United States had been alone among industrialized nations in having a first-to-invent system. By moving to a first-to-file system, the United States will, proponents hope, reduce administrative and litigation costs patent applicants and holders can incur in a first-to-invent system, and in a world of disparate systems. Adoption of the first-to-file system was accompanied by a number of conforming changes to other provisions of the Patent Act, including §102 on novelty and §103 on non-obvious subject matter. These changes, and the change to a first-to-file system in general, are of interest to patent practitioners down in the weeds of the patent world, but they have little significance to the broad question of what types of innovations should or should not be granted patent protection, protection that in essence amounts to a limited-term monopoly.
Another much discussed aspect of the America Invents Act is the broadening of post-grant reviews. A rationale for the expansion of post-grant reviews is that the complexity of technology and the large increase in the number of patent applications has resulted in the granting of many patents that on one grounds or another should not have been granted. Under the America Invents Act (section 6), post-grant reviews may be sought on any invalidity ground during the first twelve months after a patent is issued or reissued.
A narrower provision of the America Invents Act (section 18) allows post-grant review of the validity of certain business method patents. The covered patents include ones that claim a method or corresponding apparatus for performing data processing or other operations used in the practice, administration, or management of a financial product or service, except that patents for technological inventions are not covered. Interestingly, the provision includes the admonition that amending or interpreting the categories of patent-eligible subject matter set forth in §101 of the Patent Act are not a permitted result of a post-grant review of a financial product or service patent.
The only direct narrowing of patentability under the American Invents Act concerns tax strategies. A small subset of business method patents, tax strategy patents are, as the moniker suggests, patents on tax strategies, or more accurately, on ways to avoid or reduce taxes.
Protecting tax strategies through the patent laws had aroused enough politically powerfully opposition that Congress was willing to curtail the practice. But Congress was apparently leery of opening a can of worms, which would have been the case if it began tinkering with the categories of patent-eligible subject matter in §101 of the Patent Act: processes, machines, manufactures, and compositions of matter. Consequently, Congress took the approach of saying that any future tax strategy patent applications would be deemed insufficient to differentiate them from prior art. In other words, future tax strategies would not be considered novel or non-obvious inventions warranting patent protection.
So Congress has joined the Supreme Court in punting on the fundamental question that the Information Age poses for an Industrial Age patent system: as predominately intangible innovations proliferate and become the mainstay of economic activity, where is the line to be drawn between what is patentable and what is not patentable? For the time being, drawing that line will be the province of, principally, two entities: the Patent Office and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which is the federal appeals court that deals with patent matters at the appellate level.
The Patent Office itself does not speak with one voice. Policies and guidance are issued at a centralized level, but patent examiners can be all over the board in interpreting the policies and guidance, particularly in the fuzzy field of business method patents. The internal Patent Office appeals body—the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences, which the America Invents Act renamed the Patent Trial and Appeal Board—attempts to bring a modicum of consistency to examiner decisions, but the effort is never-ending and only partly successful.
Thus for those seeking patent protection for innovations with a significant degree of intangibleness, the years ahead will likely be a time of considerable uncertainty. The principal beneficiaries of the uncertainty? The patent bar, of course.
Monday, September 12, 2011
CNN-TEA PARTY PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: THOUGHTS ABOUT
) When did CNN foreswear substance for entertainment?
) The National Anthem!?
) OK then, why not an F-16 flyover?
) And scantily clad cheerleaders?
) Was CNN making a case for being the Monday night football provider?
) Michele Bachmann’s children number 3, 5, 7, or what?
) If CNN allies with the Tea Party to sponsor a Republican Presidential debate, would it also join forces with the Democratic Party to sponsor a Republican Presidential debate?
) Texas Ranger Recon Unit: can it operate nationwide, maybe even in Afghanistan?
) Which is an indication of greater idealism: cheering for the uninsured thirty-year old dying because of no medical care, or cheering, as in the last debate, about Texas executing two hundred plus people during the Rick Perry years?
) Do those who support individual retirement accounts based on stock market investments recall that the stock market tanked recently?
) If old people’s benefits are not going to be tampered with and reforms will make things right for young people, does that mean those in their forties are in deep do-do?
) Who keeps returning Ron Paul to the U.S. Congress?
) For that matter, where did these Tea Partiers come from?
) Is pretty much anything treasonous?
) Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain: somebody is paying you guys to embarrass yourselves, right?
) And Wolf, it’s been a long slow decline from those heady days in 1991 when you were a young stud dodging incoming Scuds in Saudi Arabia, hasn’t it?
) The National Anthem!?
) OK then, why not an F-16 flyover?
) And scantily clad cheerleaders?
) Was CNN making a case for being the Monday night football provider?
) Michele Bachmann’s children number 3, 5, 7, or what?
) If CNN allies with the Tea Party to sponsor a Republican Presidential debate, would it also join forces with the Democratic Party to sponsor a Republican Presidential debate?
) Texas Ranger Recon Unit: can it operate nationwide, maybe even in Afghanistan?
) Which is an indication of greater idealism: cheering for the uninsured thirty-year old dying because of no medical care, or cheering, as in the last debate, about Texas executing two hundred plus people during the Rick Perry years?
) Do those who support individual retirement accounts based on stock market investments recall that the stock market tanked recently?
) If old people’s benefits are not going to be tampered with and reforms will make things right for young people, does that mean those in their forties are in deep do-do?
) Who keeps returning Ron Paul to the U.S. Congress?
) For that matter, where did these Tea Partiers come from?
