LGF commenter zombie notes: Meanwhile, while you're all being distracted, civilization continues to disintegrate: Three policewomen spend full day dressed in Muslim burkhas in controversial 'In Your Shoes' exercise
And just ten years ago this was shaping up as another American Century... (Yes, we're talking about the UK but we're often not far behind them on this kind of thing.)
1. This kind of thing does not come out of the blue. Where are the ideas coming from? Who gave the order? Cui bono? Why was no effort made to identify them, let alone hold them accountable? Sloppy journalism. Ineffectual opposition.
2. A modest proposal. To really understand Islamic culture, the policewomen should personally experience the mindset of the Muslim males who put women into these costumes. A field trip to Saudi, perhaps?
3. Another modest proposal.Sergeant Leonard said the experience had given her a greater appreciation of how Muslim women feel when they walk out in public in ‘clothing appropriate to their beliefs’.
Well, Sgt, while you're on that field trip being temporarily adopted into a Saudi family, stroll around in clothing appropriate to your personal beliefs and see what happens.
4. A police spokesman speaks.‘This exercise is just one of many activities South Yorkshire Police have planned with communities and ethnic minority leaders to secure strong relationships, celebrate diversity and encourage integration, working towards a safer, closer society,’ she added.
I'd like to believe that but I don't. My difficulty is that these oh-so-subtle ploys by the host culture are indistinguishable from gutless rationalizations by spineless elites.
Unless it's the host culture that is supposed to do the integrating.
5. Announcement by the Home Secretary. Effective immediately, in the interests of diversity, social cohesion and multicultural integration, members of the Islamic faith will be referred to as 'The Faithful'. Usage of the term 'Muslim' is left to the discretion of The Faithful. Usage by any others will be considered hate speech. /
CNN reports that a Border Patrol agent was killed near the border in the San Diego area: Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano vowed to "find and bring to justice" those responsible for the killing.
"This act of violence will not stand -- nor will any act of violence against the Border Patrol," she said in a written statement.
What do you mean it will not stand, you dumb (*expletive*)? He's dead.
Condolences to Agent Robert Rosas's family.
An inventor working on fuel cells was criminally prosecuted for not putting a sticker on an otherwise legal UPS package. When he was acquitted, another pretext to jail him was fabricated. See here, here, here, and here.
Before you try to do something for the body politic, you have to get permission from each of multiple parasites.
Addendum 20091007. The Washington Times has taken notice. Apparently there will be follow-up to the Congressional hearings cited by the original post.
A small step and a giant leap.
Many more small steps there, please. Economically sustainable ones.
Noted by an LGF commenter. See also this and especially this.
I've wondered why Mitt Romney didn't run for a second term in 2006. My best guess was that he didn't want to risk failure. I'd like to see more boldness than that in a President.
Now I also wonder if he didn't want to be in office when the flaws in his healthcare program became obvious.
Amazon sold a couple of Orwell novels on its Kindle device. When the electronic editions turned out to be unauthorized, Amazon removed the books from customers' Kindles without their knowledge or permission. Electronic refunds were provided.
in a piece whose title I have used, New York Times technology columnist David Pogue quotes a reader:As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.
When the Kindle came out, I said:Not mentioned in the pitch is that the buyer pays $399 for the privilege of being subjected to Amazon's digital rights management.
This event might be the kind of glitch that is likely during a new product's shakeout period, but imagine what malicious gifted hackers could do.
Addenda 20090719. 1. For that matter, why--rhetorical question--is Orwell still under copyright?
2. Interesting thought here: what if DRM is not used to delete books, but to modify them?
It's my impression that the Victorians bowdlerized Shakespeare and other writers who offended their delicate sensibilities. Why not do the same today? For example, rewrite American classics to harmonize with Dominionism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, Afro- or Eurocentrism, etc. The Clinton administration has already insinuated propaganda into prime time programming: see here, here, and here, for example. Recall the Bellesiles case.
Victor Davis Hanson sticks up for Palin (another copy is here), but says she needs a learning period before she can operate on the national stage.
Hanson is much more favorably disposed toward Palin than I have become, but I agree with him.
Somebody else who might be quietly loading up on gravitas is Mike Huckabee. If the country is in trouble in 2012 and Huckabee can handle a hostile interview with an MSM heavyweight, he will have a legitimate chance.
The above is meant as an assessment, not an endorsement. Huckabee, like Hillary, reminds me of Nixon.
The Discovery of Global Warming.
To date I've only glanced at it, but I had no idea that the path of research was so laborious and counterintuitive. I guess a toy model simply cannot capture what is going on. Afaic the track record to date implies the surprises are not over.
It was all progress and breakthroughs and smiles for the cameras during his Russian visit. Right afterwards:Medvedev warns US against missile shield
Charles Krauthammer:The signing ceremony in Moscow was a grand affair. For Barack Obama, foreign policy neophyte and "reset" man, the arms reduction agreement had a Kissingerian air. A fine feather in his cap. And our president likes his plumage.
(HT: LGF) In other words, the Russians let Obama preen on ceremonial occasions. Then they resume pressure.
