>> c-span, created by america's cable companies 35 years ago and brought to you today as a public service by your television provider. >> president obama begins a trip to europe and the middle east this week. today he's in the netherlands for meetings with the prime minister and the chinese president. in the evening, a meeting with g7 world with leaders for talks on ukraine. on tuesday the president visits the world forum to participate in the national security summit and later in the day he'll travel to brussels where on wednesday he'll meet with belgium's prime minister before attending the european union/u.s. summit. on thursday president obama visits the vatican to see pope francis and hold meetings with italy's president and prime minister. on friday he travels from rome to riyadh, saudi arabia, for a meeting with king abdullah. he'll remain there overnight

before returning to the u.s. on saturday. you can watch coverage of his trip this week on the c-span networks. >> we have to remember two thing, i think. first, we're there because we were attacked in new york city, and 3,000 americans were murdered. that's why we went to afghanistan, to get those people who were killing us. and second, president obama has said there's a limit to this. within two years, we're not doing it anymore. so i agree with you, julie, at some point you have to let them do it. but in our, in our first goal if we get away from the afghans, etc., and look at what our first goal was, if i had told you or any of the listeners in 2001 that we would not be attacked again in the united states of america for the next decade, none of, you know, none of us would have believed that. because at that point al-qaeda had more of the advantage.

now we really hav al-qaeda and the terrorists definitely on the defensive. and so we can at this point get out most of our forces from afghanistan. so i agree with you. but we've been successful in what we really wanted to do as a country. and that is to protect ourselves. >> vietnam vet, assistant defense secretary during the reagan administration, analyst and author bing west will take your calls and questions "in depth" live for three hours starting at noon eastern sunday, april 6th, on c-span2's booktv. >> coming up next, a look at federal science powell and the use of similar -- policy and the united states of simulation to solve problems and national threats. the chief scientist for the national nuclear security agency and a special adviser to energy secretary ernest no miss recently addressed the howard baker center for policy in

knoxville. this is about an hour. [applause] >> that was an overly generous introduction. thank you again, taylor. i think the hospitality here at the baker center at the university of tennessee has been, you know, remarkable. it's a wonderful place, and i'm happy to be here. you know, as an academic who ended up in washington for some reason, i wanted to give you my personal take on computational science, what we do can and kind of how i view this. i think it's an interesting story. i hope you'll find it interesting. as a way that tester, i guess -- beta tester, i guess this can fail and still be successful as part of your learning, so we can look at it that way. [laughter] so i have, i guess, some framing thoughts on computational science. i guess i should project this.

let's see. there we go. so there are just a few topics i'd like to talk to today, tell you a little bit how i think about it, where i see the challenges, some examplings of what what we've done and how we use it and where we're headed. and depending on time, i'll cover some of these in different ways. i think there is no even or simple way to explan how we -- explain how we apply simulation these days. certainly from popular culture we have a sense that simulation can do remarkable things, you know? you only have to go to the theater or look at all the

content out there where virtualization is really part of almost anything you see these days. but when you have to temper it in reality and make decisions and or there are consequences to those decisions, it's a little bit different. and i wanted to tell you a little bit about that world. the degree of trust in simulation is still e emergent. there is not a unique way to characterize how well we think we are predicting something and how much we trust it, and there's a lot of work to be done there. there's some places we do it by statute, and there are other places where you really need champions and advocates at the right time to say, hey, you know, these tools could be brought to bear. here are some experts that could help, and i hope to give you a few examples of that. really trust -- there isn't an easy way to explain whether

you -- why you trust simulation or why you don't. i think for everybody it's somewhat experiencial, and there is a personal aspect to that, and you see it among scientists. i see it in washington among scientists. there are some that believe it, and there are system that don't. and, again -- and there are some that don't. and, again, you can trace it back many ways. you can trace it back 500 years to decart and bacon and intucktive reasoning and different ways to approach the world. either you believe imperialically that until you test it and do the next experiment you can't take the next step, or you can believe that you can deduce things and set up some type of intuitively-derifed set of -- derived set of premises, and those are two lines of thought that exist today. you'll find a collection of scientists, some will say unless you do the experiments, i don't believe anything you predict. and so it's, again, the whole

idea of trust and when you call upon simulation to help you is still, you know, deeply rooted in personal issues that are hard to capture. and i hope you keep that in mind as we go through some of the examples today. i'll try and cover a collection of different topics and try and show you some of the commonality of what's behind these, and i hope you find it interesting. prediction is really part of our everyday life. you teal with it -- you deal with it whether you're trying to figure out, you know, what's going to happen in march and the ncaa tournament or the world cup in rio or the gold medal count in the sochi olympics. you know, production comes -- prediction comes in many places. you predict things by yourself. i would say that among all the predictions you do, the consequences are probably fairly

limited. the consequences of making a bad prediction are typically not severe. maybe you'll get wet because you didn't expect it to rain. maybe you didn't, you know, fill out your bracket in march very well, and you didn't win the pool. but i would say that is not a high consequence type of decision. but today we're turning to simulation quite a bit more to help us in -- whoops, i'm sorry about that -- in understand unda number of types of more serious problems, more societal problems and i view them as being in two categories. you know, as an academic, i resonate, certainly i resonated in my previous career on a class of let me call for no better name output-based type

simulations. this is the kind of problem that a scientist poses. it is typically well defined. you know what to measure. you know in scientific parlance you know the degrees of freedom, you know what to measure. you're trying to solve the theory, and it's then an exercise in mathematics, in controlling your approximations to solve that. and you have something you want to measure. maybe you're studying protein confirmation, or maybe you want to measure the mass of a the protown, you know? -- proton. you can pick your defineties, but it's -- quantities, but it's scientifically precise. it also has the benefit that you are the specialist. when you solve that kind of problem, you are the master of that domain, and you control it. the other class of problems that

i see, let me call outcome-based, are the ones that i find more interesting these days. these are the ones that are technically im precise. they're ill posed, they're things that impact people. you want to know why things are going to happen and why they're important to you. often you don't know what the degrees of freedom are. you don't know where to start. you might not be able to control the models or the approximations. you don't know i how precise your answer is. but that's the place where we need the most help. typically, these are multidisciplinary type problems where you have to work with other people. you have to ask questions outside your comfort zone, and they are hard. i think discovery lies there in general, and this is the class of problems i would like to illustrate today. you know, in this second class of outcome-based problems we

don't ask scientifically-precise questions. but the things we care about is what do you have to do and when, you know? what is your confidence that you can actually help here? what does it mean? what does it mean to you? what happened? what are the risks it might happen again? and the question is how do you bring science into answering questions that are not scientifically precise? where do you start and how do you do that quickly? what tools do you have at your disposal to help inform that? often you don't even know if you're asking the right questions, and often you have to ask are the right people asking the right questions. and in any case, are you even positioned to answer them? but when you think about societal issues finish and i'll talk a little butt about fukushima, the underwear bomber,

you know, the satellite shootdown, the oil spill, you know, collections of things that impacted people where science helped inform the decisions to be made. again, real problems, real issues often time urgent, but the kind, the quality of the question you want to answer through simulation is like that. and so that is not precise. what is the measure of what does it mean. because the average person wants to know what it means to them, how it'll impact their life. you know? where you'll have electricity or whether you can get gasoline or groceries or is your lifestyle impacted? that's really the societal issue that you're concerned about. and so how do do you manage the interface of science which is typically precise questions and precise methods which the imprecise means of the this

quality. i wanted to mention maybe one additional quick digression that, you know, at the same time that that we're interested in solving these problems, we certainly have a changing world. there was a nice little piece a couple years ago, i remember that jack -- [inaudible] did in comparing the ipad ii to the clay supercomputers, and these days, you know, with the iphone and the amount of computing you carry in your pocket, it's remarkable when you project out 10 or 15 years, you know, the kind of time scales that departments, you know, have to think about for planning big infrastructure. what is the future we're thinking about, what are the tools we have to have, and how do we work through there so the country can be responsive to answer these kinds of questions. today there's a growing set of issues we worry about, whether it's in energy or security or climate, health, critical infrastructure, you know? there are more and more places where we think that there is a

role for computational science to inform us in decisions because many of these things can't be tested or instrumented or done before it happens, and so these are places where virtualization is an important step in characterizing the rusks and decisions that we -- the risks and decisions that we might have have to make. among the kinds of problems we have there are, again, two categories; data rich ask data poor. i just want to distinguish those just to keep that in the pack of your mind -- the in the back of your mind. there are some problems, you know, sensor data, weather data, places where you have nothing but data, and your problem with simulation is to figure out what does it mean, what are causes and effects, what are simply just, you know, correlated signals or what are causative. and that's not always easy. solving the inverse problem from a rich set of data is a very

hard problem in trying to figure out what really impacts what. there are problems that are day poor, certainly a nuclear weapons program is an example, but i'll give other -- i would say that tony's supernova work is data poor place. tony would certainly love to instrument the next supernova before be hand and get all the day you want, but you can't do that. and if you get data, you'll be happy. but you, you can only get what you, you know, very limited set of measurements and making sense of that is really model dependent. and so among the classes it's not just simulation broadly. there are different qualities of questions we ask. there are different kinds of day and different assumptions we have to make on the models we need. ..