) Is pretty much anything treasonous?
) Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain: somebody is paying you guys to embarrass yourselves, right?
) And Wolf, it’s been a long slow decline from those heady days in 1991 when you were a young stud dodging incoming Scuds in Saudi Arabia, hasn’t it?
Thursday, September 08, 2011
ONE MONTH WORK, NINE MONTHS VACATION?
The Congressional Budget Office issued a sobering budget and economic report on August 24. Among other predictions, the CBO estimated that unemployment would remain above 8 percent until 2014. That’s more than two full years away. A major reason for the pessimistic forecast is that the CBO anticipates only modest economic growth.
And why is economic growth only expected to be modest? Republicans will tell you that too much taxation and too many regulations are the problem. Democrats will tell you that not enough government stimulus is the problem. Some economists will tell you that a financial crisis caused by too much debt—such as the current one—does not permit a quick rebound. The economic system has to go through a painful period of deleveraging; that is, debt reduction. Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff are two such economists (This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Princeton University Press, 2009).
The too-much-debt economists are probably in the ballpark. But their explanation might not be the whole story. A few months ago, Barack Obama his own self stumbled onto a fundamental problem. He noted that using an ATM meant you were not interacting with a real live bank teller. In other words, ATMs have substantially reduced the number of tellers need in the world.
Of course, the President’s observation was greeted with derision by his adversaries, and even many of his supporters snickered. But he did touch upon a serious obstacle to a full-employment economy: the rapidly changing nature of work. Over the centuries, technological change has in turn produced changes in the nature of work. Existing jobs and occupations have disappeared or been degraded. New jobs and occupations have evolved. The process has rarely been smooth. Change is messy.
The onset of the Information Age, brought about by the computer, has continued—indeed accelerated—this disruptive evolutionary process. The relative, and in some cases absolute, numbers of bank tellers, secretaries, administrative assistants, production line workers, and many other similar types of employees have contracted. New jobs and occupations are emerging, but slowly. In fact, national economies may be entering an environment in which full employment is not achievable. Put another way, the problem might not just be the lack of jobs but the lack of need for a fully employed workforce.
If, say, 100 workers and managers can, with computers and computerized machinery, produce enough food, clothes, housing, other necessities, and leisure goods for 1,000, 10,000, even 100,000 people, what then? Well, you respond, those thousand or whatever need money to buy the food, clothes, housing, other necessities, and leisure goods, so they have to work. But all the necessary work is being done. Is massive income redistribution the answer? Is rotating the 100 necessary worker and manager positions through the 1,000 total supported people the answer? Work a month and get nine off? Are we ready for that future?
And why is economic growth only expected to be modest? Republicans will tell you that too much taxation and too many regulations are the problem. Democrats will tell you that not enough government stimulus is the problem. Some economists will tell you that a financial crisis caused by too much debt—such as the current one—does not permit a quick rebound. The economic system has to go through a painful period of deleveraging; that is, debt reduction. Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff are two such economists (This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Princeton University Press, 2009).
The too-much-debt economists are probably in the ballpark. But their explanation might not be the whole story. A few months ago, Barack Obama his own self stumbled onto a fundamental problem. He noted that using an ATM meant you were not interacting with a real live bank teller. In other words, ATMs have substantially reduced the number of tellers need in the world.
Of course, the President’s observation was greeted with derision by his adversaries, and even many of his supporters snickered. But he did touch upon a serious obstacle to a full-employment economy: the rapidly changing nature of work. Over the centuries, technological change has in turn produced changes in the nature of work. Existing jobs and occupations have disappeared or been degraded. New jobs and occupations have evolved. The process has rarely been smooth. Change is messy.
The onset of the Information Age, brought about by the computer, has continued—indeed accelerated—this disruptive evolutionary process. The relative, and in some cases absolute, numbers of bank tellers, secretaries, administrative assistants, production line workers, and many other similar types of employees have contracted. New jobs and occupations are emerging, but slowly. In fact, national economies may be entering an environment in which full employment is not achievable. Put another way, the problem might not just be the lack of jobs but the lack of need for a fully employed workforce.
If, say, 100 workers and managers can, with computers and computerized machinery, produce enough food, clothes, housing, other necessities, and leisure goods for 1,000, 10,000, even 100,000 people, what then? Well, you respond, those thousand or whatever need money to buy the food, clothes, housing, other necessities, and leisure goods, so they have to work. But all the necessary work is being done. Is massive income redistribution the answer? Is rotating the 100 necessary worker and manager positions through the 1,000 total supported people the answer? Work a month and get nine off? Are we ready for that future?
Thursday, August 18, 2011
THE BOOGER, OUR LITTLE FRIEND
Boogers get a bad rap. They are consistently portrayed in an unflattering manner. Their extraction through nose-picking is not presented as a natural human activity but as something uncouth, even filthy. An entire Seinfeld episode was built around the disgust with which society views a pick.
Yet who among us has not participated? And we should not be ashamed of having done so. Boogers are not vile things. They are actually quite useful.
One use: food. Yes, boogers can be a tasty little snack. They are naturally salty, some more so than others. And if survival is at stake—say you are trapped in a cave and becoming malnourished—boogers are certainly more palatable than other human waste alternatives. So, find yourself hungry but with no food readily available? Pick your nose.
Another use: glue. Some, admittedly not all but some, boogers are excellent adhesives, at least as good as epoxy, J-B Weld, Gorilla Glue, or other alternatives available from such stores as Home Depot and Ace Hardware. Have a repair job requiring an industrial strength adhesive? Pick your nose.