Most astute of them, unfortunately.
In Moscow:The future does not belong to those who gather armies on a field of battle or bury missiles in the ground.
Really dumb thing to say.
Speaking of dumb, that's what Palin thinks her supporters are.Time: Why July 3? Because I think that date more than anything set people off — right before the three day weekend. People assume scandal.
Palin: Yeah, that's amazing to me. That hit me like a ton of bricks there, this assumption that there must be something more to it than the altruistic, sincere and articulated reasons why I know that this is best for Alaska, that there was speculation that there must be scandal.
Palin is so selfless and high-minded that it comes as a complete shock when somebody suggests she has ulterior motives.
This is interesting too:Palin: ...It's that our administration is so stymied and paralyzed because of a political game that has been chosen to be played by critics who have discovered loopholes in the ethics reform that I championed that allows them to continually, continually bombard the state with frivolous ethics violation charges, with lawsuits, with these fishing expeditions.
So Palin is responsible for the bad law?
After reading that interview, I'm actually starting to think that Huckabee would be a less cataclysmic President than Palin. The only people who will support Palin are the people who think Bush belongs on Mount Rushmore.
Why do we suddenly need an academic whiz in charge of things? What changed?
Core principles are essential. Competence is essential. Ideas are essential. Pedigrees are not essential.
We don't need an academic whiz, but we need someone who understands that our society has been deliberately impaired by complexity that special interests have introduced for their own purposes. The metastasized system of laws and government regulations is the biggest example, but there are others.
Obviously, a technology-based civilization involves complexity. My point is that the parasitical complexity has been deliberately intermingled with constructive complexity so one can't be removed without disrupting the other. (Not to mention unintended consequences.) This threatens to bring the nation to stagnation or even collapse. We don't need academic whizzes as leaders, but we do need people who understand how a.w.'s operate: people who will undo the harm facilitated by a.w.'s and preserve & cultivate the benefits.
I'd love to see a leader who has an ordinary background and demonstrates a core understanding of the Founders, Hayek, Friedman, etc. A core understanding: this isn't 1960, let alone 1790.
From Palin's Facebook page (HT: commenter Susan at The Secular Right):...
The response in the main stream media has been most predictable, ironic, and as always, detached from the lives of ordinary Americans who are sick of the “politics of personal destruction”. How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it’s about country. And though it's honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make. But every American understands what it takes to make a decision because it’s right for all, including your family.
I shared with you yesterday my heartfelt and candid reasons for this change; I’ve never thought I needed a title before one’s name to forge progress in America. I am now looking ahead and how we can advance this country together with our values of less government intervention, greater energy independence, stronger national security, and much-needed fiscal restraint. I hope you will join me. Now is the time to rebuild and help our nation achieve greatness!
God bless you! And I look forward to making a difference – with you!
Sarah
Whaaat...?
What next?
She's keeping my attention, I'll give her that.
All-glass exposed viewing decks on the Sears Tower. Even the images make me queasy.
I bet that this is just the beginning as materials get better. (Outside glass staircases, presumably covered but who know? Outside transparent slides between floors. High-altitude slides or walkways between buildings.)
Found by a Japanese probe.
This could be a meaningless incident, or it could change the course of history.
The obvious use is a self-sustaining lunar settlement (once you've made the start-up investment). Safety issues aside, I'm skeptical about the economics of shipping uranium to earth, but what about the very rare elements?
The Feds couldn't prove Capone was guilty of his real crimes (who would testify against him?), so they nailed him on tax evasion. A reasonable recourse under the circumstances.
But now you get stuff like this:Indicted billionaire headed to Texas
...
All seven are charged with wire fraud, mail fraud, and conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Stanford also is charged with conspiring to obstruct a Securities and Exchange Commission proceeding.
Conspiring to obstruct a Securities and Exchange Commission proceeding. What does that even mean? What does obstructing an SEC proceeding mean, let alone conspiring to obstruct the proceeding?
My take is that the government is criminalizing things that are inconvenient to it. Just like this:...Stewart was found guilty in March 2004 of conspiracy, obstruction of an agency proceeding, and making false statements to federal investigators and sentenced in July 2004 to serve a five month term in a federal correctional facility and a two year period of supervised release (to include five months of home confinement).
Notwithstanding how I despise Martha Stewart, notwithstanding the likelihood that Stanford defrauded his investors, something is very wrong here.
It's not just that the book gets thrown at people who run afoul of federal prosecutors. It's that the book has metastasized by orders of magnitude.
Palin just doesn't have what it takes.
Too bad, but that's the way the wind has been blowing for a long time.
Colin Powell was right about her. Camille Paglia was wrong.
When the economy was nominally good, state governments were spending like drunken sailors: well past the rate of economic growth.
Now that things are bad, they're cutting back--on prison food. (HT: Dr. Helen)
Make no mistake, readers in the private sector. They'd treat you the same way if they could get away with it.
And they're working toward being able to get away with it. (Not necessarily deliberately. Government tends to grow unless explicitly checked.)