a little bit of the nuclear weapons program. i think it's an interesting tour de force of simulation. and i just want to capture a couple of things that are for you, just for that reason. in the bottom corner, it's just kind of an illustration of the kind of complexity. in understanding how we do, understand weapons that without

testing them, we stopped testing in 1992, you know, in the record year country did 98 nuclear tests. the integrated amount is 1054 tests over our history, kind of our legacy, but the problem scientifically is really multi-skill. it starts at the nuclear scale, at the scale of nuclear interactions for fission and fusion process of, 10 to the minus 15-meter and expands the size of the weapon, the meter size and beyond. it's more than a 15 order of magnitude problem. for those in washington what i see is you can think about it in terms of the federal budget, which is about $3.5 trillion tickets like managing the federal budget at the .3 cents level. making sense of the scales and understanding cause and effect across 15 orders of magnitude is nontrivial and has to be assumptions in there. the question is how do you

qualify the trust in the predictions you make at the different scales at the .3 cents go to $100 go, 1000, million, all the way to the trillion dollar scale to say i've i have confidence i know where the federal budget is going and i can tell you was going to be next year. it is a very tough and challenging problem and it is a place where the laboratories have certainly excelled in doing that. anyway, there are a lot of questions we ask these days just at the bottom of that slide. we want to know whether they are safer if we have more options to make them more secure. we need to know what other people are doing. we worry about terrorism and proliferation, and there are very broad questions were starting to turn these tools to. but i think in view of time, let me go perhaps to more interesting things, or at least that you might find more interesting.

i remember february 12003. i hadn't been in government very long. it was a saturday morning. i was returning from a conference in san diego and i was at the terminal there saturday morning kind of at the end of the terminal is a little round area that has the gates in thinthe middle with a bar and is waiting to board and the kind of looked over at the television sets and i was watching the reentry of the space shuttle and he couldn't quite make sense but i was looking at that knowing that the shuttle was passing overhead at the time and there were like three or so right lights coming down and i couldn't tell what that was. it was the shuttle breaking up on reentry but it was kind of a moment that is etched in my mind, one of those things where you're staring come you think you know what you're looking at and you have no idea what you are seeing. on the monday after that, sandia national laboratory was already in touch with nasa to ask what

is a we could do to help with the kind of tools that ar that ? is there something we could do to assist in understanding this problem? it is a post hoc issue but nevertheless it is a useful thing to do. nasa understood, as you can see in the video, that foam had come off. so they took some high resolution movies -- see if i can get this -- and they were able to see the foam coming off. and if you calculate the relative speed, it's about 700 feet per second that this block of foam, maybe a cubic foot or so, came off and struck the shuttle. at the time they had a tool. they had a tool called a traitor and you can read about it. there's a very good report from the columbia accident investigation board that went through this.

very thoughtful and detailed report. one of the things they found it, the model, the tool that they had, crater, which really had its genesis in micrometeorite impacting comet impacts in the '60s, grew into a tool of choice in the late '70s and early 80s, it was used outside of this domain the validity and no one knew. one of these legacy codes where people had retired, those that understood where you could use it were no longer there. there was in a sense of how predictive it was. it was viewed as a conservative tool, and it told you that there wasn't a problem. the shuttle was on its 28th flight, so it was known that the foam hit it, and it was viewed that this was not a problem. we had a look at the problem. nasa certainly reached out to a number of places to do the

analysis. one of the things that they found in sandia is that the strength properties of the front end of the wing and what they have there is in lieu, it's a picture of the simulation of the reinforced carbon carbon front ends of the wings that were used to understand what happened. anyway, sandia started a detailed analysis of failure mode. the question here is what went wrong? what is the failure mode? so you are reentering the atmosphere, going from kind of non-continuing to continue modeling. it's a challenging place to understand commend your trying to figure out what could have happened. an important part of the analysis was to get a piece of age reinforce carbon carbon material. and what they found is the h. properties depend on the number of green trees, that the strength is a degraded each time

you reenter. this one, i think 41 of the 44 tiles on the shuttle were original to the shuttle. and each time a reenter, oxygen penetrates the micro pores and it changes, reduces the strength properties. and so sandia start to characterize, they managed to get small amounts of aged reinforced carbon-carbon and characterize the stress and strength properties and started to do some analyses of what failure modes could've happened. and in the end what they found is that a cubic foot of foam roughly hitting at 700 feet per second would break through and cause these to fail. they discovered this finally in march, march of 2003.

and it wasn't until july of 2003 that the experiments were done at southwestern research institute, which demonstrated then, and the thing that actually got his attention was this. our member seen this on cnn, in my mind, we solved this a few months ago, but for those who are in -- empirically driven him this was when the answer was obtained, but it demonstrated then, you could see a picture of the simulation at the same time of the foam hitting the wing in the experiment. it demonstrated that this was a failure mode. and as the shuttle started to reenter, the hot gas certainly entered the wheel well and started to melt the inside of the wing, and it caused the catastrophic failure of the shuttle. but it was a place, again, where

simulation tested the different scenarios. it showed that it was in the wheel well problem which was originally thought as the primary cause of failure, that it happened through the foam hitting the wings. you had to characterize material which was a very complex set of simulations because again what you are asking is how did it fail and you're not sure exactly what to measure. in 2006, we launched a satellite, and it basically never made or but -- orbit. it was launched and it was in kind of a cold, tumbling state for a couple of years, and we were approached to try to understand what we can do about this. it was a classified project, now declassified. the code name was called burt frost. the issue was with what

confidence can we provide the president that one could shoot this thing down, what were the modeling conferences of the scenario in which you could shoot this out of the sky. the issue here was a large hydrazine tank, toxic material, one liter tank, frozen. it's not that hard calculation to see just from the thermal considerations that it wouldn't melt upon reentry. it would simply, it would pass through reentry, and being uncontrolled you can't steer it into the ocean. it goes where ever it does. and so we were asked to try and understand this, and it was an interesting project over a couple of months. there was a movie here i'll run.

i'm not playing the music because i don't like it, but the team that put this together as kind of an homage i guess to their efforts. but it has a couple of nice pictures in there so i clicked it and put it in there. you might recall that in 2007, i think, a chinese shot down or hit one of their own satellites. and it was a fairly high orbit. and as a consequence, there are still over 2000 pieces of debris in orbit at about 540 miles of that we worry about. the question here is whether we could shoot down the satellite at a low enough point so that it wouldn't be debris left, that you would hit the tank. and the problem is as the satellite is coming in in an uncontrolled way, kind of skips over the atmosphere and you don't know what it's finally

going to be. as it hits and starts to change its trajectory, it accelerates dramatically. and so if you wait too long it's going to fast and you'll never get it. if you hit it too high you leave the debris in orbit. so there's a small window that you have to guess at, or do more than guess, to try and understand whether there is a kill shot for the satellite. it was finally decided that about 153 miles up, that one could do that. at first the simulations gave about 80% confidence that this could be done in the window of time. i think the satellite made about 16 revolutions per day, so you had a couple of tries to do it before it was too late. and basically the satellite looked like a hydrazine tank and then something that looks like a

coke can, and then it has its solar panels. and if you hit of the coke can part, it would be like a bullet through paper. you would have no impact so you really had to hit the tank and you had to predict the telemetry. it was done when the shot was done, it matched exactly what the predictions were. it was known to be a kill shot. it was a place where, again, the initial estimate was 80% confidence. the decision at the top at the time was that's not good enough. you know, let's continue working on this. and when it could be done with 95% confidence, then it was done. it was really a remarkable missile shot down from this aegis cruiser. but again, it was kind of a time urgent problem. it came out by surprise. we have tools. we have people who understand satellite.