A third use: beauty spot. Accustomed to applying a beauty spot as part of your preparations to face the world each day but don’t have the necessary material one fine morning? Pick your nose.
Not yet persuaded about the value of boogers? Well, their use as a hygiene sensor should remove all doubts. Most of us have worked in offices at some point in our lives. And offices mean communal lavatories. And keeping communal lavatories clean is a challenge of the first order. Some employers commit the resources necessary to maintain a minimally acceptable level of cleanliness. Most don’t. But as an employee, how can you judge?
You can certainly judge the extreme. Unflushable toilets and urinals (do female bathrooms have urinals? Seriously, most guys don’t know) are certainly not acceptable. But how do you evaluate the rest?
Well, one method involves the much maligned booger. Simply place a booger on a wall. If you’re a guy standing at a urinal and no one is around, reach into the old nose, get one of your bad boys, and deposit it at eye level or a little below. And then see how many days it remains in place. Or if you’re in a stall rather than at a urinal, deposit the little rascal on the side wall, maybe a bit to the side of the paper dispenser so you’ll have a reference point to locate it on later visits.
Among Cranky’s former employers was an agency of the federal government. This particular agency was a bit lax in the hygiene department. Hygiene sensors frequently remained unremoved for weeks. The last one Cranky deposited set a record. Seven months after installation, it was still in place. In fact, Cranky left the agency before the sensor did. Some years have passed so surely it’s gone by now. But maybe, just maybe. Second floor men’s room. Urinal furthest from the door. Eye level. Check it out.
Yet who among us has not participated? And we should not be ashamed of having done so. Boogers are not vile things. They are actually quite useful.
One use: food. Yes, boogers can be a tasty little snack. They are naturally salty, some more so than others. And if survival is at stake—say you are trapped in a cave and becoming malnourished—boogers are certainly more palatable than other human waste alternatives. So, find yourself hungry but with no food readily available? Pick your nose.
Another use: glue. Some, admittedly not all but some, boogers are excellent adhesives, at least as good as epoxy, J-B Weld, Gorilla Glue, or other alternatives available from such stores as Home Depot and Ace Hardware. Have a repair job requiring an industrial strength adhesive? Pick your nose.
A third use: beauty spot. Accustomed to applying a beauty spot as part of your preparations to face the world each day but don’t have the necessary material one fine morning? Pick your nose.
Not yet persuaded about the value of boogers? Well, their use as a hygiene sensor should remove all doubts. Most of us have worked in offices at some point in our lives. And offices mean communal lavatories. And keeping communal lavatories clean is a challenge of the first order. Some employers commit the resources necessary to maintain a minimally acceptable level of cleanliness. Most don’t. But as an employee, how can you judge?
You can certainly judge the extreme. Unflushable toilets and urinals (do female bathrooms have urinals? Seriously, most guys don’t know) are certainly not acceptable. But how do you evaluate the rest?
Well, one method involves the much maligned booger. Simply place a booger on a wall. If you’re a guy standing at a urinal and no one is around, reach into the old nose, get one of your bad boys, and deposit it at eye level or a little below. And then see how many days it remains in place. Or if you’re in a stall rather than at a urinal, deposit the little rascal on the side wall, maybe a bit to the side of the paper dispenser so you’ll have a reference point to locate it on later visits.
Among Cranky’s former employers was an agency of the federal government. This particular agency was a bit lax in the hygiene department. Hygiene sensors frequently remained unremoved for weeks. The last one Cranky deposited set a record. Seven months after installation, it was still in place. In fact, Cranky left the agency before the sensor did. Some years have passed so surely it’s gone by now. But maybe, just maybe. Second floor men’s room. Urinal furthest from the door. Eye level. Check it out.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
THE GLORIOUS REPUBLICAN OATH CRUSADE
Where is Major – de Coverley when we need him?
A little rusty on your Catch-22? Major – de Coverley (yes, there was no first name, only a dash) was a minor character in Joseph Heller’s 1961 classic comedic, some would say subversive, novel set in a U.S. Army Air Corps unit in the Mediterranean during World War II. An imposing figure, with an eye patch, the Major’s reaction to a particular situation might be just the sort of thing needed to extract today’s Republican Party from a sticky mess it has gotten itself into.
What Major – de Coverley did was to bring an abrupt end to the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade. The Crusade was the brainchild of Captain Black, a rear echelon intelligence officer who fancied greater things for himself and was constantly plotting to achieve those things. After his failure to become the squadron commander—the job went to Major Major—Captain Black was upset in the extreme. He decided that Major Major was a Communist and announced to his fellow rear echelon officers: “They’re taking over everything. . . .I’m going to do something about it. From now on I’m going to make every son of a bitch who comes to my intelligence tent sign a loyalty oath.”
So the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was born. It became an immediate success. The plane crews had to sign loyalty oaths to get their map cases, more oaths to get their gear, including flak suits, and still more oaths for transportation to the airfield. An unofficial competition sprang up among the rear echelon administrators as each sought to outdo the others in requiring loyalty oaths. Requirements for the pledge of allegiance and the singing of The Star-Spangled Banner soon appeared.
Major – de Coverley had been away from the unit when the Oath Crusade began. Shortly after returning, he attempted to enter the mess hall. A loyalty oath was thrust at him to sign. He looked at it. He looked at a group pledging allegiance before sitting and another group singing The Star-Spangled Banner before using the salt, pepper, and ketchup.
