The New York Times has the article Hillary Clinton, in Roosevelt Island Speech, Pledges to Close Income Gap.

I am dying to get my hands on a video of her full speech. I’ll keep looking. As “the newspaper of record”, you’d think that the NYT could give you a link to the full speech rather than to 50 seconds of it.

I had an epiphany when I read one quote.

Allison Moore, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, called the speech “chock-full of hypocritical attacks, partisan rhetoric and ideas from the past that led to a sluggish economy.”

To a Republican, a sluggish economy means that the top 1% didn’t get all the income growth. Sadly, the top 1% had to share the income growth with others in the economy in previous “sluggish growth” periods. If you look at the current meteoric rise of the economy, the upper 1% got almost all of it, and the bottom 99% got almost none of it. Now that’s economic growth as Republicans like to see it. If you are in the bottom 99%, why aren’t you happy for the good fortune of the top 1%? Are you envious of their success? Snap out of it, and hew to the Republican propaganda machine.

As for the hypocrisy, I will provide the “evidence” in a subsequent post, Why has President Obama been willing to spend so much political capital on the Trans Pacific Partnership?

The hypocrisy would be if Hillary Clinton still believes that what her husband’s administration did on killing regulation was a good thing. Those actions were strongly desired by Republicans and detested by many Democrats at that time. No wonder a Republican spokesperson would call it hypocrisy if Hillary Clinton now denounces the very policies that made the economy soar for the 1%, and dive for the 99%.

Why won’t any lame stream media interviewer pose the following question to Hillary Clinton? “Here is an issue that you are going to have to confront. You now say that you want policies that are diametrically opposite of some of what your husband did in his administration. Can you explain to us what you think of those past policies in light of what you propose now?” To the degree that she ducks and weaves as opposed to making a straightforward response has a lot to do with whether I could ever vote for her were she to become the Democratic nominee.

The answer as to why the lame stream media reporters won’t ask this question is that their bosses wouldn’t like the premise and probably would not like the answer no matter how it was couched.

If the question were posed to Bernie Sanders as to what Hillary thinks about this, I can imagine him saying, “Now that is an excellent question for you to pose directly to Hillary Clinton. Why don’t you ask it? Are you too chicken?” I bet the reporters would find a way to duck that challenge. They want Bernie Sanders to do their job for them, and yes, they are too chicken to do it themselves.

A Facebook discussion motivated me to do some research. I found the paper The Electron and the Bit by Paul Penfield, Jr. I had Penfield as a professor in one of the courses I took in college. For a few summers, he also worked as a consultant for our group at Digital Equipment Corporation.

What brought me to this paper was an interest in nationally sponsored education initiatives. Section “IV. Engineering Science” is relevant here.

Gordon Brown, among others, realized what was wrong. The problem was that the necessary science was not known, or at least was not in a form accessible to engineers. He agreed with Dugald Jackson that engineers must be able to apply known techniques and develop new techniques using known science. But he went further, saying that at least some of them should also be able to extend the relevant sciences in ways required by engineering. Brown called such activities “engineering science.” He concluded that changes in the educational programs were needed.

In Brown’s view, the science should be taught in the first years, followed by contemporary technology based on the science. Specialization and theses would come in the senior year. The best students would be encouraged to enter an expanded doctoral program, which would produce engineers able to extend engineering science. He served on a department curriculum committee and rallied support for these views. When he became department head in 1952, he immediately instituted a curriculum review to identify the underlying sciences in all areas, and relate them to engineering techniques. Six undergraduate textbooks, called the “Green Books” after the color of their covers, were written during the late 1950s.

I was the beneficiary of this change in curriculum. More directly I benefited from the effort Penfield describes next.

The first major test of this engineering-science approach was provided by semiconductor circuits. The transistor was invented in 1947; circuit applications began in the 1950s; the integrated circuit came along in 1960. Universities had to include transistors and integrated circuits in their undergraduate programs. But how? Should devices be taught in terms of terminal characteristics or the internal physics? What if fields of science not previously thought relevant were needed? Could nonlinear circuits be covered? How much solid-state physics would be required?