with people who understand from a mechanics that understand failure and characterization and codes and all this, and yet you somehow grab all this, put it together and try and see can you actually address this question. fukushima was again a problem of this quality. i remember, again, this pretty visibly. we were just watching it on tv in the office that morning trying to figure out what this meant without having a sense of the reactor facilities yet. it was simply about the tsunami itself, which was just devastating. one of the things that the department does is nuclear emergency response, and so it is a place where we have the ability to send things, robots, into very harsh radioactive environments, a place were we

can do air sampling. something borne out of the old nuclear testing days is atmospheric modeling, because we cared quite a bit about where radiation dose. and so there are still many resident skills. we were brought into this and a couple of ways. one, for emergency response, clean teams here at oak ridge who are called to task to help, but the questions that arose that came to us in part where the following, you know, what is the danger? how bad can it get? at any given time there are about five to 6000 student visas for your students in japan. every year there are i think five to 6000 u.s. tourists there. u.s. military on bases. so there is a large u.s.

population there, and a question that comes up is, do we evacuated u.s. citizens? there was going to be a midday meeting in tokyo, which meant a meeting in the middle of the night, and wen we had a little e than an hour to figure out what can we add to this conversation. so the call went out in the middle of the night to the livermore director to mobilize the center. the issues is what are the initial conditions? you can say you want to model it. ya great atmospheric models perhaps, but you still should try and capture what is coming out of it and how much. initial conditions, i would say, were not well known at the time. but the questions were significant because if you decide to evacuate u.s. citizens, it's a logistics problem. how do you get all the people out? no, airplanes, whose airplanes? if not a simple thing to do if you decide that the our citizens at risk. people also wanted to know what

does it mean for people on the west coast of the united states. so for specific u.s. interest, there were a lot of questions that we cared about quite a bit. what are those rates? which isotopes? and things of higher degree refinement. the initial estimate was from the simulations that were done, were that tokyo was not at risk and we did not have to worry about that. but i have to say, it's not easy to do these kinds of scientific problems through the conventional way of peer review. you can't pull together a team of your best people in the middle of the night and say, hey, you haven't met each other before, but why don't you work together and into this question in an hour? and so the question is how do we do that? how do we become more responsive to harnessing the skills that we have in this country in a way

that can address these questions, which seem to come up almost annually? there's always something that comes up where science can likely informed, and i think this was a case where we did quite a bit of air sampling and air modeling. we did really quite a bit of support for japan, and i think it was a very positive story that came out of this. understand again what happened at the site, and what it means to japan, and then what it means to u.s. citizens as well, or to the continental united states. there are other places. we have been working for a good year or so on trying to look at governance models, how we work with -- how many agencies can come and partner with us at our national laboratories to solve

some of their interesting problems. what is the way we can't engage other agencies to answer their strategic issues using the tools we have like at oak ridge or other national laboratories. we have had a conversation with janet napolitano on december 18 on this, you know, saying that partnership model is part of our effort to develop a stronger strategic relationships between agencies, which turned out to be timely in a number of ways. one week later on december 27, 2009 -- 25th, there was abdulmutallab, the underwear bomber who was stopped from igniting his pet and that he kept in his underwear in that flight. it started our relationship between the department of energy

and the department of homeland security and aviation security to try and answer some of these questions of how to protect against this? could this happen again? what are the risks of this happening? it was an interesting problem. it's really for this particular type of issue, it's a competition of different effects going on all the elastic energy stored in the airplane and whether you can dissipate it before a catastrophic crack propagates through the skin and the ribs of the aircraft and we worked on this with them for some time but i would have to say it has been a valid within. i can't say too much more about this, other than the are a lot of interesting issues in

aircraft security here, and there was quite a bit learned from this, but it was a place where again we had to become aviation experts to enter a number of these questions because it was time urgent to figure out what the risks are out there. and we have to protect against different kinds of threats that we expect on airplanes. i have a few other examples, but let me perhaps go towards simulation. you know, i want to say a couple things about the tools here before i get to some summary points. the tools we use our can we talk about simulation of something simple but those certainly are at the laboratories, the program on this, it's a tour de force. a computer is maybe 100 or 200

racks of system to each racks weighing more than a car. they suck up remarkable amounts of energy. they have millions of processors that judges somehow work across to solve a single problem. it takes teams of experts and people to attack these from across a broad set of disciplines. extremely nontrivial to deliver any of these kinds of simulations or products. really champions. these systems take megawatts of power. i remember at livermore when we are starting up the white, i think it was the white supercomputer. it runs at about four points seven megawatts when it's working -- 4.7. when it is idling it is about 2.5. so when they running the first simulation, run the first benchmark, something that jack likes very much, the linpack

benchmark that his organization, the top 500 attacks annually and is done for many years, so and press return government started and suddenly there was 2.5 megawatts light in the local power grid, which is the equivalent to a couple thousand homes. there was a call from a local power company trying to figure out what was going on because someone started a calculation. these are not just computers. they are very complex things that you will have to think about in different ways. when we had the first large system up there -- at sandia up there in the top corner, 10,000 processors, i think is about the size of a basketball court. there was chip by intel that is effectively the same competition will power, picture of a colleague of their holding this

back in 2011. the equivalent power from this machine in 1996. we are looking ahead at the technology, heaping in mind that portable electronics and basically 600 plus billion dollar portable electronics market can't be steered very much by federal investment, but perhaps strategic investment at the margins can still derive quality computers for the problems that we need to solve in the years to come. it's a challenge. kind of the system we're looking at would probably be, in the best case, a 20-megawatt type of system. 10 to the 18th calculations, operations per second.

our notional goals for this but we need them to be functional and useful. let's see. since i have a tendency to talk a little bit too long, let me go to thinking a little bit about the future. so going back to where i started, you know, there isn't a natural place for anyone to stop and say, what is simulation? what can it do for us? who should be working on this? often we end up in crises and we end up in places where we are responding to something and doing the best we can with what we have. it's important to start looking ahead and asking where could we add value. and i just picked a couple things the president has mentioned recently, the climate action plan, certainly his nuclear security agenda from a

number of speeches. and nuclear posture review. places where you could imagine there could be a role for simulation and a substantive way. and the question is, well, how do we do that? who's going to do it? it's one thing to say that. the question is, who does what? if there is an eccentric like to think about this, it's incumbent on people, on those invested in the outcomes, to think about that and try and make things happen. decisions are typically not made by scientists. i don't say that as good or bad. i simply observe that the kinds of questions we are faced with often are not scientific, and the problems are often not well defined. wbut we want to know what it means to people, we want to know what it means to the economy. we want to know very big, society based questions. when you try and dissect these

they typically cover a number of different disciplines, a number of skills, many fields of specialty. rallying the right people to try to address them can be nontrivial and it can be somewhat unnatural. i would say it doesn't overlay on university structures very well either. there isn't a natural place to go to try and address some of these questions. and peer review is typically not available to you don't have time to sit back with your team of experts and get your panel together and go through and figure out whether what you do is write the you are trying to understand what you need to evacuate people, you know, you just don't have time for that. so the question is how do you build in a sense of pedigree, wallaby, prediction so we don't end up doing something foolish. i think that is very nontrivial. i think it's a real problem and it requires scientific attention because we typically don't stop

-- we typically stop at error bars on a number of interests, and it doesn't? >> guest: to the average person and to the kind of meta- questions that are emerging now. simulation is certainly showing its value. we find it in more and more places, largely because there are champions out there to pull it along and no one to injected, but it isn't still a natural place to go. many of the problems we get, i mean, we don't have oil spill simulation experts that we call on for underwater crises. we don't have the experts or, you know, pick your topic. and we can't afford to constitute them for every problem we have here to we have to figure out how to create a more responsive infrastructure from the tools and people we have. so i think there's a lot to offer. i think it is a lot of promise,

but we are going to have to figure out again how to transmit the degree of confidence in anything we do. perhaps understanding how we can be more responsive. there are washington issues there i'm sure, but there are places, the university could see themselves, there are places national labs could see themselves. when you know when to inject this into a conversation and how do you do it. even asking, are these the right questions to be asking. progress here, success against the next set of threats, of urgencies i think will require communication and greater partnership among the different entities among a broader set of scientists, from social scientists to health, the

physical and mathematics. certainly industry, labs and government. i don't see the number of issues diminishing. i see them growing. i see the complexity increasing. i see the kinds of things that we are expecting people to answer becoming a little more refined, and i think we have to be prepared for that. but i think there's a very positive story on what this country does in simulation and how we turn it to these problems. i hope i have made at least some impression that this is of interest. thank you again for your time, and i'm happy to take questions applaus.[applause] >> we are recording this presentation that would like the question and answers to be does the microphones. we have microphones we can pass

along. we will have a reception after the question is to -- question and answer. so you can ask me to questions at the reception if you'd like. if you have a question, anybody want to go first? tony? tony, do you have a question? >> i enjoyed the presentation. especially the nasa thing since i was working there. you think we could have sanasa e i was working there. you think we could have saved columbia? >> so that's, you know -- [inaudible] >> that i don't, wouldn't consider myself qualified to answer that. i think even if, you know, we had any time away discovered what the issue was, mitigations is an entirely different problem. i couldn't answer that with any confidence. i didn't think about that

question though. i thought this is the right complex question to ask, but i don't have anything to help you with that. >> so coming back to the nasa example, i think when the interesting pieces there was you talked about the greater code being used outside of the valid parameter set. but you also raise the point that there was a human factors associate with that, and that the skill set or the knowledge or the depth of knowledge at least of what was actually in that code and how was developed was lost. as we move now into a realm we are no longer talk about codes that are thousands of lines long, but code for millions if not trillions of lines long, how do we deal with that problem? >> yeah, so this is really at the heart of a field called uncertainty quantification.