With “fiery disdain” and “mountainous wrath,” Major – de Coverley swept the oath away. Harshly and loudly he thundered, “Gimme eat.” Looking around the room at the various groups at one stage or another in the oath taking process, he added with a roar, “Give everybody eat.” And so the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade came to an end.
Captain Black remind you of anyone? Yes, Grover Norquist. Mr. Norquist’s no tax pledge has not only become almost a requirement for success in today’s Grand Old Party but has also spawned pledges and oaths on other matters, abortion for example. As many observers have suggested, should not the oath to support the Constitution that every office holder takes be all the oath-taking that is necessary?
Yes, what today’s Republican Party needs is a Major – de Coverley, someone who, when Mr. Norquist thrusts a no-tax pledge at him or her, sweeps it away and thunders, “Gimme eat. Give everybody eat.”
A little rusty on your Catch-22? Major – de Coverley (yes, there was no first name, only a dash) was a minor character in Joseph Heller’s 1961 classic comedic, some would say subversive, novel set in a U.S. Army Air Corps unit in the Mediterranean during World War II. An imposing figure, with an eye patch, the Major’s reaction to a particular situation might be just the sort of thing needed to extract today’s Republican Party from a sticky mess it has gotten itself into.
What Major – de Coverley did was to bring an abrupt end to the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade. The Crusade was the brainchild of Captain Black, a rear echelon intelligence officer who fancied greater things for himself and was constantly plotting to achieve those things. After his failure to become the squadron commander—the job went to Major Major—Captain Black was upset in the extreme. He decided that Major Major was a Communist and announced to his fellow rear echelon officers: “They’re taking over everything. . . .I’m going to do something about it. From now on I’m going to make every son of a bitch who comes to my intelligence tent sign a loyalty oath.”
So the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was born. It became an immediate success. The plane crews had to sign loyalty oaths to get their map cases, more oaths to get their gear, including flak suits, and still more oaths for transportation to the airfield. An unofficial competition sprang up among the rear echelon administrators as each sought to outdo the others in requiring loyalty oaths. Requirements for the pledge of allegiance and the singing of The Star-Spangled Banner soon appeared.
Major – de Coverley had been away from the unit when the Oath Crusade began. Shortly after returning, he attempted to enter the mess hall. A loyalty oath was thrust at him to sign. He looked at it. He looked at a group pledging allegiance before sitting and another group singing The Star-Spangled Banner before using the salt, pepper, and ketchup.
With “fiery disdain” and “mountainous wrath,” Major – de Coverley swept the oath away. Harshly and loudly he thundered, “Gimme eat.” Looking around the room at the various groups at one stage or another in the oath taking process, he added with a roar, “Give everybody eat.” And so the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade came to an end.
Captain Black remind you of anyone? Yes, Grover Norquist. Mr. Norquist’s no tax pledge has not only become almost a requirement for success in today’s Grand Old Party but has also spawned pledges and oaths on other matters, abortion for example. As many observers have suggested, should not the oath to support the Constitution that every office holder takes be all the oath-taking that is necessary?
Yes, what today’s Republican Party needs is a Major – de Coverley, someone who, when Mr. Norquist thrusts a no-tax pledge at him or her, sweeps it away and thunders, “Gimme eat. Give everybody eat.”
Saturday, February 12, 2011
DESERT STORM, THE FORGOTTEN LESSON
The twentieth anniversary of the Gulf War of 1991 is passing with little notice. Yet the war was one of those pivot points in the history of the United States when the perceptions of the past give way to a different focus. Perhaps the small number of backward looks is due to the intervening chaos of the Twenty-First Century’s inauspicious beginning. Perhaps the lack of attention is a result of the extraordinary degree of success that was enjoyed by the United States and its Coalition partners in 1991. Whatever the reason, the Gulf War and Operation Desert Storm—the name of the military operation under which the war was prosecuted—are now little more than historical footnotes.
How was the war an historic pivot point for the United States? Most notably, the event erased the last vestiges of the international funk into which the nation had fallen after Vietnam. For almost two decades, the U.S. had been afraid of its own shadow. Every foreign policy issue had been considered in the context of, we can’t have another Vietnam. The attitude surely discouraged involvement in a number of ill-defined messes around the globe. But it also hindered action in more clear-cut situations.
The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, was just such a situation. In response, President George H.W. Bush on August 5, 1990, set a tone not heard much in the preceding twenty years: “This will not stand.” Thus commenced months of both diplomatic activity to bring other nations on board and military preparations for a possible armed intervention. Something else that commenced were months of, we’re getting ourselves into another Vietnam. But George H.W. Bush was not to be dissuaded. The diplomatic efforts to build a coalition succeeded, and when Iraq failed to leave Kuwait, the armed intervention—war—followed.
Air attacks began on January 17, 1991, and a ground invasion of Kuwait and southeastern Iraq started on February 24. By March 3 the fighting was over. The enemy, Iraq, was vanquished, papers were signed, and the victors came home to parades and celebrations. It was a classic military victory. So much for that disagreeable little episode a few years back in Southeast Asia.
But righting a wrong and erasing the funk of Vietnam had downsides. For one thing, at least a few individuals in Islamic nations were disturbed by the intrusion of the West, particularly the United States. Cultural and religious norms had been violated. Perhaps feelings of belligerent inferiority had been stoked. The simmering hatred for the West and the United States became apparent to all on September 11, 2001.
Another downside seems to have been the creation of a false impression in the minds of some in the victorious nation, the United States. That false impression concerned the apparent ease of applying military might. The leading U.S. military men in the Gulf War, General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., Commander of U.S. Central Command, had insisted on adequate—no, more than adequate, overwhelming—forces. A veteran of World War II, George H.W. Bush agreed with the need.