Reuters headline: The Average Green Employee Makes $76,000. To whom is the money going?JOB FUNCTION PERCENT AVG BASE SALARY AVG BONUS
Analysis 18 $64,000 $11,000
Broking 2 $86,000 $32,000
Consulting 31 $66,000 $10,000
Engineering 5 $62,000 $6,500
Legal Services 1 $135,000 $36,500
Management 20 $97,500 $27,000
Marketing/Sales 8 $78,500 $25,000
Media/PR 1 $63,500 $11,500
Trading 6 $93,500 $120,000
Other 8 $74,500 $26,500
Engineers receive the lowest salaries and lowest bonuses. Lawyers and bean counters are paid the most.
My goodness, what a surprise that the people working with the technology are at the bottom of the totem pole.
The green economy: what a sham, what a scam.
After the murder of George Tiller, an LGF commenter remembers:They decided to go after me after I began volunteering as a NOW clinic escort in my home town of Pensacola, a town in which abortion clinics have been firebombed nearly a dozen times, and in which two doctors and one clinic escort have been murdered by two different people - Michael Griffin and the Methodist preacher Paul Hill. I just happened to drive by one day and saw women being beaten with wooden protest placards as they tried to enter or leave the clinics, so I began helping them in and out, shielding them with my body, and taking the blows intended for them on my own head and shoulders. The vicious and abusive protesters were bussed to the clinic on a weekly basis from a Southern Baptist and an Assembly of God church.
First, they illegally accessed my college transcripts, to help them build a profile to help them phone harrass me more effectively. I received sometimes hundreds of calls a day, for weeks on end, from many different phone booths by many different people, condemning and threatening me. When that didn't work, they began surveilling my home, trailing me wherever I went, and then they sabotaged my car. Finally, they strangled my family cat to death and hung it from a tree in my backyard by a noose around its neck, and safety pinned a note to its belly reading YOU'RE NEXT, BABY KILLER! But I never stopped helping those women.
Colin Powell: [F]ar from being the Great Satan, I would say that we are the Great Protector. We have sent men and women from the armed forces of the United States to other parts of the world throughout the past century to put down oppression. We defeated Fascism. We defeated Communism. We saved Europe in World War I and World War II. We were willing to do it, glad to do it. We went to Korea. We went to Vietnam. All in the interest of preserving the rights of people.
And when all those conflicts were over, what did we do? Did we stay and conquer? Did we say, "Okay, we defeated Germany. Now Germany belongs to us? We defeated Japan, so Japan belongs to us"? No. What did we do? We built them up. We gave them democratic systems which they have embraced totally to their soul. And did we ask for any land? No, the only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead. And that is the kind of nation we are.
Dinocrat notes that hedge funds are unhappy after donating heavily to the Obama campaign.
The Administration's desire to regulate their pay just might get their attention.
A Democratic former SEC Chairman is critical:...Arthur Levitt warned the Obama administration and U.S. regulators against attempting to change the way executives at financial firms are compensated.
“Government can jawbone, but for government to regulate I think is overkill and very mistaken because you don’t know where it’s going to end,” Levitt said in an interview with Bloomberg Television today. Efforts by the Obama administration to change Wall Street pay practices are “totally wrongheaded,” he said.
The people pushing this are very mistaken, but I fear they do know where they intend it to end--and it won't be just with the financial services industry.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party continues its principled opposition: opposition to Charles Darwin, Roe v. Wade, and gay marriage. Note to the GOP: an armageddon indeed is taking shape, but not the kind you apparently have in mind.
Reuters:President Barack Obama proposed on Thursday nearly doubling funds to enforce U.S. tax laws next year, with an aim of more than quadrupling funding for tax compliance to $2.1 billion within five years.
How about explaining to the public that the enforcement budget will not focus on wealthy people who have the resources to contest the IRS? No, Middle America, it will go toward shaking down you.
It's imperative that the GOP develop a positive constructive message, but something like this is too obvious to pass up.
According to Rasmussen polling, half the general population has a favorable view of the recent tea party protests; 81% of the political class has an unfavorable view. 25% of Americ an adults know someone who attended a tea party; less than 1% of the political class do.
This guy is applying brain scanning to advertising.
Will this start being done remotely? Not just for data gathering, but during negotiations? What about interrogations?
Clifford Asness.
Addendum 20090523. He has lost control of his temper before, and his funds (apparently) are emerging from a bad time.
At his recent shareholders' meeting, Buffett on the recession:“I think that virtually everybody associated with the financial world contributed to it,” Buffett said of the crisis. “Some of it stemmed from greed, some from stupidity, some from people saying the other guy was doing it.”
At CNBC a month or two earlier, Bueffett on the recession:Well, we went wrong originally because we had a belief that--and everybody had the belief. I had it, the government had it, mortgage lenders had it, borrowers had it, media had it, everybody thought house prices could go nothing but up and--or at least they couldn't go down a lot.
I'd have a lot more confidence in the CNBC Buffett than in the other one.
Apparently this is not a joke:Jeb Bush to help party rebuild
Former Gov. Jeb Bush and other Republican leaders are holding the first of a series of town hall meetings aimed at remaking the party's image.
