THE ONES WE DON'T KNOW WE DON'T KNOW (Biographical)

I've always been impressed by the sayings of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfiled, particularly

From Department of Defense news briefing, February 12, 2002.

• Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

I've frequently puzzled over the meaning of "the ones we don't know we don't know." But just this past week, I have twice experienced the truth of this statement. A few nights ago we were invited to a dinner at a home I had been to several times before in a large subdivision with a complex layout but hadn't been to the home in some time. Naturally having been there several times, I thought I remembered how to get there, but, after wandering around the subdivision for quite awhile, we decided to go to the club house, that we had seen, and ask directions. So I didn't know that I didn't know how to find the home. Again just today, we were going after church with a group, but separately, to a restaurant that I had passed many times; however, I turned right rather than left at an important intersection. After driving some distance going the wrong way, I turned back the way we had come, and, after going some distance passed the intersection where we made the wrong turn, we came upon the restaurant we were looking for. Once again I didn't know that I didn't know how to find the restaurant.

As Rumsfeld says, ...it is the latter category [unknown unknowns] that tend to be the difficult ones.

LIBYA: WHY ARE WE THERE?

Recently I wrote a piece called Snake Bit in which I wrote that I hoped Presidnet Obama would pull an Eisenhower - i.e. After fomenting the Hungarian uprising, just walk away from it (http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2011/03/snake-bit.html). Pulling an Eisenhower, however, was more difficult because President Obama said that Qaddafi must go. To quote from Snake Bit: I think that it was criticism of our president for not taking sides earlier in the Egypt rebellion that got him to say that Qaddafi must go. And the Tunisian uprising was successful also.

It seems to me that Qaddafi has been behaving himself pretty well in recent years. He gave up trying to get nuclear armaments after a promise that we would not seek regime change in Libya. I haven't heard that he had been playing cute with oil. Should we be surprised that he wanted to put down an armed insurrection in his country?

The main excuse for going into Libya with airpower is to save lives of those in East Libya. Though it is uneven, liberals do have a feeling for helping revolutionaries against dictatorial regimes - witness what was an unpopular Kosovo War by President Clinton. Although it is tempting to think that oil has something to do with our participation in the Libyan War, it very well could be that humanitarian considerations are responsible. After all, oil matters were not a consideration in the Kosovo War.

The Kosovo War is also interesting in that it is the only war I know about that was won by air power alone, without American casualties, and perhaps Obama was led to believe the same can be done in Libya. After all, Sec. Clinton is in the Obama administration. There is a difference, however. In Kosovo there was a no fly zone, and, in addition, we set about destroying the infrastructure of the county, in particular destroying bridges to prevent the advance of tanks while also harming communication of all types throughout Serbia. But is the terrain in Libya conducive to regime change by destroying infrastructure? There was some inkling that this may be the approach because of news about the destruction oil depot.

Our involvement in the Libyan war seems to be cemented because President Obama reiterated that Qaddafi must go. Now it would appear that we are in it to the end, apparently doing whatever it takes to depose the dictator. But even if we were in it to protect the East Libyan revolutionaries from the Qaddafi regime, it would appear we, or someone, would be involved for a long time. Sort of like the Clinton low-level war in Iraq in the 1990s with a no fly zone to protect the Kurds from the Iraqi dictatorship (and what was called by some "fly by shootings") In theory the long involvement need not necessarily be us but might be some combination of the Brutish and French.

Though at present we do not know the outcome of the Libyan War, one hopes it does not do for Obama what the failed rescue in the desert (Operation Iron Claw) did for President Carter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Claw) by participating in his defeat for reelection. On the other hand, Bush-43 never paid a political price for neither capturing or killing Osama bin Laden as he promised to do. I guess we will just have to see.

WORK AS A TEENAGER IN THE 1940s (Biography)

As a child, living in St. Paul, MN,to make some money, teenagers had snow shoveling, lawn mowing and trimming, changing screens to storm windows in the fall and storm windows to screens in the spring, including washing the windows at the same time. Sometimes you could earn a little by running errands for people or for caddying at the local golf course. Lawn mowing was the most profitable. All this was very competitive, not from the standpoint of what you would charge to do a job particularly, but who could get to the job first. I didn't mind mowing lawns but I hated trimming for some reason. Caddying was heavy work as most golfers at that time didn't use pull carts for the bags. You had to carry them by a strap over your shoulder. Sometimes they wanted you to take two bags, one for each shoulder. You got paid more, but it was awfully heavy work for me. My memory may be faulty, but I think you got $3 for one bag and $5 for two for 18 holes, actually not bad at that time for 3 or 4 hours work. Of course you could do three or four lawns over the same time and would probably earn more.