And the force that was put together for the Gulf War was indeed overwhelming: in excess of 520,000 members of the U.S. military alone. Other nations added at least another 100,000.
But the lesson of victory resulting from the application of this overwhelming force was not learned by all, including apparently the Secretary of Defense at the time, Richard B. Cheney. When the United States embarked on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in 2001 and 2003, respectively, the numbers of troops involved were much below the 1991 Gulf War levels. There is no evidence that Mr. Cheney, now the Vice President, expressed any concerns about the relatively small force the nation was committing.
The maximum number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq combined has never exceeded 200,000. The combined areas of the two countries total over 400,000 square miles. The operational area of the 1991 Gulf War—Kuwait and the southeastern corner of Iraq—was 20,000 square miles at the most. So the math is more than 500,000 troops for 20,000 square miles in 1991 versus less than 200,000 troops for more than 400,000 square miles in the wars of this century, a 25-to-1 versus a 0.5-to-1 ratio. Perhaps those numbers explain the elusiveness of a clear cut victory in Iraq and Afghanistan. Incidentally, the troops-to-square mile ratio in South Vietnam at the height of the U.S. involvement was approximately 1.3-to-1. As older readers may recall, that ratio proved inadequate to establish physical control over the entire country.
Thus a largely forgotten lesson of the Gulf War and Desert Storm—and Vietnam—is that seeking an outright military victory requires a massive commitment of manpower. If the committed forces are less than massive, the nation should lower its expectations and increase its time horizons. Simply keeping hostile forces off-balance for a lengthy period might be the best achievable outcome. But pursuing a classical military victory when the manpower commitment has not been made has proved a fool’s errand.
How was the war an historic pivot point for the United States? Most notably, the event erased the last vestiges of the international funk into which the nation had fallen after Vietnam. For almost two decades, the U.S. had been afraid of its own shadow. Every foreign policy issue had been considered in the context of, we can’t have another Vietnam. The attitude surely discouraged involvement in a number of ill-defined messes around the globe. But it also hindered action in more clear-cut situations.
The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, was just such a situation. In response, President George H.W. Bush on August 5, 1990, set a tone not heard much in the preceding twenty years: “This will not stand.” Thus commenced months of both diplomatic activity to bring other nations on board and military preparations for a possible armed intervention. Something else that commenced were months of, we’re getting ourselves into another Vietnam. But George H.W. Bush was not to be dissuaded. The diplomatic efforts to build a coalition succeeded, and when Iraq failed to leave Kuwait, the armed intervention—war—followed.
Air attacks began on January 17, 1991, and a ground invasion of Kuwait and southeastern Iraq started on February 24. By March 3 the fighting was over. The enemy, Iraq, was vanquished, papers were signed, and the victors came home to parades and celebrations. It was a classic military victory. So much for that disagreeable little episode a few years back in Southeast Asia.
But righting a wrong and erasing the funk of Vietnam had downsides. For one thing, at least a few individuals in Islamic nations were disturbed by the intrusion of the West, particularly the United States. Cultural and religious norms had been violated. Perhaps feelings of belligerent inferiority had been stoked. The simmering hatred for the West and the United States became apparent to all on September 11, 2001.
Another downside seems to have been the creation of a false impression in the minds of some in the victorious nation, the United States. That false impression concerned the apparent ease of applying military might. The leading U.S. military men in the Gulf War, General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., Commander of U.S. Central Command, had insisted on adequate—no, more than adequate, overwhelming—forces. A veteran of World War II, George H.W. Bush agreed with the need.
And the force that was put together for the Gulf War was indeed overwhelming: in excess of 520,000 members of the U.S. military alone. Other nations added at least another 100,000.
But the lesson of victory resulting from the application of this overwhelming force was not learned by all, including apparently the Secretary of Defense at the time, Richard B. Cheney. When the United States embarked on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in 2001 and 2003, respectively, the numbers of troops involved were much below the 1991 Gulf War levels. There is no evidence that Mr. Cheney, now the Vice President, expressed any concerns about the relatively small force the nation was committing.
The maximum number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq combined has never exceeded 200,000. The combined areas of the two countries total over 400,000 square miles. The operational area of the 1991 Gulf War—Kuwait and the southeastern corner of Iraq—was 20,000 square miles at the most. So the math is more than 500,000 troops for 20,000 square miles in 1991 versus less than 200,000 troops for more than 400,000 square miles in the wars of this century, a 25-to-1 versus a 0.5-to-1 ratio. Perhaps those numbers explain the elusiveness of a clear cut victory in Iraq and Afghanistan. Incidentally, the troops-to-square mile ratio in South Vietnam at the height of the U.S. involvement was approximately 1.3-to-1. As older readers may recall, that ratio proved inadequate to establish physical control over the entire country.
Thus a largely forgotten lesson of the Gulf War and Desert Storm—and Vietnam—is that seeking an outright military victory requires a massive commitment of manpower. If the committed forces are less than massive, the nation should lower its expectations and increase its time horizons. Simply keeping hostile forces off-balance for a lengthy period might be the best achievable outcome. But pursuing a classical military victory when the manpower commitment has not been made has proved a fool’s errand.
Sunday, February 06, 2011
TEAR DOWN THOSE PYRAMIDS
Was Ronald Reagan a great President? Well, following Vietnam, the oil shortages, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, how good did you have to be? The nation was in a funk, economically and attitudinally. Just maintaining an even keel might be enough, in the eyes of many, to make you a great President. So yeah, Ronald Reagan might qualify as a great President.