there is a good answer. but it is a place where working with universities around the country to try and understand. certainly there's work at our laboratories but you're exactly right. i think an experienced code writer maybe we'll remember where all the right punctuation is in the code for maybe 50,000 lines of code, but when you have 100 million lines of code, it is harder to figure out what is really in there. so there are all kinds of sources of uncertainty that come into a complicated code, from the use of metrical properties, updated, two assumptions and models to places where there's a mix of empiricism and calibration. and there is no methodology to propagate uncertainty through the entire spectrum of sources

of uncertainty. and i think even qualifying all the potential sources of uncertainty is hard. so it is a place where we need work. i don't think there's a good answer for that, but it is really where we have to look. because ultimately if someone is going to make a decision, you have to have a simple distilled amount of information on the degree of trust you have in what came out. in some of these simulations look convincing with great color maps and great details and meshes and so forth, but it's a cartoon. and so the question is to what extent is there confidence and knowledge behind it. and i would say that's still an open scientific question. i think that is a problem that needs to be worked on in years to come. it's really out the heart of

complex simulation. >> well, good. spent dimitri, you said something earlier that really affected me. i'm sure did everyone hear, when you said that these things happen annually. obviously, there's a pressing need to look ahead. with regard to how we set things up to better prepare to respond, both calling up the director in the middle of the night, what are your thoughts on that? how can we set up a better framework to respond to these things given, as you said, we can expect these things happen unfortunately yearly. >> yet. you know, that is, that's an important question. building end of responsiveness is hard because of how we support people and fund people. everyone is busy, and it

requires people to want to be involved in this. so we need to know who is out there and whether they are willing, you know, at the ready to help. when something urgent happens, you go to the short list, who comes to your mind. it's kind of human nature, who do we have? we have to get a little bit better than that and think broadly about the tools, the experts resident in these countries, and there is probably a next step there in understanding what that means, whether there are barriers in funding or regulations that we would have to change. i don't know. with the oil spill, the lab director from sandia, tom hunter, really left his job for

about four months, together with them we had laboratory people for months doing only that. you know, it was a nontrivial commitment, and so the question is, would you be ready to leave what you are doing today if we say, i really need to? can you afford that? it's not for everybody. and so finding a subset of those who are inclined to dedicate themselves to some of these problems, which might be short or long-term, is part of that. but understand what assets we have is another. we do need a bit of an inventory so that we can be more responsive and understand whether there are barriers that have to be changed through any legislation, or policy changes, or simply communication. wikileaks was another great example. the guy didn't go into it, it was also a nice place were so that there was a massive data

sets. on the order of less than a million mixed-media things, and what's in there? aside from doing any keyword search, is my name in there? is our department in there? there's something a little more sophisticated you could do, and outhere are graph analysis meths and things that we looked at. what is the content? what is the knowledge involved? what are the relationships of information? what do you distilled from us when you look at it in its entirety? that are very interesting and complex problems, so sometimes you need material science people. sometimes you need algorithms and grab people. ultimately, though, you need the computer people. so thi there's kind of a core be but then it's a mix of things you would need at the ready for any of these. >> i'm going to have a follow-up comment i've you can elaborate on but i notice that you a good

year, good component to your presentation. i know good your work with sandia at length to sort of model the next generation. it reminds me that we need these computer folks for ever. increasing with our corporate engagement strategies and our involvement with our partnership at oak ridge, many of our corporate partners are coming to us and asking to simulate experiments ahead of spending a lot of time and energy and money actually confirming the experiments. so we are seeing a groundswell of interest in that, and it speaks to the fact that i think this although will not become a place, it would be more routine in the future. you see that coming in that realm, in the r&d enterprise? >> i hope so. we have a few examples of where things like that work, whether partnerships with businesses have worked. my personal characterization of the goodyear story was it

required the company to be in crisis before it forced adoption as a new paradigm for tire development. in the end it led to the top selling tire in germany, you know, they're really marquee product. i think the president of north american tire was the one who finally championed this in 2004 when goodyear was against the ropes. we have found in talking with different companies, you often find the people doing simulation and those engaged in thinking about the world this way often not having the top cover from their leadership. there isn't the poll from the top from management, from the leadership saying, i want you to inject this new way of thinking into our business model. typically, what we hear is, you know, they don't care, you are too expensive. what have you done for me now?

we need this by next quarter. the goodyear story was decade-old. it started in 1993 and it should valley in 2004. it saved the company, which was the last global use tire company. but it took that long. it was beyond thinking through quarterly profits, and so that is hard to do. when companies are at risk, there are a few stories out there on, well, that's what leadership looks at all the options on the table, and they're willing to change the model dramatically. i don't know of too many examples where it's happened where things were going well. >> hopefully that will change. >> capturing the roi is something that we need to do more of. >> i think we have time for one more question. >> thank you for a very stimulating, thought-provoking

presentation. you talked much about how to prepare in terms of the people and the science. now i think also data, you talked about assumptions, how much can be trust and belief in the data and the outcome of the models. but the input is very important, of course, if you can't trust the data that you have. and, of course, you need to draw on data that is in the public sector and the private sector, and the academic sector. can you do more in preparing in terms of validating existing data sets and really documenting them well enough as computer code you mentioned, that it was not applied for what was originally intended for and we didn't know about the limitations? so the nation hasn't been very successful i think in implementing metadata standards,

and i think it could be done more. what do you think could be done in terms of getting the data sets more useful so we can trust them better? >> so i think one of the things that, one way to address that is we need to do what is useful to do in the first place. i don't think we should have standing armies on the ready for trying to anticipate things that might happen because we will never get it right and we waste money and you don't want people idle. so given that you can't anticipate what's going to happen, the move towards simply doing what we are doing better for what we need to do anyway is probably what we should be doing. if there are places where we can improve standards, if we can improve the quality of what we think we are doing, the methodology, that should be

something that we do and we try and capture. but the only other thing we can do is structure ourselves so that we can then be responsive to draw upon what we've learned to throw into the next crisis. >> thank you. before we wrap up, i want to thank dimitri for his excellent presentation i want to make a comment. where the number of deaths from there's organizations. we have guessed from the department of energy, from the national nuclear security administration, we have guessed from oak ridge personal lapse i'm delighted our friends in the committee were able to join us today. i may have overlooked some just so please excuse me if i've done the out catch up with you at the recession. we will have a reception shortly. i'm very blessed with the fact that i've a wonderful colleague of mine who helps me organize

these things to this actual conversation today was cohosted i the baker center, from grateful to matt and howard for the help with this. so thank you all for that and thank you for coming on a very cold day that's warming up. if you'd like to join us after this for some refreshments and more question with dimitri, that would be great. please help me thank dimitri for his time here. we want to give a very small token of our appreciation and dimitri -- >> under $35. [laughter] [applause] >> it's under $5. spent coming up on c-span2, a panel looks at political strategies for republicans and upcoming elections. and have a tea party influences the gop. later the senate is back from its weeklong recess at 2:00 eastern to resume work on legislation providing aid to ukraine with a procedure vote to

advance the bill at 5:30 p.m. last you dutch politician traveled to iran as a representative of the european parliament. today shall about her impressions of the country, its nuclear program and human rights record. journalist barbar barbara slavin interviews are atlantic council in washington, d.c. live coverage beginning at 10 a.m. eastern on c-span. >> have you ever heard of fracking? >> never heard of it. >> hydraulic fracking? >> no. >> of what? >> son back drinking water sources due to hydraulic fracking. epa announced it was delaying studies until 2016. can we really wait that long,

congress? we've announced the winners of this years c-span studentcam video competition on what's the most important issue congress should address this year. watch the top 21 winning videos starting next tuesday april 1 and every weekend throughout the month at 6:50 a.m. eastern on c-span and see all the winning documentaries online studentcam.org. >> next a tea party's influence on the republican party and future collection strategies. speakers include author david horowitz, jeffrey lord and mike rosen. this event was part of an annual retreat of osha program after the rockies which provides economic and political leadership training. from colorado springs this is about one hour and a half. >> let me just kind of set the stage for where we want the discussion to go and where we