MIT led the way in answering these questions. In the fall of 1960 Richard B. Adler and Campbell L. Searle organized the Semiconductor Electronics Education Committee (SEEC). By 1966, 31 people from nine universities and six companies produced seven coordinated textbooks and related curricular material, aimed at third-year and fourth-year electrical engineering students. The books featured more solid-state physics than had ever before been used in teaching electronics. In the books, semiconductor-device models were derived from the solid-state physics, and they in turn were used in transistor circuits.

SEEC was a triumph of engineering science, with a substantial, lasting impact. The basic ideas influenced many textbooks written in subsequent years. The approaches are still used in EE education throughout the world, even though the SEEC books themselves can no longer claim contemporary relevance because they were never updated to cover integrated circuits, MOS devices, or much on digital circuits.

The books listed in The MIT Semiconductor Electronics Education Committee Series were influential on my career. I still have some of the books in the series.

At least half of my professional career was directly related to software that simulated integrated circuits and used models of transistors that were the descendants of those described in these books. The other half of my career still involved software related to simulating integrated circuits, just not quite as intimately connected to the models of transistors.

I had a freshman adviser who tried to assure me that I didn’t have to obsess over picking a major. He said that after a few years out of college I wouldn’t be using the stuff I learned at M.I.T. anyway. How wrong he was about the use of what I learned. He was right about not obsessing over choosing a major.

It is about time to remind people of my previous post The S Word: A Short History Of An American Tradition … Socialism.

In a discussion on Nancy Weinberg’s Facebook post, Mary Ellen Palermo and I went round and round on rationalizations for having settled on Hillary Clinton as a preferred candidate. I think we finally got to the issue.

Democratic Socialist is what he calls himself. There is no party of this name that I am aware of in the United States. Even if there were some obscure party of that name, I don’t think you can connect Bernie Sanders to it. But we are making progress, since you now have identified what ticks you off about Sanders. Rather than cower from a label and try to pretend he goes by a label that fits your preconceived notions of what labels are acceptable, he is going to educate you on what his label means.

You can do some of that work yourself by reading “The S Word ” book. I am pretty sure you will be surprised to read some of the historical facts that have been purposely hidden from you.

This may be the first time you will be confronted by the power of the forces against which progressives have been fighting, even when they didn’t realize the exact nature of these forces.

The irony of the use of the word socialist, and the irony of so many Americans having been propagandized into thinking this is a dirty word is the large majorities of people who agree with the political positions that Bernie takes as a result of his being a socialist.

June 13, 2015

I got unlazy and did the research I should have. Here is the Democratic Socialists of America web site.

We are a political and activist organization, not a party;

The Daily Kos has the Cartoon: Attack of the 14 year old black girl.

Coming soon from McKinney Texas Police Productions, it’s the next summer horror science fiction cop flick, Attack of the 14 Year Old Black Girl! A frightening teen girl in a bikini terrorizes the police force of a small Texas suburb, making them respond with excessive force and brutality reserved only for the worst of America’s swimming thugs! Who will protect our nation’s pool parties from this monster? Rated R for Racist! Featuring Emma Stone as the Asian Neighbor.

The Wall Street Journal blog has the post De Blasio to Skip Clinton Rally, Praises Rival Sanders.

In April, Mr. de Blasio said in an interview on NBC that he wouldn’t endorse her “until I see an actual vision of where they want to go.”

“She’s a tremendous public servant,” he told NBC. “I think she is one of the most qualified people to ever run for this office. And by the way, thoroughly vetted, we can say that. But we need to see the substance.”

Much if not most of what Hillary Clinton says is laudable. The issue is all about what she refuses to say or to talk about.

Thanks for Nacy Weinberg for posting this on her Facebook timeline.

John Oliver did a fantastic routine in the video Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Infrastructure (HBO).

America’s crumbling infrastructure: It’s not a sexy problem, but it is a scary one.

The one mistake that John Oliver makes along with other politicians is to think that the rebuilding of infrastructure needs tax funding. The building, rebuilding, and maintenance of our infrastructure requires physical and human assets to accomplish. The creation of the money to fund this requires a few keystrokes on a computer by someone at The Federal Reserve bank.