But there were some negatives. On Ronald Reagan’s watch, the federal debt almost tripled, from $789 billion in 1981 to $2,191 billion in 1989, and in no year was there a budget surplus. The nation moved from being the world’s largest international creditor to being the largest international debtor. Unemployment reached 10.8 percent in the last months of 1982, almost two years into Reagan’s first term. The highest unemployment rate under Barrack Obama has been 10.6 percent, which basically was an inheritance from his predecessor.
Two hundred forty-one members of the U.S military died by Islamic suicide bomber in 1983 in Lebanon. Reagan responded by withdrawing the U.S. military from Lebanon, a wise move say some, cutting and running say others. In any event, the home-front political repercussions were few because Reagan promptly had the military beat the snot out of Grenada, a Caribbean powerhouse. Internationally, the withdrawal had a more detrimental result, helping to persuade a certain up-and-coming Islamic radical that the United States was something of a paper tiger.
In 1986, a murky arms for hostages deal involving Iran and aid to Central American anti-communist rebels raised questions about the extent to which Reagan was actually in control of his Administration.
But let’s be generous and say Reagan was a great President. He was certainly better than some who have gotten to the Oval Office. He made many of us feel good. He said pithy things. The problem is his present-day worshipers. They are prone to see the Reagan years as the nation’s apogee, a time when all was right with the world. They see the fall of Communism as a direct result of a Reagan pithy exhortation: “Tear Down This Wall.” They want current problems to be so easily solved.
The attitude was on display this weekend, the centennial of Reagan’s birth. The boys and girls at conservative media central, Fox News, could not just extol Reagan’s virtues. They had to go a step further and bash current political adversaries by contending that Ronnie would know how to solve current problems. The economy? The deficit? Ronnie would know what to do about them, never mind the mixed economic record of his eight years.
But perhaps the most ludicrous statements concerned the current turmoil in Egypt. Ronnie would know precisely what the nation’s policy should be. More important, he would be able to articulate that policy with rousing words of inspiration. The Fox News folks didn’t get around to speculating what those words might be, just that Ronnie would find them.
Ronnie not being here, however, perhaps he and his friends at Fox need some help. How about this: “Mr. Mubarak, Tear Down Those Pyramids.”
But there were some negatives. On Ronald Reagan’s watch, the federal debt almost tripled, from $789 billion in 1981 to $2,191 billion in 1989, and in no year was there a budget surplus. The nation moved from being the world’s largest international creditor to being the largest international debtor. Unemployment reached 10.8 percent in the last months of 1982, almost two years into Reagan’s first term. The highest unemployment rate under Barrack Obama has been 10.6 percent, which basically was an inheritance from his predecessor.
Two hundred forty-one members of the U.S military died by Islamic suicide bomber in 1983 in Lebanon. Reagan responded by withdrawing the U.S. military from Lebanon, a wise move say some, cutting and running say others. In any event, the home-front political repercussions were few because Reagan promptly had the military beat the snot out of Grenada, a Caribbean powerhouse. Internationally, the withdrawal had a more detrimental result, helping to persuade a certain up-and-coming Islamic radical that the United States was something of a paper tiger.
In 1986, a murky arms for hostages deal involving Iran and aid to Central American anti-communist rebels raised questions about the extent to which Reagan was actually in control of his Administration.
But let’s be generous and say Reagan was a great President. He was certainly better than some who have gotten to the Oval Office. He made many of us feel good. He said pithy things. The problem is his present-day worshipers. They are prone to see the Reagan years as the nation’s apogee, a time when all was right with the world. They see the fall of Communism as a direct result of a Reagan pithy exhortation: “Tear Down This Wall.” They want current problems to be so easily solved.
The attitude was on display this weekend, the centennial of Reagan’s birth. The boys and girls at conservative media central, Fox News, could not just extol Reagan’s virtues. They had to go a step further and bash current political adversaries by contending that Ronnie would know how to solve current problems. The economy? The deficit? Ronnie would know what to do about them, never mind the mixed economic record of his eight years.
But perhaps the most ludicrous statements concerned the current turmoil in Egypt. Ronnie would know precisely what the nation’s policy should be. More important, he would be able to articulate that policy with rousing words of inspiration. The Fox News folks didn’t get around to speculating what those words might be, just that Ronnie would find them.
Ronnie not being here, however, perhaps he and his friends at Fox need some help. How about this: “Mr. Mubarak, Tear Down Those Pyramids.”
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
TIGER MOM OR DAD WOULD'A HELPED
Talk about explosive impact. The Tiger Mom Amy Chua has become close to a national obsession. Her espousals of a child-raising theory centered around browbeating one’s urchins until they excel have roused vehement debate. Most seem to think her approach is over the line.
Well, Cranky begs to differ. He thinks that the lack of a Tiger Mom, or Dad, in his youth condemned him to mediocrity. Cranky’s dream in his adolescent years was to be a high school basketball star. Despite a year-round commitment, however, and hours and hours of practice, he never made it past mediocre. Even in his senior year, he was mostly the sixth man on the team.
For a long time Cranky attributed his lack of success to being a slow 5’10” Caucasian with a vertical leap of about six inches. But now he realizes what the real problem was. He didn’t have a Tiger Dad, an Ol’ Man who devoted hours to screaming the Young Cranky to perfection.