hope it goes. as we know, as talking weather comes to management of a project or an enterprise or a political campaign we start with vision and we move to strategies and projects and tactics. some would say that when it comes to those involved in the center right, conservative end of the political spectrum, that we might share similar vision but when it comes to the very next day, the project, such a project in fact, that's where we go in multiple directions. i want to start by telling a personal story what i've seen this first hand and been a part of the problem perhaps depend on one point of you and the points of view will be represented and water. of him and by the collar state senator, and i'm of the united states house of representatives. i saw the same occur in both places and it also occurred to greater extent in the political

context in today's topic in discussion. sulleys back in washington there's no sunshine laws. members of congress can go off in secret and in meetings and so it is those who member here, you can back me up on this and others who have been there. wednesday morning the republicans go to their meeting room and the democrats go to their meeting room and they talk about, their lives get up and talk about the agenda for the week and how this fits into our agenda for the year and someone. and then they mapped out a plan this week congressman, colleagues will go to the floor and here's our game plan. and when we come to the floor, the democrats, all vote the same. they all do what they're asked. it all go up to the microphone and the podium and they use the same phrases, the same word can the same definitions. are speaking off the same notes. but over on our side where i

was, i'll just name names but you have dick armey and tom delay and john boehner and gingrich would be there during the time i was there and it was a here's our plan and here's what we need to do it and then you have somebody like me who would raise his hand and say, i didn't come here to do that, guys. i'm not voting for this bill only because it's better than the worst bill that will get a vote no. do you follow me? so we would consult the asking to vote for something that was sad because that was better than the alternative. and i wasn't the only one. is what happened all the time. life was measurable and still is today for the leaders, the floor leaders in the republican house and republican senator that's true in washington, in denver, in every state capital. i would submit because we care a lot about the principles. we care about about the vision to anything that departs from that our habit tends to be i'm

speaking -- sticking with the visitor put that resulted in office was chaos on the floor. we were in charge. there was a speaker in charge. he didn't have the votes on the floor of to make certain things happen. that is not the case when the other side is in our. i assure you. this is a terribly perplexing dilemma, of course. that's what you get after you've won an election and you are on the house floor or the senate floor in washington or denver, in washington or the state capital here in denver. out on the street when it comes to all of us, we kind of approach politics the same way on the conservative side. all of us are driven by a vision. the next level, the tactical level that we are not in agreement that were not in agreement on the panel. i would submit we're not in agreement even in lpr on any given day on whether the best way forward on strategies

project and tactical level. so that's why we focus on principles that lpr and hope those principles will result in successes and in our case for joy they do all the time. the truth is you can of the best ideas in the world and we can talk about them in gatherings like this or over a beer with friends. democrats understand power. republicans understand principle. more often than not as we've seen today democrats have power and we have lots of great things to talk about. so how do we change that? that is the discussion we're going to launch into right now. let me introduce our panels and then i will join them in the middle. they will all have 15 minutes for some introductory marks and then we will out a couple of issues around the arrangement here on the dice and then will take a few questions from the audience as well. let me start with matt kibbe.

he has been here in lpr in the past, called one of the masterminds of the tea party politics. thank you. mastermind of tea party politics by "newsweek," an economist by training, public policy expert by determination. he is president of freedom works and has been with freedom works for over 15 years and also a distinguished senior fellow at the austrian economic center in vienna, austria. david horowitz, next member of our panel, david horowitz was one of the founders of the new left in the 1960s, but has transitioned to combating those trying to destroy traditional american value. here's the front of the david horowitz freedom center. he is focused on academic freedom and returning universities to the presence of open inquiry and the fight to halt indoctrination at the classroom. he is the founder of students for academic freedom. jeffrey lord, our next speaker, sparked this topic in an article that he wrote recently in the

american. >> tater jeffrey lord brings years of political expertise to the table i if you served in the reagan white house as an associate political director and he now works as a journalist interpreting -- and giving a trip to. >> it, "national review" online, "the wall street journal," "washington times" and many, many more. mike rosen, one of denver's most listened to radio talk show host now in its 28th year. he writes an editorial page column for "the denver post" and has been a frequent commentator on local and national tv. mike is a frequent visitor at least for the last many years as i going to be here at the lpr retreat. so let's go ahead and get started. matt, you want to go ahead and take center stage? >> thanks. [applause] >> so i'm starting to think that politicians only care about one thing.

you know what i'm talking about, right? and sure, the sweettalk is really often and they send e-mails and they send you letters and they sometimes friend you on facebook. if you're a democrat, decades really cool because you might get an i am from george clooney. republicans aren't quite like the. we are kind of old school. we are all trying to do the same thing. the politicians in both political parties, they are courting you. you know what they are up to. you try to resist it. you know that they just want one thing. but after a while they start to were you tempted to start to think okay, maybe just this once. try it, and you do it, right? we've all done it. i'm not judging. i've done it, too. i've done it out the vote for

somebody else's candidate running on somebody else's ideas splitting the difference on somebody else's bad public policy. and you always feel really duty the next day, don't you? you wake up thinking why did i do that tracks they don't call. [laughter] they don't write. and they sure don't ever keep the promises they made to you when you're soliciting your vote, right? and i've been that guy. at certain times in my life the republican party tested for things that i thought were pretty precious. my first experience in republican politics when i was a young intern in washington, d.c., i was looking for what is now freedom works, one of the first things i got to do is go see ronald reagan gave a speech. i didn't know much about politics. i was thinking is going to be a professor at that point.

and i got to go see ronald reagan, who i did know that much about to be honest with you. and he talked about liberty. he talked about freedom. he actually quoted. if you don't know who that is, you don't know the secret handshake of the ron paul revolution. so me being young and naïve i was thinking okay, this is what the republican is that i'm going to be one of those guys. and i would find out quite soon afterwards that it really wasn't about. that when ronald reagan first announced he was running for governor, all of the really smart people in the gop were speaking off the record to "the new york times" talk about how it was that reagan was this right wing lunatic that's going to destroy the republican party. and later in 1976, he was a

sitting republican president could you imagine what john mccain would've said if he been a senior senator at the time? ronald reagan is a block over. -- wacko bird. i noticed a pattern when i got involved that republicans would win when they stood for something, when what they said when they ran for office was by and large what they tried to do when they want office. that was her later with ronald reagan. it was a true in 1994 when newt gingrich was taking on his gop establishment and is a permanent minority mindset that the house of representatives had under bob michael. ..éihshp &c

>> today all of these experts within the gop lecture us for losing the senate majority in they said we could pick up one, and if you count scott brown, we picked up seven. in my world, that's called winning. in their world they're always diminishing expectations, their always telling us what we shouldn't talk about, they're always suggesting that there's some sort of trade-off between principle and electoral success. and they scold us. today john cornyn talks about republican-on-republican harm,

often suggesting that it's the tea party and the liberty movement and grass roots activists who would call themselves constitutional conservatives and republicans that believed what ronald reagan said way back when, that somehow we are tearing apart the coalition that can successfully beat harry reid and the republicans. but let me suggest a few facts. dick lugar, senator, republican senator, he lost his primary, he refused to support the republican candidate in indiana. more recently, his pac just maxed out to the democrat running the georgia a seat that we hope to hold. trey grayson who is mitch mcconnell's preferred

favorite economist robert reich. do can you guys know who robert reich is? he's not a supply sider, let's just say that. charlie crist is running as a democrat. charlie crist was enforced by the senate republican committee. charlie crist was held up as the future of the gop. we had to be more like charlie crist in order to win. my favorite, of course, or hi worst nightmare was arlen specter. do you guys remember the first time pat toomey ran against arlen specker? the gop circled the wag gones. karl rove and the white house and senator rick santorum and just about everybody that was considered acceptable within the gop said the only guy that can win is arlen specter. if they hadn't weighed in, pat toomey would have won that fight. fast forward to the fight over obamacare. who was the 60th vote on

obamacare? who left the gop at that very moment that he decided that he could win as a democrat, not as a republican? arlen specter. so our decisions matter a lot in public policy. we would not be fighting to repeal obamacare today if it wasn't the decision by some republican experts to save arlen specter. john boehner's best be friend, steve latourette, former congressman, he is a lobbyist now. he has created a pac called defending main street explicitly, and i quote, to beat the snot out of the tea party. he's running ads in some of these races. he's defending some of the big's offenders -- biggest offenders when it comes to the principles of limited government. do you know who funds that pac? john boehner's best friend's pac? labor with's political league, 100k, international league of