As long as the real assets are freely available to be bought with U.S. currency, then there is nothing stopping us but politicians and a misinformed public.

Naked Capitalism has the article Why the Consensus Process Has a Poor Track Record in Activist Movements.

If the forty-year persistence of consensus has been a matter of faith, surely the time has now come for apostasy. Piety and habit are bad reasons to keep using a process whose benefits are more notional than real. Outside of small-group settings, consensus process is unwieldy, off-putting, tiresome, and ineffective. Many inclusive, accountable alternative methods are available for making decisions democratically. If we want to change the world, let’s pick ones that work.

The article is short on listing the techniques that work, but we shouldn’t fault the article for that. It is valuable to be able to see a problem that others have not seen so well, end explain its origins and symptoms. Coming up with definitive and workable solutions to these problems is a much rarer talent than is the already rare talent of identifying a problem few others can see. In other words it is too much to expect that everyone who can articulate a problem can also find a solution to it.

Naked Capitalism has the article People and Power – The Technology Threat featuring an Al Jazeera documentary. If me telling you the source of the documentary puts you off, then it is your loss, not theirs. It is time to wake up about the huge amount of intelligence that resides in the Arab world and the media organizations that they control.

When the talk of what historic waves of technology innovation did to jobs before, everybody in this documentary leaves out one very important piece of history. The benefits of more jobs at better wages did not happen automatically in any of the previous industrial revolutions. The people, unions, and governments all took actions to make sure that the gains from these revolutions were not concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few. We need to be thinking of how this problem is going to be solved this time around. Did anyone think of asking Watson for a suggestion on how to fix the problem?

I’d hate to see people come to the conclusion that we must shut technology down to save the world. The real point is that we must learn what social/political actions we must take so that the most people get the most benefits out of this great new technology. We can’t leave it to the markets to solve the distribution problem. Any politician who does not actively address this issue is not one that we need to elect in the next few decades.

We need to test each politician to see if that person has the vision to see the problem and to imagine ways to begin to address the problem. Another test might be that any politician who claims to have all the answers we need about this problem is not one who is either telling the truth or one who understands the depth and breadth of the problem.

I don’t think I can remind you enough of one of the quotes on my quotes page.

Scott Santense – posted here June 3, 2015 – source

If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for life. If you build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?”

The New York Times has the article What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie? by Gary Taubes Published: July 7, 2002. Note that this was published 13 years before the article in a previous post Four Decades of the Wrong Dietary Advice Has Paved the Way for the Diabetes Epidemic: Time to Change Course.

As I was reading The New York Times article I was wondering if they cribbed their material from the article of my previous post, and then I reminded myself which article came first.

After 20 years steeped in a low-fat paradigm, I find it hard to see the nutritional world any other way. I have learned that low-fat diets fail in clinical trials and in real life, and they certainly have failed in my life. I have read the papers suggesting that 20 years of low-fat recommendations have not managed to lower the incidence of heart disease in this country, and may have led instead to the steep increase in obesity and Type 2 diabetes. I have interviewed researchers whose computer models have calculated that cutting back on the saturated fats in my diet to the levels recommended by the American Heart Association would not add more than a few months to my life, if that. I have even lost considerable weight with relative ease by giving up carbohydrates on my test diet, and yet I can look down at my eggs and sausage and still imagine the imminent onset of heart disease and obesity, the latter assuredly to be caused by some bizarre rebound phenomena the likes of which science has not yet begun to describe. The fact that Atkins himself has had heart trouble recently does not ease my anxiety, despite his assurance that it is not diet-related.

This perfectly describes my ambivalence at trying out the low-carb diet. Our reason for trying it was mainly about blood sugar test results that showed our blood sugars to be higher than what our Doctor wanted to see. The diet seems to have immediately brought our blood sugar levels down to an acceptable range. The fact that we also lost weight was not our primary motive, but had also been suggested by our Doctor.

I will be getting a dietary consultation to see what a dietician thinks about this issue some 13 years after The New York Times article was written.

Thanks to Mary and Andy A. for sending me the link to the NYT article.