Douglas L. Ross - My Personal Reflections

You just have to love Dr. John Malone. The guy's a certified genius but also a "what you see is what you get" straight-shooting kind of guy. His Ph.D. is from Johns Hopkins, BA is science from Yale, worth $2.3 billion (according to Forbes, but probably way low because they just couldn't find all of it). He ran TCI (America's largest Cable company) and sold it to ATT for $54 billion. He's the kind of person that you could just sit and listen to for hours. He's so logical, well informed and well spoken. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal here's a few nuggets from what he had to say... (I agree with him about Obama) WSJ: What are the biggest risks for Liberty right now? Mr. Malone: I think the biggest concern I have for the next year or two would be on the retail side, because of the consumer sentiment and the macro conditions. The concerns really tend to be much more macro: Is America going to make it, rather than are we going to make it?...

This Wall Street Journal article Climate Change and Open Science - WSJ .com made the right basic point about liberal hypocrisy in the Climate Change debate, but disappointingly it failed to cite the best sources of real information from an unbiased scientific point of view. I believe that source is Dr. S. Fred Singer & Dr. Craig D. Idso , from the Science and Environmental Policy Project and Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, who coauthored "Climate Change Reconsidered; The Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change" published in 2009. In this book, the petition letter shown here from Dr. Frederick Seitz ( Ph . D. Physics) President Emeritus of Rockefeller University was published. Dr. Seitz circulated this letter: urging fellow academics with qualifications in the physical sciences to sign the petition at http://www.petitionproject.com/ and thereby acknowledge their agreement with this statement in the petition: Accor...

My friend Bill Loughrey has written a new book entitled Political Will that modestly attempts to answer the questions; "how America became great, what went wrong, and how to fix it?" I haven't finished reading the book yet, but I tip my hat to Bill for even trying to answer these great questions. I'll do a review when I finish it.

Photographer David Bergman took this amazing photo at President Obama's inauguration with the GigaPan system. GigaPan uses a mechanical device called the Gigapan Epic plus an ordinary digital camera to take overlapping images (~220 in this case) and seamlessly stitch them together via special software to make one giant, high-resolution photo (this Obama inauguration photo apparently has 1.57 gigapixel resolution). On the GigaPan.org website it's possible to pan/zoom the photo to an amazing degree of detail. For instance, some ordinary people on the Mall will be able to identify themselves in this picture and show that they were there on January 20, 2009. I believe the software which stitches the photos together involves fractal geometry technology similar to that which astronomers use to piece together images of the sky. Bergman is selling prints of this photo here for ~$90+ and if I had been there I would deifintely buy one.

Is it just me or does this sound like an economic "Mission Accomplished?"

I thought President Obama's inaugural speech was a little disappointing when read for substance from afar, although I can imagine that it might have seemed more uplifting in person. I think the Wall Street Journal got it right in their pre -inaugural " The Opacity of Hope " editorial as they concluded: "The complicated nature of our world means that every modern Presidency is to some extent a leap into the unknown. Mr. Obama's meteoric rise makes him a bigger leap than most. We don't know if he is a genuine man of the left, or a more traditional pragmatist. The audacity of our hope is that as President he will use his considerable talents to return his party to the policies of growth, opportunity and the vigorous defense of U.S. interests that marked it the last time the country had such great expectations for a Democratic President -- under JFK." To me, Obama didn't start well with his first official act being this rather vague and plainly accusa...

On my flight home this week by coincidence I was seated by a young single black woman about 30 years old who worked for a big retail bank (which isn't going under) and whose job is still secure. She did not have a Masters degree but was obviously intelligent and ambitious (she was quite deliberately networking me and trying to set me up as a future contact that might work to her advantage). In a moment of candor that she might have regretted later, she revealed to me that she had recently purchased her first home and gave me a few more details than I would have normally expected. It was an 1800 square foot starter place in a nice new suburban sub-division for about $150k. She had put down about 20% and had a fixed rate mortgage at about 6.3%. With taxes and insurance, that made the payment about $1000 per month and that was apparently just a little more than her salary would justify. But she was making it ok . It turns out that she was revealing this to me because she had two thin...

In this recent blog post I said that I felt like we have a chance to actually have a President that we can be proud of no matter who won, McCain or Obama. I still feel that way in principle, so now we'll see if I was right. Despite the fact that I voted for McCain and I still think he was the better man, I join McCain in wishing President-elect Obama the very best. I pray especially that Obama and the country will be spared the kind of unprecedented trauma, through no fault of our own, that plagued President Bush from the outset. Personally, I don't really care that much about Obama's race but I can understand the sense of pride that most African-Americans have in this accomplishment. It's worth a moment of celebration, but very soon Obama will need to move on and show that he deserved it, not just from a misguided sense of entitlement that likely got him elected in the first place, but because he can lead us in sensible directions that we'll actually be proud of...

My son asked me what I thought about Sarah Palin for Vice President? I realized that I wasn't sure what I thought about it. So I thought about it. My first reaction was negative. Mainly, I questioned whether she really had the necessary experience to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency. But that's really an issue that's being framed unfairly by a lot of false dichotomies from the liberal left who simply don't like her values or fear her popular appeal from the great-unwashed. For example, take Matt Damon's "finger on the trigger" question implying that someone that's dumb enough to have religious faith and to believe in a God's creation can't be trusted to have their finger on the trigger. When you really think about that you quickly realize that it rules out just about every President or Vice-President we've ever had. And besides that, the implication that a woman like Palin would be trigger-happy is ludicrous. The opposite is far m...

I discovered a great election news blog today [called Dow Jones Insight Election Pluse] that shows off some interesting visualization technology which Dow Jones sells in conjunction with Factiva and other info sources.

I'm a huge fan of Marc Andreessen and I have no doubt that his thoughtful endorsement of Barack Obama [ blog.pmarca.com: An hour and a half with Barack Obama ] will have great influence. However, I suspect that many who follow Marc were already persuaded by more emotional "anything but Republican" feelings and had made up their minds anyway. I can relate to that, that's how I felt after eight years of Clinton. What I like about Obama is that, with McCain, for a change after nearly sixteen years he gives us two decent candidates that we might actually be proud of. In my mind, both could be acceptable leaders. I sincerely hope that they have a thoughtful and civil debate which helps us all sort out the right way forward for America. Marc's characterization of Obama made me think about why it is that I support McCain and I'm grateful to Marc for that. Of course I was not fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to meet McCain personally as Marc did wit...

Kurgman is writing a blog now in the newly "free" NYTimes website. He's probably doing it to promote his new book. I assume he'll give the proceeds to the poor to alleviate income inequality, right Paul? Anyway, out of curiosity I looked at the source of the chart that Krugman uses to make his point (by the way, it was pointed to not by Krugman but by a reader who made a comment). The very first paragraph of that report says this... According to Kuznets’ influential hypothesis, income inequality should follow an inverse-U shape along the development process, first rising with industrialization and then declining, as more and more workers join the high-productivity sectors of the economy [Kuznets 1955]. Today, the Kuznets curve is widely held to have doubled back on itself, especially in the United States, with the period of falling inequality observed during the first half of the twentieth century being succeeded by a very sharp reversal of the trend since the 19...