So thanks a lot, Dad. It wasn’t me that was the loser. It was you. You were content to accept my obvious physical limitations. You did not demand that I overcome nature and achieve stardom. I could’a been a contender, Dad, but you let me down.
But there is still time for Cranky to be a Tiger Dad. I’ve got two grown daughters who are athletic enough but, to my regret, have never shown much interest in basketball. All I want them to do is to make a jump shot, a bona fide jump shot. Start with the ball about chest high, rise in the air bringing the ball over the head and situating one hand on the ball’s underside, then in that millisecond pause at the top of the jump, simultaneously flick the wrist and push with the arm.
C’MON GIRLS, STOP LOLLYGAGGING. YOU SHOOT LIKE GIRLS. IF YOU CARED FOR YOUR OL’ MAN, YOU’D DO THIS.
Well, Cranky begs to differ. He thinks that the lack of a Tiger Mom, or Dad, in his youth condemned him to mediocrity. Cranky’s dream in his adolescent years was to be a high school basketball star. Despite a year-round commitment, however, and hours and hours of practice, he never made it past mediocre. Even in his senior year, he was mostly the sixth man on the team.
For a long time Cranky attributed his lack of success to being a slow 5’10” Caucasian with a vertical leap of about six inches. But now he realizes what the real problem was. He didn’t have a Tiger Dad, an Ol’ Man who devoted hours to screaming the Young Cranky to perfection.
So thanks a lot, Dad. It wasn’t me that was the loser. It was you. You were content to accept my obvious physical limitations. You did not demand that I overcome nature and achieve stardom. I could’a been a contender, Dad, but you let me down.
But there is still time for Cranky to be a Tiger Dad. I’ve got two grown daughters who are athletic enough but, to my regret, have never shown much interest in basketball. All I want them to do is to make a jump shot, a bona fide jump shot. Start with the ball about chest high, rise in the air bringing the ball over the head and situating one hand on the ball’s underside, then in that millisecond pause at the top of the jump, simultaneously flick the wrist and push with the arm.
C’MON GIRLS, STOP LOLLYGAGGING. YOU SHOOT LIKE GIRLS. IF YOU CARED FOR YOUR OL’ MAN, YOU’D DO THIS.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
MAN UP, JUAN
The NPR-Juan Williams thing is why the Great Spirit made television: pure entertainment. NPR, of course, comes across as ideologically rigid, unfair, and not very bright.
But Juan Williams and his cohorts at Fox News are using the occasion to take both umbrage and gloating to new levels. The umbrage was at the seeming injustice of firing poor Juan for expressing in measured, non-inflammatory language a queasiness about getting on a plane with individuals in Muslim garb, a queasiness shared by perhaps 90 percent of his fellow citizens. The gloating was, “see, this proves our point about how hypocritical those pinhead leftwing liberals are.”
Juan-Fox, however, are in danger of overplaying their hand. In the day or so after his firing—which was immediately followed by a lucrative new contract for Juan with Fox—Juan was the guest host of Bill O’Reilly’s Factor. Instead of exercising a little low-keyed humor that would have made NPR even more the Ogre, Juan whined. And whined. And whined.
Whining is what Fox and conservatives accuse liberals of doing. But it appears that liberals haven’t cornered the market in whining. Juan and the other Fox conservatives have shown an ability to whine with the best of them.
One is tempted to resort to a favorite new phrase among distaff conservatives: Man Up.
Man Up, Juan. Stop your whining, enjoy your monetary largess, and get on with your life.
Incidentally, the perfect, though undoubtedly political incorrect, response of a Harry Reid or other target of a “Man Up” would be, “Hey Sweetheart, grow a pair.”
But Juan Williams and his cohorts at Fox News are using the occasion to take both umbrage and gloating to new levels. The umbrage was at the seeming injustice of firing poor Juan for expressing in measured, non-inflammatory language a queasiness about getting on a plane with individuals in Muslim garb, a queasiness shared by perhaps 90 percent of his fellow citizens. The gloating was, “see, this proves our point about how hypocritical those pinhead leftwing liberals are.”
Juan-Fox, however, are in danger of overplaying their hand. In the day or so after his firing—which was immediately followed by a lucrative new contract for Juan with Fox—Juan was the guest host of Bill O’Reilly’s Factor. Instead of exercising a little low-keyed humor that would have made NPR even more the Ogre, Juan whined. And whined. And whined.
Whining is what Fox and conservatives accuse liberals of doing. But it appears that liberals haven’t cornered the market in whining. Juan and the other Fox conservatives have shown an ability to whine with the best of them.
One is tempted to resort to a favorite new phrase among distaff conservatives: Man Up.
Man Up, Juan. Stop your whining, enjoy your monetary largess, and get on with your life.
Incidentally, the perfect, though undoubtedly political incorrect, response of a Harry Reid or other target of a “Man Up” would be, “Hey Sweetheart, grow a pair.”
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
GOBI MARATHON
Hey Runners, tired of those multi-thousand person races in which you're rubbing elbows, butts, and whatever with your buddies for miles? Well, there are alternatives. One of Cranky's daughters sent some pictures of the 2010 Gobi Marathon in Mongolia. Here they are.
Nothing like a pre-race squirt of camel's milk:
And we're off:
Anybody seen a Porta Potty?
A tree would be nice:
Where are the cheering multitudes?
Wish you were here:
Nothing like a pre-race squirt of camel's milk:
And we're off:
Anybody seen a Porta Potty?
A tree would be nice:
Where are the cheering multitudes?