Not everyone agrees:''Jeb may be a better spokesman for the Republican Party than Rush Limbaugh, but that's a very low bar,'' quipped Democratic state Sen. Dan Gelber of Miami Beach...
The new group also includes Republican presidential nominee John McCain, prompting the national Democratic Party to circulate a blogger's snarky observation that 'things are really humming along when your `rebranding' effort is led by your recently crushed presidential nominee and your discredited party leader's brother.''
Sayfie called that a ''cheap shot.'' He added, ``People judge the governor on his record and the president on his record.''
It might be a cheap shot, but it's a direct hit too.
Oh, and the story says that Mitt Romney is in on it too.
In view of recent biotech fraud, this should be taken with salt:The U.S. is a bit late to the global stem cell research game. Japan’s Dr. Shinya Yamanaka demonstrated the ability to reprogram adult cells to behave as embryonic stem cells as early as 2007. But it is in China’s Guangdong Province that there have been almost miraculous strides in actually using stem cells to treat and cure diseases such as blindness, cerebral palsy, and spinal cord injuries.
...
Regenerative medicine is the future. Asia will be at its center. More and more western scholars and doctors are coming to China to collaborate.
Nevertheless, it shows how the wind is blowing.
If I were the Chinese, I'd donate heavily to American creationists and Western environmental extremists.
I'd prefer America to lead humanity into the future, but progress is more important than who makes it.
The next time you see an interesting right-of-center headline that decries our fiscal mess, search the text for 'Bush'. If the word does not appear, move on immediately.
The only exception is writers who have established a long-term record of credibility.
Rasmussen Reports:51% View Tea Parties Favorably, Political Class Strongly Disagrees
Fifty-one percent (51%) of Americans have a favorable view of the “tea parties” held nationwide last week, including 32% who say their view of the events is Very favorable. (p)Thirty-three percent (33%) hold an unfavorable opinion of the tea parties according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Fifteen percent (15%) are not sure.
...the nation’s Political Class has a much dimmer view—just 13% of the political elite offered even a somewhat favorable assessment while 81% said the opposite. Among the Political Class, not a single survey respondent said they had a Very Favorable opinion of the events while 60% shared a Very Unfavorable assessment.
One-in-four adults (25%) say they personally know someone who attended a tea party protest. That figure includes just one percent (1%) of those in the Political Class.
The whole thing is worth reading.
Political Parasite Class.
Fixed it.
Bloomberg reports:Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein, 54, wants to refund money received from the U.S. Treasury to run the bank without any limits on compensation.
But the government may not let Goldman repay, thunders Henry Blodgett. Are we going to be a market economy or a command economy? Are we on the brink of communism? Etc etc
Back to the Bloomberg piece:Even after repaying funds to the U.S. Troubled Asset Relief Program, Goldman Sachs intends to take advantage of government help by continuing to sell low-interest debt backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Chief Financial Officer David Viniar said on a conference call today.
Goldman Sachs has sold one $2 billion bond without an FDIC guarantee and about $22 billion with the backing since the government program became available in October.
“It’s still attractive to have the FDIC-insured debt,” Viniar said in an interview today. “We’ve issued some non- guaranteed, we expect to issue more non-guaranteed, but the FDIC-insured is also attractive.”
That puts things in a different light...
More here.
Dinocrat quotes:“We need to be doing a lot more to reverse the global trend toward fatness, and recognize it as a key factor in the battle to reduce (carbon) emissions and slow climate change”…
The underlying attitude here is totalitarian. This guy pretty much nails it, IMO:What they want is a a command-and-control economy based on scarcity of resources. And of course, once widespread scarcity is established, THEY will be in control of the scarce resources, so WE will OBEY.
Somewhere, Mencken is not surprised:The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
And then there are the Earth Without People people:The environazis are not interested in renewable energy because they are not interested in renewable people. These are anti-human…opposed to our very existence.
You have to wonder what induced the level of self-loathing required to make some people hate absolutely everything associated with their species. But there you have it.
I'm baffled. I have no idea of how to communicate with someone who thinks this way.
***************
I don't know if the climate is warming, cooling or trendlessly fluctuating, or whether anthropogenic warming and natural cooling are offsetting each other. IMHO the proper long-term recourse is geoengineering--reversible geoengingeering, thank you very much--, and I support research into such proposals even when the motivation seems half-cocked.
I finally had occasion to jot down my impression.
The religious kook right favored big government as a means to impose their agenda on the country. They thought that small-government voters and centrists would have no choice but to vote Republican. They deliberately allied with the Abramoffs in the GOP and blew off the limited-government wing. They counted on a permanent Republican majority in which they would pull the strings.
After the complete collapse of their strategery, their reaction isn't pretty. They don't acknowledge that they were wrong or mistaken and need to change. No, they believe God is testing the righteous, i.e. them, while He prepares to smite the nation for its sins, i.e. for throwing them out of power.
The refusal to learn or adjust is the worst part of the situation.
Afterthought. Call the GOP's controlling coalition an alliance between the influence peddlers and moral dirigistes aka culture warriors.
Seen at a Tennessee tea party:A sign near the center of the crowd summed up the sentiment succinctly: Above side-by-side pictures of President Bush and President Obama were the words “Dumb & Dumber”.
