Restatement of the cool

Since I don't have a teevee, I seldom see President Obama, either in clips or extended appearances. From news reports and occasional audio clips, I have the sense that he's the most down-home politician in the country.

This video clip from The Washington Post confirms that. He really is a likeable guy.

Take heart

This is my favorite kind of innovation: The kind that requires no investment but careful thinking.

RtO has from time to time cited the most successful investment in history, the creation of the Black Ball Line just about two hundred years ago. And at one time, when I was a reporter, I used to award the Red Cellophane Prize for innovation that benefitted everybody but the innovator.

(It was modeled on a slick idea that a physician had some 40 years ago: Instead of requiring every hospital laboratory to purchase a $5,000 red-lens microscope for a certain kind of test, just wrap red cellophane around the 'scope that every lab already had. Unfortunately, that kind of thinking is not so common, so Red Cellophane Awards have not been made often.)

According to the New York Times

From 2003 to 2013, the death rate from coronary heart disease fell about 38 percent, according to the American Heart Association citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the primary federal agency that funds heart research, says this decline has been spurred by better control of cholesterol and blood pressure, reduced smoking rates, improved medical treatments — and faster care of people in the throes of a heart attack.

“It may not be long before cardiovascular disease is no longer the leading cause of death” in the United States, said Dr. Michael Lauer, the director of the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

 The red cellophane effect belongs to reducing the time to get people having an attack the correct treatment. For most attacks, that means within 90 minutes. It was achieved primarily by rethinking tasks: operational research.

The series is worth reading. This is why you should be reading newspapers (at least one).

My brother, an engineer, likes to tell the story about a car assembly plant where one in 25 new cars would not start. A new manager came in, called in the engineers and announced that from now on this plant would have 0 restarts.

The engineers nodded, took notes and started asking what budget the boss was allocating. This was a problem they could fix.

"No budget," said the boss.

The engineers protested. They were confident they could identify and correct the problem but it would take money.

It didn't.

When a car failed to start at the end of the assembly line, it was pushed into a repair shop nearby, where mechanics found the problem and corrected it.

The new boss moved that shop to the other side of the big parking lot. Faced with pushing thousands of cars hundreds of yards, the mechanics made sure the line workers understood how unhappy they would be if cars didn't start when finished.

Not all problems can be dealt with by the red cellophane approach, but all that can should be.

 

Color lines

The only winner in the Charleston shootings is Rachel Dolezal. Rachel who?

See, a few days ago she was on all the front pages, now she's gone.

Rap Brown said violence is as American as cherry pie. Changing your background is, too. Dolezal is not unusual in that.

Take Iron Eyes Cody, who portrayed an American Indian weeping about littering. He was born Espera Oscar de Corti in Louisiana; his parents were immigrants from Sicily.

Most of the changes are trivial or harmless. I knew a woman name Bodenstein who changed her name to Bodine because it "fitted in" better and was easier to handle for her clients. She was a real estate agent. Some are trivial but not entirely harmless. Janet Cooke, temporary holder of a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, claimed to speak French but didn't.

Possibly her padding her resume helped push a more honest applicant out of the picture at the Washington Post, but knowing French was not relevant to her job interviewing English-speaking Americans.

(Cooke's French claim was harmless enough but I had not realized until I looked up her Wikipedia bio that she sold her lies to the movies for $1.6 mil, or about what she would have earned working as a Post reporter between 1981 and 1996. Except she didn't have to work. So not so overall harmless after all.)

Others are very harmful indeed, like Scott Hanson who faked being a doctor.

All this by way of introduction. RtO has no opinion about Dolezal. But she did say something that was true if not relevant to her employment.

I cannot find a link but it was along the lines of: We are all from Africa, aren't we? That gives me a chance to link to what I consider the cleverest political song of the last several years, Roy Zimmerman's "Rift Valley Drifters."

Who says Hawaii is a liberal state?

Not RtO, what with its loyalty oaths and so on. And its drive to confiscate Hawaiian land on Oahu a few years ago when lease rents were about to reset for a bunch of condo owners.

Same thing -- coming land rent resets -- is happening in Manhattan, according to the New York Times.

Remarkably, no one seems to be suggesting that the government step in and transfer the appreciation to the lessees.

There is a wrinkle that, so far as I know, is not a possibility in Honolulu:

The expiration of a lease is particularly fraught for land-lease co-ops that were once rent-regulated apartment buildings. When their land leases expire, these co-ops will be dissolved and the apartments will once again become rent regulated, with the landowner becoming the landlord, Mr. Saft said. Unless new terms are negotiated, the co-op shareholders could become tenants of their former homes.

 London is another city where values have increased a lot and that has  lot of leasehold housing, some of the leases going back to the Middle Ages. But, according to a commenter on the Times' story, in London the lessee can demand that the lessor sell, under court-supervised valuation.

Calling Peter Savio.

Gummint debt

Government debt, engine of prosperity

Governments have accumulated debts probably ever since there was a government, and -- as Paul Krugman writes in this column -- it is an unshakeable belief of rightwingers that this is a BAD THING, despite evidence to the contrary.

The prime example is England, which institutionalized its debt in 1694 (when the Bank of England was organized for the purpose of buying government bonds), touching off the greatest economic expansion in history.

Not many Americans know that, but you'd think some few Englishmen would, and that a Chancellor of the Exchequer (treasury secretary) would, for sure. But, as so often happens when you expect people to know obvious stuff (and otherwise there'd be no need for a blog called Restating the Obvious), they don't:

 In particular, one important factor in the recent Conservative election triumph was the way Britain’s news media told voters, again and again, that excessive government spending under Labour caused the financial crisis.

It takes almost no homework to show that this claim is absurd on multiple levels. For one thing, the financial crisis was global; did Gordon Brown’s alleged overspending cause the housing busts in Florida and Spain? For another, all these claims of irresponsibility involve rewriting history, because on the eve of crisis nobody thought Britain was being profligate: debt was low by historical standards and the deficit fairly small. Finally, Britain’s supposedly disastrous fiscal position has never worried the markets, which have remained happy to buy British bonds despite historically low yields.

Nonetheless, that’s the story, generally reported not as opinion but as fact. And the really bad news is that Britain’s leaders seem to believe their own propaganda. On Wednesday, George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer and the architect of the government’s austerity policies, announced his intention to make these policies permanent. Britain, he said, should have a law requiring that the government run a budget surplus — with current revenue paying for all spending, including investment outlays — when the economy is growing.

It’s a remarkable proposal, and I mean that in the worst way.

Readers who have been here for a while will remember that the globalization of the crash was a disproof of the rightwing claim that that Community Reinvestment Act caused our crash.  Remarkably, that idea is still being shopped and -- one supposes -- bought by the less reflective part of the citizenry that reads political statements.

RtO has been somewhat distracted by the covey of idiots vying for the rightwing vote in the coming elections and had almost forgotten how stubbornly the rightwing clings to its delusions. But the recent exchange between Jamie Dimon, criminal banker, and Senator Elizabeth Warren reminds us that the delusions are (as Krugman says) ineradicable.

Your tax dollars at work

Blowing up dead mooses.

Bad banana news

Sayonara?

According to Bloomberg News, a new plague is sweeping bananadom, and this time there's no hope.

Well, let's hope it's overstated. There was a time, not so long ago, when Hawaii was almost in a panic about banana bunchy top virus, for which there was also no hope. But we still get some apple bananas. They usually cost more than imported Cavendishes, but most people think they taste better.