One of the residents in our neighborhood was a man by the name of Herbert Beutow who was Treasurer of 3M (as it is now called) who paid the best by far. In a snow fall there was a great rush among us teenagers to see who could get to the Beutow's first to shovel the walks. He paid $5 when you were lucky to get $2 from anyone else. Of course the Beutow lawn mowing was a coveted job too. And they gave out whole candy bars for Halloween, when others might give you a couple Hershey kisses. He eventually became Executive Vice President and later CEO of 3M and helped me get summer jobs at the 3M factories (tape slitting and abrasive belts) for three summers. The tape comes out of the tape factory in "jumbos" that might weigh as much as a ton and had to be slit down to usable size. You might run off a hundred commercial-sized tapes at a crack. The tape slitting plant ran three shifts: the Day Shift from 7:00 AM until 3:00 PM, the Swing shift from 3:00 PM to 11:00 PM, and the Graveyard Shift from 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM. You rotated every week from one shift to another, and it played hob on your system. In abrasive belts (sandpaper), we just cut belts from big jumbos of sandpaper and glued the abrasive belts together in a big hot press. Some of these belts were very large and used in the automobile industry or furniture making factories.

Working in tape slitting one summer when I was 20, there were tapes that had sticky sides after slitting so they were sprayed to make a plastic coating on them. The business was not good for 3M that summer,and all the youth on summer jobs were let go but me because I was the only one who enjoyed working in the spray room. I liked it because I was having sinus trouble that summer and the volatile solvent for the plastic cleared my sinuses, so I could breath through my nose. I was also recovering from a collapsed lung so I appreciated light work.

The summer after my senior year in high school, I couldn't get work at 3M so I got a job delivering groceries and stocking shelves for a grocery store. I think the name of the store was C.J Sonnen and Son. Not many grocery stores delivered groceries so they had a lot of business. Not surprisingly, many people who ordered groceries lived in second and third floor walk-ups, and you had to carry the folding grocery boxes loaded with canned good and bottles of milk up to the apartment. It could take an hour or so to make a full delivery round to quite a few houses so the people at the end got warm milk in the summer. Curiously some people that would complain would be ignored, but others got quick attention and my route would be changed to get to them early in the delivery round. I'm not sure but perhaps these "important" customers were the bigger customers. I also had to drag such things as 100 lb sacks of potatoes up steps to the main floor of the grocery and stock the shelves. The sacks of potatoes were the worst, but I also had to bring up cases of canned goods,sugar and flour. I worked over 50 hrs a week, as I recall, including Saturdays and got 55 cents an hour for this and no overtime. The middle aged man who got the fresh produce such as lettuce, celery, etc. early every morning and took care of stocking vegetables got paid only 50 cents an hour. I felt bad about that.

Also possible was short-time work during the canning season. You could get a job with Green Giant for maybe two weeks working with such things as corn and peas. I did corn one summer. There was this conveyor belt that brought the corn in cobs from the delivery trucks. My job was to pull back the husks and cut out any wormy parts. There were two kinds of worms: one was the simply the large corn worm and the other was smaller called the corn borer. Well the corn was delivered pretty fast on the belt, and, although there were two of us, quite a few corn cobs got passed us without the worm search. I wouldn't eat canned creamed corn for more than a decade after that, though there was no charge for the extra protein. And of course, everything was cooked and sterilized by the time you bought it.

Another job that lasted for four weeks (I don't recall why it was just four weeks, but maybe I was a fill in for regulars on vacation.) was with the meat packer Rath in south St. Paul. I did miscellaneous things, mainly cleanup, but I saw sausage being made and wouldn't eat sausage for years afterword either.

Then there was one job that lasted less than half a day. It was with a railroad, and we were to walk along the side of tracks and cut the weeds down with a big scythe. There were three of us that were to walk abreast, but the other two were older men. Well, I was the middle syther, and I was just scything away when I stopped briefly and looked back. The two old men were about half a block behind. The straw boss came up to me and told me to slow down. I suggested that the old men should speed up whereupon the straw boss called me a punk kid and I should go draw my pay. That was that.

DISAPPEARING WORDS

English is an evolving language and words come and go. Here are some that are going or all but gone:

Child, children: all but replaced by kid and kids. Move to a shorter, more gutteral word. Generations of parents have faught a losing battle to keep the words child and children as kids are baby sheep.

But not all changes are shorter, consider:

Check which is all but replaced by double check. In present usage double check means just check once. When someone today says "I'll double check that." they don't mean they will check it twice, just once. Apparently to check is not a strong enough word so it is replaced by double check. this follows our advertising rich vocabulary where nothing is normal size but must be Large, or Super, or Giant size.