It's too bad the tea parties didn't start under Bush.
Afterthought. The Boston Tea Party was about illegitimate taxes. The main point of the current protests is that illegitimate government spending will ruin future generations and bankrupt the country.
Calling the protests tea parties helps get attention and so does holding them on April 15, but the implication is inaccurate. The passions behind the Boston Tea Party and contemporary protests may be similar, but the issues are different. Today's labeling predisposes the underlying message to be distorted by opponents and misunderstood by the public.
The mislabeling will be corrected if the protests jell into a long-term constructive political movement.
Most online content is not of permanent value. Two exceptions are below.
The 2003 Glenn Reynolds on loving monsters. (Unfortunately Reynolds spreads himself too thin nowadays.)
Megan McArdle on gay marriage (with an addendum here).
P.J. O'Rourke's 'The Piece of Ireland That Passeth All Understanding'.
And not just the Irish. Consider Serbs and Croats, for example. No need to mention Africa.
Afaic "intellectual property" (patents, copyrights, trademarks) is a social contract. Afaic parasitical rent-seeking special interests have distorted the underlying law to the point at which intellectual property does more harm than good.
Despite the excesses and misuse, incentivizing innovation and progress sounds like a worthy concept. However, two reputable economists argue that the concept is inherently flawed and we'd be better off without it.
Does the content industry's government-abetted predatory behavior facilitate terrorism? A couple of comments to that effect are plausible on their face. By creating a mass market for circumventions of "intellectual property", the industry may have stimulated development of evasive technologies that the bad guys would not have invented on their own. Mass circumventions have enabled the few actual villains to hide like needles in a haystack.
Column after column, year after year, Victor Davis Hanson drones out his unhip historical truths.
If conservatism survives this rudderless period, it will be because people like Hanson staid the course.
The press gushes over Obama while ignoring his inexperience and gaffes. Comparisons to JFK continue.
Soviet Premier Khrushchev supposedly sized up JFK as weak when the two met. This perception emboldened Khrushchev to put Soviet missiles into Cuba, thereby precipitating the Cuban Missile Crisis.
(Speaking of comparisons: the left dismisses or ignores Obama's blunders; Bush loyalists mocked his critics as educated dopes who didn't understand strategery.)
The prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense. ...it appeared that the prosecutors who tried Mr. Stevens on ethics charges would themselves now face ethics charges.
...
Judge Sullivan recently ordered that some of the government lawyers involved be held in contempt of court, including the two top officials of the Justice Department’s public integrity division, the section that prosecutes official corruption.
I'd like to know these government lawyers' political backgrounds. The investigation of the government lawyers should pursue potential links to the Democratic Party's campaign apparatus. Fat chance, of course.
(Not that I'm a fan of porkmeister Ted Stevens.)
The prison system American gulag is a national disgrace (as is the vile War on Drugs). Consider the fraction of the population that's incarcerated. Consider the public attitude: don't bend over for the soap nyuk nyuk hyuk. Reminescent of the Roman mob.
To his great credit, Jim Webb, to whom I donated when he knocked off the Great Theocratic Hope George MacacAllen, is risking significant political capital on doing something about it. See here, here and here.
Addendum. Webb was mentioned as a vice-presidential nominee and has campaigned with Obama. Is he doing this with Obama's support or at his instigation? (Because Obama does not want to get accused of playing racial politics.) The possibility warrants mention.
Whatever. I strongly support what Webb is doing.
A month ago I commented at Dinocrat:Why is the government choosing now to hound a major, fragile Swiss bank about confidential American deposits? It reminds me of the Bush administration’s sending Drug Warriors to eradicate Afghan poppy crops–just as the Taliban is making a comeback. (Presumably the Chinese would be more than happy to pick up where the Swiss may be forced to leave off, and they could make the Swiss look like small-time operators.)
The AP reports:However, experts such as Florida tax lawyer William M. Sharp say the victory some are claiming over tax havens may be short lived. While the flow of untaxed money to places like Switzerland and Liechtenstein will diminish, new destinations are emerging in Asia and the Middle East that will be harder to crack, he says.
The Middle East hadn't crossed my mind, but it makes sense.
The GOP House leadership held a press conference to present a Republican alternative to Obama's budget.
Except they didn't have any numbers. (H/T: LGF)
How can the GOP be so incompetent? Maybe it's because they won Congress at the beginning of the peace dividend and holiday from history. They take these conditions as facts of nature.
The Democrats also take them as facts of nature, but their time as the minority has made them hungrier and more politically adroit than the Republicans. Unfortunately for the country, they are looking even less fit to govern.
He is quoted:My dad once said to me, "Son, a fool with a plan can beat a genius with no plan."
sigh What do you call a company run by a planless genius who reflexively meddles in any project that shows promise?
Unprofitable.