operating ennears, 2 -- engineers, 200k. i could not find a single conservative or republican donor that gives to steve latourette's pac. so here we are, we're having this family squabble. there's an honest debate going on about what is good policy and what is good politics and how do we retake the majority. i can speak, i think, for a lot of activists to suggest that we're tired of one night stands. we're tired of waking up the next day and realizing that just, we just got had again, that they made these promises during the election cycle, but then they govern in a completely opposite way. and there's a paradigm shift, i think, going on in this country that the gop is very slow to figure out. there's a huge opportunity here. imagine what we could do if the tea party and constitutional conservatives and liberty groups and ron paul millennials and the

gop faithful could come together on a set of common principles. we'd be unstoppable. every place i go everywhere in the country, i am told by activists that the local gop doesn't want them. they don't want young people that believe in liberty. they don't want tea party activists that will spend every weekend knocking on doors for candidates. i don't get that. i don't get that, and i think more importantly the gop doesn't get it, because there's this new world that we live in that is exactly like what we should be. what do we believe? we believe in competition. we believe in freedom. we believe in the personal knowledge and the ability of individuals to come together on a voluntary basis and create something that's so much bigger tan any one of us -- than any one of us could have done. i just described freedom, right? market competition, local

knowledge. but when it comes to our politics, it's all top-down. it's still about, in the minds of mitch mcconnell and the rnc and the gop experts in washington, it's all about them figuring out what they want to do and then dictating to the rest of us what we should do to fall in line. you're losing all of that energy, all of that decentralization that has fundamentally changed the world today. you see it in ukraine today. you see it all over the world. you saw it in rand paul's race against trey grayson. you saw it in ted crz's ability -- cruz's ability to go right around the gop establishment, run against a candidate that had an infinite amount of money and organize online, talk to bloggers, raise money in a decentralized way much like barack obama did when he beat hillary clinton. democrats have this figured out better than we do. they've gone through this

transition where hillary clinton was the chosen one in 2008. she had all the bundlers, all the democratic poobahs were saying hillary's the guy. everybody except barack obama, right? that wasn't a joke, by the way. [laughter] except for barack obama, right? he was organize toking in caucus -- organizing in caucus states, he was raising money online, he was tapping into a growing progressive movement that has by today taken over the democratic party. and yet we're told that republicans can't win unless they compromise on principle. i don't think that's true. i think there's a huge opportunity here. but i can tell you from my perspective, and i think i speak for a lot of activists that are struggling to protect their country, to save what's precious are about america, that they're not falling for the gop's line anymore.

they're looking for authenticity. in short, they're not looking for a one night stand. they're looking for a long-term commitment based on a set of values that don't change the day after the election. be we can figure out -- if we can figure out how to do that as people that want to balance the budget, people that want to rein in washington, d.c., our job's a little bit harder, right? it's easy to make empty promises about health care. democrats are very good at it. the question is, how do we take good policy and make it good politics? it's not by misleading people. it's by doing what you said you were going to do once you get to washington d.c. thank you. [applause] >> excellent.

the question we're asking the republican party and the tea party, can this marriage survive, my answer is, it better. the white house is occupied by a lifelong, anti-american radical who has done more -- [applause] who has done more to bankrupt this nation's economy, take us down as a military power and destroy individual liberty t than anyone in this room would have thought possible in january 2009 when he first took office. it's worse tan that. than that. obama's the head of the democratic party that has moved so far to the left over the last 46 years that it has become a party that is anti-free market, anti-individualist, anti-constitutionalist and and unready to defend america's sovereign interests at home and abroad. we cannot afford to let such a party run our government for another four or eight years. the world can't afford it.

so how do we hold this conservative coalition that opposes our national suicide together? how do we make this marriage survive? first of all, by recognizing that the difference between the tea party and the republican party is a matter of tactics and temperament, not policy and ideology. to understand what i mean by this, you just have to go back to the flash point that made this, raised this question of a schism in the first place. the famous alleged shutdown be by tea party hero ted cruz. i probably should acknowledge at this point that i am a huge fan of what the tea party represents but not always what it does. i believe the emergence of the tea party is the most important political development in conservativism in the last 25 years and is possibly the last best hope for our country.

the government shutdown was the alleged result of cruz's filly buster of a continuing resolution to fund the government. in fact, cruz and the tea party legislators voted to fund the government, just not obamacare. the house had passed an amendment to the resolution that would strip obamacare from the funding bill, but then a las vegas monster named harry reid stripped the amendment from the bill which is how the democrats and the press were able to lie successfully and lay the blame on cruz and the tea party. cruz then conducted a one-man filibuster to express his opposition to reid's thuggery and to what he regarded as a cave-in of most of his republican colleagues who, rather than join him, voted to pass the resolution with obama care as part of it. and so the republicans attacked each other instead of the real culprits. you might ask yourself this question, what would have happened if the republican party and the tea party and the big

pacs run by rove and the koch brothers had funded a $30 million campaign to put the blame on reid and obama where it belonged? there was no such campaign. all the parties on our side, all of them, failed to take the fight to to enemy camp this way. the finger pointing that followed is just another example of the circular firing squad that we on the right are so good at and that continually sets us back. here's a second important point that applies to all the frictions between tea partiers and republican regulars. the conflict within the right about the obama shutdown was not about policy. it was about tactics. every republican in congress is opposed to obamacare with no exceptions. not a single republican legislator voted for it. not a single republican legislator would support it. the issue is tactics.

how best to defeat the democrats and repeal a monstrous law? how to defeat the socialist party that now controls our government and is hell bent on bankrupting our country, crippling our military and destroying the culture of individualism and opportunity that has made this nation what it is? understanding that -- [inaudible] is tactical, not fundamental is crucial to keeping the marriage alive. a tactical difference is no grounds for divorce. another important point to understand is that there's a difference between politics and policy. republicans are good at policy. they're not so good at politics, which is the way one gets to make policy. do we repeal obamacare by obstructing it at every turn, or do we repeal it by lying low until we have a majority and abolishing it in a stroke? and if we lie low, do we demoralize our troops who see us

as compromisers and appeasers and, in effect, give up the chance of ever winning a majority and accomplishing our goal? these are the questions that divide us. they are legitimate questions, and you'll excuse me for blurting this out, no one knows the answers. politics is always a gamble. no one can be sure what will succeed. and that is why we have to respect each other and keep our coalition strong even though we disagree. i said we were not so good at politics. actually, we're terrible at politics. whenever a republican and a democrat square off, it seems to me like godzilla versus bambi. [laughter] they call us racist, sexist, homophobes and selfish pigs, and we call them liberals. [laughter] who's going to win that argument? [laughter] they spend their political

dollars calling us names and shredding our reputations. we spend ours explaining why the complicated solutions we propose will work and why theirs don't. but when you are being called a racist, an enemy of women and a greedy s.o.b., who do you think is listening to your ideas about the budget? who is going to believe you when all your motives are ulterior and degenerate? this is the problem that not only republicans, but also tea partiers and conservatives have failed to address successfully. it is why the democratic party, which supports policies that are morally repugnant and have failed on an epic scale, still wins elections. medicare is bankrupt and a mess. social security is bankrupt and a mess. the war on poverty is a trillion dollar catastrophe that has created worse poverty than it was designed to cure, and yet democrats can still win

elections and pass the biggest socialist entitlement and redistributionist scheme ever and get away with it. my friends, until republicans and tea partiers start to fight fire with fire, this scenario is not going to change. [applause] twenty-five years, twenty-five years after the most oppressive empire in the history of the world collapsed because socialist economics don't work, 49% of american youth, according to a pew poll, think socialism is a good system. that's a political failure on our part. we won the cold war, but we didn't drive the stake through the communist heart, and as a result, the vampire of social justice has risen again. another way of of looking at this problem is that the republican party and conservatives generally are guided by a businessmennalty --

business mentality whereas the left's mentality is missionary. let me explain this. democrats, progressives, so-called liberals see themselves as social redeemers. they don't approach social programs, problems pragmatically looking for ways to improve this situation or that except as a political expedient to get votes. they approach social problems with an eye to changing the world. hillary clinton once told "the new york times" -- and this is a quote -- we have to twine what it means -- define what it means to be human in the 21st century. no republican or conservative in his right mind talks like that. on the eve of his election, barack obama said we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the united states of america. no one in his right mind eventies like that. even thinks like that. unless they are progressives. who believe they are on the side of history.