Fewer: Fewer is all but replace by less. It used to be that things you could count, you would use fewer (e.g fewer dollars) and for things you couldn't count you use less (e.g. less money), but hardly anyone uses fewer any more, just less.

This is not the disappearance of words, but possibly a related subject of changes in clothing. I am noticing that more and more women are wearing trousers rather than dresses. Dresses are not nearly gone but seem to be headed that way.

SNAKE BIT

President Obama must feel snake bit. First he opens up drilling on the Atlantic shelf of the U.S. and then BP screws it up by creating a disaster in the Gulf. Then he seems to seriously consider enlarging the U.S. nuclear power capabilities, and nature screws it up by the Japan super earthquake of 2011.

I think that it was criticism of our president for not taking sides earlier in the Egypt rebellion that got him to say that Qaddafi must go. And the Tunisian uprising was successful also. And now it looks like Qaddafi may stay. As George Will has said, President Obama is doing as well as can be expected in a situation over which he has no control. Still I have this peculiar feeling that "Here We Go Again." I hope it is wrong.

I recall the Hungarian uprising of 1958 that we helped foment. When the Soviets came in to quell the uprising, I was sure it would be nuclear war. After all, we had urged them to do it. We couldn't abandon them now. I never thought that President Eisenhower would just say something like, "Too bad, boys" and abandon them to their fate. Perhaps Libya should be Hungarian Uprising II with the U.S. doing an Eisenhower.

THE PROBLEM WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT STICKING WITHIN ITS REVENUES

Senator Rand Paul says the $2.1627 trillion of Federal revenues for FY 2010 is plenty of government. Assuming that the FY 2012 Federal revenues are the same as in 2010, the military/security budget of FY 2012 of $1.2192 trillion* would be 56.4% of the Federal revenues, leaving only $0.9437 trillion ($943.7 billion) to fund the rest of the government. Even of this, about $290 billion of non-military/security interest payments on the Federal debt must be taken from the $943.7 billion leaving only $654.6 billion to fund the entire rest of the government. This sum must be used to pay entitlements (e.g. Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security) which in FY 2010 totaled $700.7 billion for Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid totaled $793 billion with Medicare being about 2/3rd of that total and Medicaid being 1/3rd.** Thus Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid payments by themselves massively exceed the $654.6 billion available for non-defense/security spending. The Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid budgets together total $1.4937 trillion or 69.1% of the $2.1627 trillion of Federal revenues, even a larger percentage than the military/security budget. The military/security and entitlement budgets together total 125.4% of the 2010 revenues, greatly exceeding the revenues available by about $550 billion. Thus nothing is available for the government as we know it, i.e. most of the discretionary budget (Departments of State, Treasury, Justice, Agriculture, Energy, Education, Interior, Commerce, National Park Service, etc. and the Administrations of EPA, NASA, etc., and such Authorities as the Tennessee Valley and Bonneville, etc. excluding the military/security budget). You could shut all these parts of the government down completely, and you would still run a deficit of about $550 billion.

To the credit of Rand Paul, he would not take Military/Security spending off the table for consideration of budget cuts though my understanding is that current plans do take them off the table; however he would not touch Social Security.*** The problem is caused to a significant extent in that Federal revenues are at a 60 year low as a percentage of GDP.**** I don’t see how we can balance the budget without tax increases in addition to budget cuts plus a rapidly increasing economy. And the budget cuts must be carefully made as they could easily push us into a recession or worse through large cuts in Federal and contractor employees and termination of contracts, many of which don’t have release clauses so will have to be paid anyway. This was true, for example, when President Obama terminated the manned missions to the moon project of NASA, though it does save follow-on contracts. * http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-hellman/national-security-budget_b_829676.html.