Live free or die, my ***:Ban on Feet-Nibbling Fish Leaves Nail Salons on the Hook
Mr. Ho's Import From China Caught On, But Some State Pedicure Inspectors Object
The U.S. Agency for International Development distributes condoms overseas. It is switching from American-made condoms to offshore ones:"Of course, we considered how many U.S. jobs would be affected by this move,” said a USAID official who spoke on the condition that he would not be named. But he said the reasons for the change included lower prices (2 cents versus more than 5 cents for U.S.-made condoms) and the fact that Congress dropped “buy American language” in a recent appropriations bill.
I'm all for free trade, but I wonder why Congress dropped the buy American language during a serious recession[1].
---------------
[1] Note the scare headline: "U.S. to buy Chinese condoms, ending Alabama jobs." In the text: In a move expected to cost 300 American jobs, the government is switching to cheaper off-shore condoms, including some made in China. [emphasis mine]
In fairness, there's this from the USAID spokesman:Besides, he said, the sole U.S. supplier — an Alabama company called Alatech — had previous delivery problems under the program. (p)It's clear that Alatech's problems over the years, which apparently have been resolved, may have driven U.S. officials to seek much less expensive foreign-made condoms in the first place.
I didn't know he refused urges to assume dictatorial powers.
The House voted to retroactively tax the AIG bonuses.
It's claimed that the people who ruined AIG are long gone and in effect the bonuses are being given to the janitors hired to clean up the mess.If they did walk out the door, who would volunteer to work at the Chernobyl of the financial world? And what would become of the mammoth portfolio that remains?
"It would become the biggest naked position on Wall Street," one longtime Financial Products executive said, "and everybody would exploit it."
...
"Nobody is going to give it back and then stay," said one of the firm's employees. "If they give back the money, then they will walk. And they will walk into the arms of AIG's counterparties."
Failure of AIG was said to imply the collapse of the world financial system…
These people are receiving death threats, and politicians like Cuomo and Frank are pushing to have their names made public.
Is this the worst Congressional abuse we've seen since the McCarthy era?
(To be sure, the rulebook gets thrown out the window when the national interest is seriously threatened. But that's obviously not the case here. Or it wasn't.)
Is this the worst abuse of Congressional power since the McCarthy era? The effects could be even more destructive. Who will trust the United States after seeing this? I’m appalled. I’m ashamed. I’m scared.
Even if the effects are not apocalyptic, note that they’ve set the precedent of a 90% tax.
Vermin.
And half of the Republicans went along.
Corrupt gutless morons.
Divided government is the only reason I see to vote Republican.
Addendum. Connecticut's Republican governor, Democrat Attorney General, and Democrat legislature are piling on, issuing subpoenas to the AIG bonus recipients and CEO. And the NY Attorney General has demanded and obtained the names. Their names and home towns are being published. Voices of sanity are being ignored.
The American political class is threatening and ripping at the AIG people while they are literally struggling to save the world.
I voted for Obama. I was wrong. I recant. If I could do it over, I would vote for McCain.
I will not vote for Obama in 2012. I will not vote for him even if his opponent is worse--which is entirely possible in this declining nation. (May Heaven lead us to a renaissance.)
Some things are more important than temperament. Some things are automatically beyond the pale, with no questions asked.
I didn't want to believe this. I waited for clarification. It came. Obama is serious about requiring wounded veterans to use private insurance to pay for their medical care.
This is more disgusting than the Lewinsky scandal.
***************
More here.
Update. Retraction of the plan was too reluctant to make a difference to me.
There's discussion of John Derbyshire's How Radio Wrecks the Right.
Not twenty years ago the Republicans were the party of ideas. The party of the future. The party of insight. Now it's the party of Rush Limbaugh and Mike Huckabee.
What happened? A Christian conservative poet might have an explanation:
...Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
*****************
I don't turn Limbaugh off when I chance on him, but I don't seek him out either.
IMHO serious conservative and libertarian thought acknowledges the necessity of difficult compromises between legitimate but conflicting values and aspirations. You don't win elections or a mass radio audience by talking about the tragic sense of life, but a political movement that ignores these things altogether will ultimately be trivial.
Bloomberg:Daniel Aromi and Cecilia Caglio, economists at the SEC in Washington, said in a December report to former Chairman Christopher Cox that the so-called uptick rule was less effective when needed most, during panics that drive prices down and volatility up.
Who cares? We have to Do Something. Scapegoats must be found.
I'm about as persuaded about the uptick rule as I am that Global Warming is an urgent threat.
From Dinocrat commenter Paul:It’s what you get from a team of glorified clerks, Yale/Harvard system gamers. They’ve grade grubbed, networked, sniffed their way to the top and now out in front, in the clear and separated from their elderly, formal mandarin institutions are clueless.
Like Churchill said, a very bad system, but...
Ray Kurzweil's book "The Singularity is Near" (TSIN) came out in 2005. Columnist Kevin Drum wrote positively about the book but quibbled slightly. He extrapolated a log-log plot in the book and wondered why the immminence of the Singularity wasn't already obvious in 2005. Kurzweil emailed Drum:It isn’t valid to extend a log-log plot. A progression is valid by showing exponential growth along a linear time axis, so a graph with a linear x (time) axis and a log y axis can be validly extended (provided of course that one has analyzed the paradigm being measured and shown that it will not saturate to an asymptote)...