and the more and that the moral arc of the universe is bent towards justice. that phrase is actually woven into a carpet that obama has installed in the oval office. it's his inspiration. lest -- leftist secular missionaries whose paradise is called social justice. the pursuit is why the democratic party set out to radically transform a '60s american economy and regulate the health care of 300 million americans from an internet web site without the support of -- well, that in itself, cuckoo. [laughter] i mean, central planning failed, people. without the support of a single republican in the face of majority opposition from the people at large. the democratic party has become a dangerous party. it is driven by the missionary left, backed by the billions of

soros and party friends and regards politics as war conducted by other means. that's why democrats can say and believe that republicans are conducting wars against women, minorities and the poor while republicans refer to them as liberals and patiently explain to them why their policies won't work. if explaining why their policies won't work was politically effective, they'd be out of business. socialism doesn't work. central planning doesn't work. these ideas have ruined whole continents. why haven't democrats learned from that? it's because they are missionaries, and their politics is a religion which provides them with a meaning for their lives. they are the prophets of a social redemption, a future in which the meaning of being human has been redefined and social justice prevails. because their politics is inspirational, every failure

along the way is regarded as a glitch. the cause is noble, and they cannot allow it to be derailed by a failure of any of its parts. after a century of corporations and ruined continents, socialist should be just another name for delusional. also progressive. and yet these are the fantasies that drive the democratic party today. by contrast, a business mentality, which is ours -- not mine, because i'm a renegade leftist -- a business mentality is pragmatic, and its expectations are modest. it is not looking to change the the actual beings who inhabit it. it sets out to meet their needs within the parameters that are set by human capabilities and desires. when a businessman is delusional, when his expectations exceed the capacities of the marketplace, the market?á punishes him and

punishes him without mercy. a business approach is fundamentally positive. to succeed, it must meet the expectations of others and not merely their hopes. where possible, it wants to avoid conflict and the alienation of others. it is looking to maximize customers and expand markets and, therefore, to make deals. a businessman would rather buy you out or merge with you than crush you. when obstacles present themselves, it is cheaper and in the long run more productive to compromise and find a way around them. this is the mentality of our washington insiders, a way of looking at the schism between the tea party and the republican party is that the tea party which is an upstart is driven more by the missionary mentality while the republican party is more of a business establishment with a business temperament and approach.

john boehner and mitch mcconnell are dealmakers, not game changers. this is probably not the best mentality when confronted by a mission their party that views politics as war and that is out for your blood. in these circumstances and equal and opposite force, a missionary force may be required to defeat it. the grassroots understands this, which is why and how the tea party was born with and why a maverick like ted cruz was able to defeat the strongest republican establishment in texas, the most important republican state and become a senator. the tea party's mission is not parallel to that of the political left. it is not about creating a new race of human beings or a new social order. its mission is closer to the realism of business. a constitution is out to defend something familiar and real, a constitution that has been

shredded, a culture that has been reduced and an economy that is heading for bankruptcy. in this doesn't mean that tea partiers should be unmindful of the dangers that missionary ideas bring with them. good principles don't guarantee good candidates or winning politics. some tea party losses in the last election hurt the conservative cause and could have been avoided if the distinctions were kept in mind. the very fact that the tea party is missionary, that it is organized as a cause, on the other hand, makes its demands and actions seem impractical and even extreme to bids as usual -- business as usual republicans. this is inevitable. in order to change things, you have to take positions that seem unrealistic and may even seem extreme. it's the nature of change, and the tea party is about change and, in fact, it is already changing something. what it is changing is the

republican party. without the tea party, there would be no ted cruz, no rand paul, no mike lee. if the tea party were not challenging the republican establishment and causing conflict, it would have no reason for being. i believe that cruz's stand on the senate floor not only did not injure the chances of a republican victory in 2014, i believe it enhanced them, because it lit a fire in the republican base and showed the rank can and file -- the rank and file that there are republicans ready to fight. the thing that our voters most want to see is a republican who is willing to fight. both mccain and romney lost because they failed to create the passion among republican voters that gets them to the polls. too many republicans, too many conservatives sat on their hands. and why not? since both mccain and romney assured them that obama was a, quote, good man. no, he isn't. he's a compulsive, brazen liar.

[applause] he's a human wrecking ball blasting the structures and foundations of a great nation. the question you probably ask is how far the tea party can succeed as a caucus within the republican party. how great are the changes it can achieve? can republicans like boehner and mcconnell be changed? that is, if they are not unseated in primaries or by votes in their caucuses? [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> well, if my analysis is correct, both men have a business mentality and appreciate power, so my answer is, yes. if the grassroots mobilizes and the tea party gains critical mass, they can be changed. that's what politics is about. that's what happened to the democratic party. the radical left infiltrated it through the mcgovern campaign

and transformed it into an anti-american, anti-free market, anti-constitution party. so how do we fight fire with fire? how do we answer this thing when they call us names? actually, it's very easy. every inner city in america of size is 100% controlled by the democratic party and has been for 50 years. the democratic party has its boot heels on the necks of poor black and hispanic people in every major inner city in america. they're crushing the life out of millions of poor black and hispanic children in the public school traps which they run as a jobs program for adults and the slush fund for the democratic party. for the republican party, for conservatives generally to fight the democrats, you have to take the battle to enemy camp. you have to tar and feather them. it's very unpleasant, and people

who are not ready for unpleasantness should not be in politics anyway. [laughter] it means taking up the cause of the victims and indicting progressives for their crimes. it means fighting fire with fire. the one thing it does not mean is business as usual. [cheers and applause] >> there is a reason david is america's favorite renegade leftist. [laughter] let me start by, first of all, thanking you for inviting me and thank you for being here because what you're doing is incredibly important. let me just start here. i know you can't see this. i'm going to hold this up. this is a story from "the new york times" dated december 15, 1976. if you'll recall in is the 76 --

in 1976, ronald reagan challenged gerald ford, the establishment republican president, for renomination. he lost in a very close vote, took it all the way to the republican convention in kansas city. one of the republican establishment arguments at the time was that only an establishment, moderate republican can win. we've heard this argument many times. and, of course, president ford lost. about a month after that defeat, "the new york times" sat down with then-former governor reagan in his office in los angeles, and this article is headlined "reagan urges his party to save itself by declaring its conservative beliefs." and he says in here a political party is not a fraternal order. a party is something where people are bound together by a shared philosophy. so with that in mind, let me begin with a reagan joke. he liked to say -- he had a lot of them. he liked to talk about the great

baseball manager frankie frisch who sent a rookie out to play center field. the rookie promptly dropped the first fly ball that was hit to him. on the next play, he let a grounder go between his feet, and then he threw the ball to the wrong base. frankie was so mad, he stormed out of the dugout, took the glove away from the rookie and said, i'll sew you how to -- show you how to play this position. the next batter slammed a line drive right over second base, frankie came in on it, missed it completely, then he got up, threw down his gloves and said you've got center field so screwed up, nobody can play it! [laughter] [applause] now, with that in mind let me tell you a couple stories here. let me begin with the first story that revolves around something called the children's television act. the time is 1988. the children's television act was, of course, a liberal

mission. they wanted to do, inject the federal government into what kids were seeing on saturday mornings and evening hours. and the way that we're going to do this was to limit the amount of television advertising that could be allowed during children's programming, and you have to love this. it was going to be 12 minutes an hour during the week and 10.5 minutes an hour on saturday morning. now, you can just imagine. there's a couple liberals sittingsome i think it ought to be 11 minutes, no, no, mildred, it ought to be 10.5. okay, it's 10.5. so they put this in legislation, and they get it passed by the house and senate which was in the hands of the democrats at the time. now, why were they doing this? well, of course, those damn commercials were getting the tykes ginned up in the morning, right? they wanted fruit loops. they wanted tony the tiger's frosted flakes. my god, they even wanted the toys, g. with i. joe.

just unbelievable. america was awash in mommy, i want, i want, i want. so, of course, the answer was to make uncle sam dr. no. so they passed this legislation, and they sent it to president reagan. now, on november 5th, 1988, president reagan took a look at this and said, well -- [laughter] you can imagine the polite nod of the head as he's laughing hysterically in the oval office. he spoke about how it was filled with laudable goals. but as far as he was concerned, this was a serious constitutional issue that was raised about the ability, and i'm quoting him here, of the federal government to oversee the programming decisions of television broadcasters. not to mention that it raised a red flag about those -- and by "those" he meant prospective government regulators -- who might discourage the creation of programs that might not satisfy the tastes of agency officials, government bureaucrats

responsible for considering license renewals. thus, conservative principle at work, ronald reagan vetoed the bill. dun. dope. done. no, no, no, no, this is washington. some things never die. 22 months later after ronald reagan's veto, the bill was passed yet again by the house and senate, both in democrats' hands still. what was the change? we were now in the presidency of george herbert walker bush, the bush 41 presidency. now, in a way of the white house what happens is you have staff members frantically sending memos about different things, the president should do a, b or c and then they have these discussions. so there was, for some reason, a miracle, i think, a reagan staffer who was still in the bush white house, and he does his -- he sees and hears that the president is going to sign this bill.