Wish you were here:
Sunday, August 22, 2010
C&O CANAL ENCOUNTER
Recently—actually it was the hottest freakin’ four days of the year—Cranky and his oldest daughter did a little bike ride from Meyersdale in southern Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C., about 220 miles. The first 35 or so were on the Great Alleghany Passage trail from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Maryland. The last 185 were on the C&O Canal trail.
All-in-all it was good time, but seriously hot. Also, after the first 25 or so miles each day, pretty brutal: tender crotch, pained back and neck. Cranky’s theory is that bikes are meant to be ridden no more than 30 miles at a time. At 30 miles, the body says, “enough of this.”
But still a good time. The Great Alleghany Passage and the C&O trails are kinda neat; not crowded, in places even empty. The C&O parallels the Potomac, so there’s always a flowing river close by. The C&O is also mostly shaded, a nice thing when the temperature is pushing 100.
An encounter, however, moved the trip from the just-good-time category to the memorable category. Cranky and his daughter encountered a nudist, a well-endowed nudist who was obviously proud of his equipment.
A number of campsites are along the C&O. They usually consist of a small clearing, sometimes a picnic table or two, and a pump that produces water from a well. On day two of the trip, a few miles east of the Paw Paw Tunnel, the travelers—Cranky and his daughter—stopped at one such campsite to replenish water. Just before the campsite was a small stone bridge. A couple—a man and a woman—were sitting on one of the bridge’s knee-high walls. The water pump was just beyond the end of the bridge. As Cranky and daughter pedaled past, Cranky got the distinct impression that the man was not clothed. He seemed to have a towel or tee shirt in his lap, but that was all.
But water was needed, so with a cheerful “we’re just gettin’ some water,” the travelers pulled up to the pump and proceeded with the task. After a few moments, the couple rose and began walking past the travelers to the grassy campsite. The woman had on a shirt and shorts. The man had on nothing and made little effort to cover himself with the towel or tee shirt he was carrying. Other than the man’s nudity, the couple weren’t threatening in any way.
The man appeared to be of South Asian, perhaps Indian, ethnicity. As he ambled down into the campsite, his ample brown buttocks bounced and rippled.
But the encounter had not reached its high point. The travelers finished replenishing their water and prepared to depart. As the travelers were mounting their bikes, the couple began returning to the bridge. The man was providing full frontal nudity. Cranky’s daughter, a modest young married lass, claims not to have gotten a full look, although someone distinctly exclaimed “WOW!” Cranky admits getting a full look and can make two definitive statements. The gentleman was not circumcised. And the gentleman was, well, hung like a horse. We’re talking a world-class Johnson.
If he were a younger man, Cranky could well have left the encounter feeling extremely inadequate. But at his advanced age, his predominant response has been to marvel at what nature occasionally accomplishes.
So, if you’re ever biking or hiking the C&O to the east of the Paw Paw Tunnel, keep alert. There’s more to be seen than deer, turtles, and the occasional bear. One of nature’s wonders might be in the area.
All-in-all it was good time, but seriously hot. Also, after the first 25 or so miles each day, pretty brutal: tender crotch, pained back and neck. Cranky’s theory is that bikes are meant to be ridden no more than 30 miles at a time. At 30 miles, the body says, “enough of this.”
But still a good time. The Great Alleghany Passage and the C&O trails are kinda neat; not crowded, in places even empty. The C&O parallels the Potomac, so there’s always a flowing river close by. The C&O is also mostly shaded, a nice thing when the temperature is pushing 100.
An encounter, however, moved the trip from the just-good-time category to the memorable category. Cranky and his daughter encountered a nudist, a well-endowed nudist who was obviously proud of his equipment.
A number of campsites are along the C&O. They usually consist of a small clearing, sometimes a picnic table or two, and a pump that produces water from a well. On day two of the trip, a few miles east of the Paw Paw Tunnel, the travelers—Cranky and his daughter—stopped at one such campsite to replenish water. Just before the campsite was a small stone bridge. A couple—a man and a woman—were sitting on one of the bridge’s knee-high walls. The water pump was just beyond the end of the bridge. As Cranky and daughter pedaled past, Cranky got the distinct impression that the man was not clothed. He seemed to have a towel or tee shirt in his lap, but that was all.
But water was needed, so with a cheerful “we’re just gettin’ some water,” the travelers pulled up to the pump and proceeded with the task. After a few moments, the couple rose and began walking past the travelers to the grassy campsite. The woman had on a shirt and shorts. The man had on nothing and made little effort to cover himself with the towel or tee shirt he was carrying. Other than the man’s nudity, the couple weren’t threatening in any way.
The man appeared to be of South Asian, perhaps Indian, ethnicity. As he ambled down into the campsite, his ample brown buttocks bounced and rippled.
But the encounter had not reached its high point. The travelers finished replenishing their water and prepared to depart. As the travelers were mounting their bikes, the couple began returning to the bridge. The man was providing full frontal nudity. Cranky’s daughter, a modest young married lass, claims not to have gotten a full look, although someone distinctly exclaimed “WOW!” Cranky admits getting a full look and can make two definitive statements. The gentleman was not circumcised. And the gentleman was, well, hung like a horse. We’re talking a world-class Johnson.
If he were a younger man, Cranky could well have left the encounter feeling extremely inadequate. But at his advanced age, his predominant response has been to marvel at what nature occasionally accomplishes.
So, if you’re ever biking or hiking the C&O to the east of the Paw Paw Tunnel, keep alert. There’s more to be seen than deer, turtles, and the occasional bear. One of nature’s wonders might be in the area.
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