So the point of the log-log plot is simply to show that a phenomenon has in fact accelerated in the past. It is not valid to extend the line. For one thing the log-log plot cannot go into the future because that is the nature of the log time axis...
In 2006 Kevin Kelly took up the issue and reposted Drum's extrapolation (click on the image to view a nontruncated version):
Kurzweil responded to Kelly like he had to Drum:You cite the extension made by Kevin Drum of the log-log plot that I provide of key paradigm shifts in biological and technological evolution...This extension is utterly invalid. You cannot extend in this way a log-log plot for just the reasons you cite. The only straight line that is valid to extend on a log plot is a straight line representing exponential growth when the time axis is on a linear scale and the a value (such as price-performance) is on a log scale...But it is not valid to extend the straight line when the time axis is on a log scale. The only point of these graphs is that there has been acceleration in paradigm shift in biological and technological evolution.
Unfortunately, by the time Drum appended Kurzweil's email to his review, I had lost the URL. By chance I recently rediscovered it on Singularity disbeliever PZ Myers' blog.
What to make of all this? sigh I've already spent too much time--and not enough time--thinking about it so I'm going to stop arbitrarily. My apologies to Kurzweil and other authors & commenters if I'm unaware of relevant insights. The following is way too speculative for my liking, but here goes:
For the purposes of this post, I ignore Myers' contentions and accept Kurzweil's chart as valid. I assume that his plotted 'events' were chosen a priori without using a preconceived mathematical model. Upon scrutiny, the plot reveals interesting properties and implications[1].
a. It resembles a log-log plot of a power law. Curiously, TSIN's discussion of the figure does not mention the power-law interpretation.
b. There are constraints on the "times to the next event": between any two events A and B, the sum of the 'times to the next event' equals the total time elapsed between A and B. That is obvious of course, but it has implications for the spacing of events that obey a power law or any formula for that matter. (Cf. Myers' harsh criticism of Kurzweil's selection of events.)
c. The overall slope of the 'line' is more or less consistent with a value of -1. A(n approximately) unit slope is noteworthy (each event is half as close to the Singularity as its predecessor), but why not some other number? I won't give equations, but basic engineering math suffices for handwaving arguments that the number of events will multiply logarithmically as the Singularity is approached. A logarithmic Singularity is not Kurzweil's preferred scenario, but he mentions it on p. 495.
d. Like commenter dreish at KurzweilAI.net, I am unpersuaded by Kurzweil's criticism of Drum's extrapolation. Extending a line segment over a distance smaller than its length is plausible on its face. Kurzweil should make a better argument.
e. Drum's extrapolation begs a question that neither his post nor Kurzweil's response addresses. It seems reasonable to try to use 'countdown' data to forecast when the Singularity will occur. If that's not the case, why not? (Per 'dreish', consider the time axis, i.e. "years before today's date as of writing". If the 'date of writing' were the Singularity onset date, then events should have multiplied and clustered as the Singularity approached in real time; the x-axis of a log-time plot would have to be extended to display the real-time clustering. For a date of writing slightly before the Singularity onset date, I'd expect Kurzweil's existing log-log plot to depart from a straight line when the time between events becomes smaller than the time to the Singularity. [For a date of writing after the Singularity, the straight line would change to a "waterfall" near the onset time.] If the data is good enough, the deviation from a straight line might yield an estimate the time of the Singularity. Kurzweil does not discuss the issue. In fact, he describes the World Wide Web as an 'event' but, surprisingly, does not predict the time to the event that will follow the WWW.)
f. Afterthought. Note that if, as a function of the time to the Singularity, the time between events scales with a power less than one, the total number of events will necessarily be finite. (For sufficiently small positive x, x to a power is less than x if the power is less than one. Thus, it would be impossible to pack an infinite number of events close to each other as the Singularity approaches.) It's not clear how to interpret such a situation.
There is more to the Countdown plot than meets the eye at first glance. It's not entirely apparent whether the chart is meant to be descriptive or quantitative. If it's quantitative, it points to more information than has been extracted to date. Addressing Myers' criticism might be happen as a byproduct of digging such information out. How will the chart look when drawn at the Singularity? Will it retain its current linear form, or will the shape change? Either outcome would be interesting.
--------------------------------------
[1] NB: in TSIN, the chart that Drum noticed is followed by over 600 pages including 100 pages of annotated footnotes. IMO the Drum-Kurzweil kerfluffle is interesting precisely because new things can be said without tangling with the interlinked sprawl of the overall book.
Maybe some enterprising person will start printing these with the current year thereon, if you get my drift. I'm thinking of ordering a few and sending them to my Congressman, governor, the DNC...
I increasingly see annualized numbers reported as monthly or quarterly ones. David Gergen at AC360:Last Friday, we learned that the economy contracted in the 4th quarter by over 6 percent.
During the evening of March 3, I submitted a correction that the rate was annualized. No correction has been made.
Layers and layers of editors and fact checkers...