well, he's apop protect tick. he goes to a senior bush colleague and says, why? why would a man who campaigned as ronald reagan's conservative heir ever consider signing such a thing? everything about the children's television act bespeaks excessive, not to mention dangerously intrusive regulation which conservatives oppose on principle and with reason. now begins a back and forth that is in its own way a classic representation of the gop establishment/tea party problem of today. it really does sound like a couple of bickering spouses. and what i'm about to tell you i got from an account of this written by a guy by the name of charles cole who was both a reagan and bush alumni, and he wrote a book on the bush administration 41 called "white house daze." now, imagine this discussion, here's the bush and the reaganite. first, the votes aren't there in

the house and the senate to sustain a vetoment -- veto. second he says, quote, he didn't really appreciate or understand the problem. after all he, the bush senior staffer, had -- [inaudible] and those saturday morning ads on tv before awful. something had to be done about them. the appalled reaganite, replies daringly, wasn't it the bush guy's parenting job to deal with the issue? why not turn off the television set if it's a real problem if after all, kids don't buy tvs, parents buy tvs. the bush guy, well, it's not that easy. his kids went to the homes of other kids, and he had no control over went on over at somebody else's house. the reaganite persisting bravely, talk to the parents of the other kids if this is a problem. if the situation is out of control, which i seriously doubt, keep your kids at home.

and on went the reagan die guy talking about how conservatives talk about parental involvement was supposed to be a, quote-unquote, hallmark of the bush administration. this went on and on, back and forth, yada, yada. the bush guy has to go, they're interrupted, end. the end result? president bush refused to sign the bill. but he refused to veto the bill, so he just let it become law without his signature. why the refusal toveto? because the reagan guy was finally told in the firm tones that meant this subject was closed, it might get overridden and, thus, make the president look bad. now, my point, this was an opportunity for a principled stand on a small but pointed issue, and it was completely blown. the children's television act is now but, of course, embedded as another brick in the tower of baa bell that is the federal government bureaucracy.

forcing television broadcasters the play mother, may i, with the fcc. once again in 2003, the second bush administration, bush 43, they made much of what they called compassionate conservativism. and one of their things, karl rove has written about this at length and very proudly, they campaigned on something called no child left behind because they wanted to get moderate suburban couples with kids. so they win. and as you recall, they won grandly with losing the vote to al gore, the popular vote to al gore, and i think there was this small matter of 537 votes in florida and five supreme court justices, but, hey. so in this budget a winning issue for them. they get there, they pass this legislation with the help of that great republican senator ted kennedy and an ohio republican congressman somewhat obscure at the time named john boehner. so this is now law and adding

billions and billions and billions to the $17 trillion debt that george will was speaking of last night. and, of course, there's all kinds of republican lobbyists who make a fair amount of change in washington making sure that this gets refunded over and over and over again. and i would point out in contrast ronald reagan had a position on federal education, and he ran on it in 1980. and it was abolish the department of education. the whole thing. [applause] adios the bureaucrats, do something else with the money, maybe give it back to the taxpayers. get rid of it. he campaigned on that and won 44 states. he didn't can need the supreme court, he didn't need 537 votes in florida. he tried, he failed. everybody knew he tried, and he carried 49 states in 1984. so what i'm saying is the tea party is basically carrying the reagan message here.

and it's not something that is alone in america. one of the things that we all know is that ronald reagan was great friends with margaret thatcher: margaret thatcher went through this battle in britain with the equivalent of, you know, the conservative party torrey establishment over there. and i wanted to quote from an article that she wrote in 1975 when she declared her candidacy for party leader. quote: one of the reasons for our electoral failure is that people believe too many conservatives, as in capital c in the conservative party, have -- and she put the word "have" in bold print -- have become socialist already. britain's progress towards socialism has been an alternation of two steps forward with half a step back, and why would anyone support a party that seems to have the courage of no convictions? then she went on to talk about what she called the socialist ratchet. quote: the notion of a ratchet

reflected the fact that britain's postwar history had consisted of sharp swings to the left followed by periods when the -- [inaudible] was arrested but never reversed. to translate into our terms in the republican party in america, what happens is the democratic party wins, they move america here. then we elect republican presidents who basically sit here and say we'll just manage this better. then eventually we lose an election, and another democrat comes in, and we're walking over here, and we're walking over here, and we're walking over here. this was almost fatal for great britain. this is what caused margaret thatcher's election finally. and so i would suggest when we look at things like the children's television act or no child left behind or any number of things, we should be looking and asking the question, are we moving this socialist ratchet left? and most of the time i would suggest the answer is, yes. be this, i think, is one of the reasons why outsiders are so

much in favor in the republican party. you get outside of washington, d.c. and ted cruz and sarah palin and donald trump and mike lee and other people are hugely popular. in washington, literally a reporter said the other day that ted cruz needs to take a food taster with him when he goes to senate republican lunches. [laughter] now, how do we stop this? there's a considerable difference between abolishing the department of education and adding no child left behind to expand the power and reach of the education department. there is a considerable difference between vetoing the children's television act on constitutional grounds and letting it become law because you're afraid to veto it and, you know, possibly make the president look bad. what these stories illustrate is that, among other things, the divide between the gop establishment and rank and file conservatives is a real one. can this marriage be saved? yes, it can. senator howard baker was the minority leader, emphasis on the

word minority, in 1980. finish a job his father-in-law, everett dirksen, had held, same job, minority leader, 20 years earlier. he ran for president in 1980, and he lost badly to ronald reagan. and the story goes that when the convention came in 1980 in detroit, howard baker was spotted standing at the rim of the convention floor looking out at all these jubilant reagan delegates, and he said aloud, these aren't my people. [laughter] now, why is this? and matt was saying something about in this. ronald reagan brought new people into the republican party. he stuck to his core principles. margaret thatcher said that the problem with the conservative party in great britain was that they were too much into consensus politics. margaret thatcher was death on consensus politics, because it always led to moving the party left. so stick to principle, never shy from it, and one last thing i

would suggest is our friend mark levin has a book out called "the liberty amendments." i hope you're familiar with it. and i hope all of you who are in the colorado legislature pay anticipation to it and have a chance to look at it and talk to people and other legislators around the country. because i do think taking power back from the federal government to the states is one way to do it. ronald reagan -- [applause] ronald reagan made that famous speech in 1964 that was called "a time for choosing." i think we are at that point again, and we can do this. thank you. police departments. [applause] >> i regard myself as a reagan republican when people ask me to define myself in the public in terms, that's the description i use. ronald reagan was one of my

heroes, so is margaret thatcher. margaret thatcher did a phenomenal be job in turning around the trajectory of the united kingdom. and her reward for that, much like the reward for winston churchill, was that ultimately she was turned out of power. classic example of someone who was right, by my perspective and by, i suspect, everybody in the room -- i don't mean right of center, i mean correct -- who was eventually rejected by the british body politic. there's a bromide going around that a conservative who stands on his or her principles, the most conservative will always be elected. how'd that turn out in 1964 with barry goldwater? how'd it turn out with sharron angle and christine o'donnell or todd aiken? that sum my isn't true. i wish -- that simply isn't

true. i wish it were true, but it isn't true. how many people in this hall, show of hands, regard yourselves as a firm tea partier? is that less than a majority? bob? you tell me. [inaudible conversations] >> there's more going though. >> i'm glad to hear that, because if everybody in this room had raised his or her hand saying unanimously we are all members of the tea party, we'd be in a lot of trouble. and it's not because i disagree with the tea party vision. i embrace it. i've always embraced it. this discussion is about, i think, unity and winning elections. that's my goal, winning elections. [applause] how many people in this room are -- and let me define my term

first -- but i call myself an i'd log. i don't regard that as a negative, as a pejorative. i am ideological. i have a philosophy. i have a vision. i have principles. how many people if in this room are ideological? just about everybody. how many people in this room -- this is great polling we're doing right now, i wish i could great specific numbers on it. [laughter] how many people in this room believe that a majority of americans are ideological? very few. i agree with the majority in this room. a majority of americans are not ideological. having an ideology, having a consistent philosophy, having a vision of the way the world works requires a lot of hard work and research and self-education and a lot of brain power. and it takes too much work. and it's not as easy as spending time on social media or watching television