Consider an article by charliebonds, post 353603, "2012 Military Budget 56.4% of Available" in Investment Analysis Clubs/Macro Economic Trends And Risks, 6 March 2011: For 2012, the White House has requested $558 billion for the Pentagon’s annual "base" budget, plus an additional $118 billion to fund military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. At $676 billion, that’s already nothing to sneeze at, but it’s just the barest of beginnings when it comes to what American taxpayers will actually spend on national security. Think of it as the gigantic tip of a humongous iceberg. To get closer to a real figure, it’s necessary to start peeking at other parts of the federal budget where so many other pots of security spending are squirreled away. Missing from the Pentagon’s budget request, for example, is an additional $19.3 billion for nuclear-weapons-related activities like making sure our current stockpile of warheads will work as expected and cleaning up the waste created by seven decades of developing and producing them. That money, however, officially falls in the province of the Department of Energy. And then, don’t forget an additional $7.8 billion that the Pentagon lumps into a "miscellaneous" category -- a kind of department of chump change -- that is included in neither its base budget nor those war-fighting funds. So, even though we’re barely started, we’ve already hit a total official FY 2012 Pentagon budget request of: $703.1 billion dollars. Not usually included in national security spending are hundreds of billions of dollars that American taxpayers are asked to spend to pay for past wars, and to support our current and future national security strategy. For starters, that $117.8 billion war-funding request for the Department of Defense doesn’t include certain actual "war-related fighting" costs. Take, for instance, the counterterrorism activities of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. For the first time, just as with the Pentagon budget, the FY 2012 request divides what’s called "International Affairs" in two: that is, into an annual "base" budget as well as funding for "Overseas Contingency Operations" related to Iraq and Afghanistan. (In the Bush years, these used to be called the Global War on Terror.) The State Department’s contribution? $8.7 billion. That brings the grand but very partial total so far to: $711.8 billion. The White House has also requested $71.6 billion for a post-2001 category called "homeland security" -- of which $18.1 billion is funded through the Department of Defense. The remaining $53.5 billion goes through various other federal accounts, including the Department of Homeland Security ($37 billion), the Department of Health and Human Services ($4.6 billion), and the Department of Justice ($4.6 billion). All of it is, however, national security funding, which brings our total to: $765.3 billion. The U.S. intelligence budget was technically classified prior to 2007, although at roughly $40 billion annually, it was considered one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington. Since then, as a result of recommendations by the 9/11 Commission, Congress has required that the government reveal the total amount spent on intelligence work related to the National Intelligence Program (NIP). This work done by federal agencies like the CIA and the National Security Agency consists of keeping an eye on and trying to understand what other nations are doing and thinking, as well as a broad range of "covert operations" such as those being conducted in Pakistan. In this area, we won’t have figures until FY 2012 ends. The latest NIP funding figure we do have is $53.1 billion for FY 2010. There’s little question that the FY 2012 figure will be higher, but let’s be safe and stick with what we know. (Keep in mind that the government spends plenty more on "intelligence." Additional funds for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP), however, are already included in the Pentagon’s 2012 base budget and war-fighting supplemental, though we don’t know what they are. The FY 2010 funding for MIP, again the latest figure available, was $27 billion.) In any case, add that $53.1 billion and we’re at: $818.4 billion. Veterans programs are an important part of the national security budget with the projected funding figure for 2012 being $129.3 billion. Of this, $59 billion is for veterans’ hospital and medical care, $70.3 billion for disability pensions and education programs. This category of national security funding has been growing rapidly in recent years because of the soaring medical-care needs of veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars. According to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, by 2020 total funding for health-care services for veterans will have risen another 45%-75%. In the meantime, for 2012 we’ve reached: $947.7 billion. If you include the part of the foreign affairs budget not directly related to U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other counterterrorism operations, you have an additional $18 billion in direct security spending. Of this, $6.6 billion is for military aid to foreign countries, while almost $2 billion goes for "international peacekeeping" operations. A further $709 million has been designated for countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, combating terrorism, and clearing landmines planted in regional conflicts around the globe. This leaves us at: $965.7 billion. As with all federal retirees, U.S. military retirees and former civilian Department of Defense employees receive pension benefits from the government. The 2012 figure is $48.5 billion for military personnel, $20 billion for those civilian employees, which means we’ve now hit: $1,034.2 billion. (Yes, that’s $1.03 trillion!) When the federal government lacks sufficient funds to pay all of its obligations, it borrows. Each year, it must pay the interest on this debt which, for FY 2012, is projected at $474.1 billion. The National Priorities Project calculates that 39 percent of that, or $185 billion, comes from borrowing related to past Pentagon spending. Add it all together, and the grand total for the known national security budget of the United States is: $1,219.2 billion. ** charliebonds post # 353603 in Investment Ananlysis Clubs/Macro Ecomonic Trends And Risks of Motley Fool, "Due to declining tax-receipts, increasing debt-service costs, etc., it is unlikely that US revenues in 2012 will be higher than 2010. In fact, it is unlikely they will even be the same. But let’s give the tax-collectors the benefit of doubt and say that revenues for the US Government in 2012 will be $2.1627 trillion. Therefore, the proposed military/security/ war budget of $1.2192 trillion will be 56.4% of total, available revenues." 

**http://www.bankruptingamerica.org/tag/social-security/ (Scroll down to Budget Process: Perception vs. Reality)
*** http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/01/detailed-look-rand-paul-spending-bill He would cut the Federal budget by $500 billion.
**** http://www.suntimes.com/business/3706985-420/taxes-too-high-theyre-actually-at-60-year-low.html