Laura Rowley, a Yahoo "financial columnist", writes:...If I take out a mortgage whose terms I don't understand, and my home value doesn't rise as I expected, then that's my responsibility. If I buy mortgages or other debt, bundle, securitize, and sell them, and fail to properly assess their risk (or lose the paperwork), that's my responsibility and my institution's responsibility.
And if I issue credit default swaps to insure collateralized debt obligations and never actually had the collateral to back them up, that's not only my responsibility -- it's fraud, and I should be arrested for a crime.
The text moves from sensible to deranged. Let's see: if all of a bank's loans are not paid back and the bank goes under, is that fraud? If the Yellowstone Caldera erupts and wrecks half the country, is that fraud on the part of the insurance industry? Is a bank supposed to hold a dollar in cash for every dollar it loans? Should an insurance company keep the cash value of all its outstanding premiums?
Reader rating on the article is 4.5/5.0.
The uptick rule has been a whipping boy in the market decline, but some skepticism is emerging as people examine the issue in detail.
Like Jim Cramer, Jack Risko has been criticizing short sellers and the uptick rule in particular. Supposedly they act like a pack to bring down a weak stock, and this is imperilling the financial system since big banks are currently weak.
I'm unconvinced that short sellers are not revealing the true value of overpriced banks and thereby legitimately contributing to price discovery. If short sellers are involved in a vicious circle, I'm unconvinced that it's a deliberate conspiracy; it could be emergent behavior that mimics conspiratorial actions.
But another interpretation altogether crossed my mind: the short-selling could be legitimate hedging.
IMHO the picture underlying option valuation is that the reward/risk ratios of a stock and its options should be the identical. Accordingly, under idealized conditions, you can construct a combination of stock and option such that the risks cancel each other out: this recipe leads to the Black-Scholes valuation equation.
Suppose you're a market maker who sells a put option on BankAmerica. You have taken the risk that the stock will be sold back to you at a higher price than the market will charge. To reduce that risk, you hedge by shorting the stock. The more the stock drops, the more you should short in order to minimize the risk. If the stock develops a strong downward trend, you the put seller will act so as to reinforce the trend, and you could become a participant in a vicious circle.
Moreover, it turns out that a "sophisticated" put shopper can dispense with the market maker altogether. If the market maker can cancel his risk by shorting the put and the stock, a put shopper can equivalize the risk of holding an unhedged put by trading like the market maker would. This is the notorious portfolio insurance that was a prime suspect in the 1987 crash.
Now consider that the financial system, expecially the big insitutions, are highly leveraged. Suppose it's June 2008 and you have bought a "diversified" package of concocted illiquid "AAA" securities from Wall Street. You are getting worried. How do you protect yourself against the decline of illiquid composite instruments that are so complicated that no one understands their details?--By shorting liquid instruments that are related as closely as possible to your holdings. You protect yourself against systemic risk by shorting the system. So you're ready to go: when trouble appears, you short the stocks of large-cap financial institutions.
The amount of money in these holdings is many times the net worth of the financial system, the potential for a vicious circle is compounded many times.
If I had a case, I'd rest it with a flourish now, but all I have is a plausibility argument so I'll mundanely stop.
My Dinocrat comment is here.
Addendum 20090806. Suppose the value of those illiquid securities is many times the value of the issuing institution, and people try to hedge with the value of the stock...
I never liked the goo-goo left, but neither have I ever been entirely comfortable with the religious right as a political force.
People are holding tea parties to protest Obama's economic policies. Salt-of-the-earth Americans. They've been there all along.
Yet the religious right has ignored them all along. Instead it has allied with the Bush/Rove/Lott/DeLay/Cunningham/Abramoff crowd to get working control over the GOP.
It confirms my suspicion that they want to force an illegitimate agenda on the country via government.
So says Texas Senator John Cornyn (Republican, of course), who believes all online activity should be archived for the police to peruse at their leisure:"Keeping our children safe requires cooperation on the local, state, federal, and family level."
Background:(CNET) -- Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations.
U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, supporter of a bill that would require Internet user records to be saved for police.
The legislation, which echoes a measure proposed by one of their Democratic colleagues three years ago, would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates.
(HT: The Next Right, where I have ranted at greater length than here.)
Addendum 20090226. I just googled "inferring meaning in random data"[1]. At the bottom of the page, there wasIn response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at ChillingEffects.org.
I don't know if the request is spurious or if Google's search engine is flawed, but I am entirely capable of navigating away from illegal material if I stumble into it. Except, of course, even if I do, I might get a visit from the police should Cornyn get his way.
And how long before people submit spurious complaints to search engines in order to suppress ideas they disagree with? I guess we'll have to hire more lawyers & more bureaucreats to assure that doesn't happen: everybody knows that the solution to a problem caused by big government is to make government bigger.
----------------
[1] I had recently found but forgotten the words 'pareidolia' and 'apophenia', and was trying to remember them
"House Democrats propose $410B spending bill", reports the AP. Including an 8% increase during a dangerous recession.
One of Bush's biggest mistakes was his failure, afaik, to veto a single spending bill while his party controlled Congress. Obama should not repeat it.
Let me fantasize. Everybody (Pelosi, Reid, etc.) gathers for the signing. Obama marches in stonefaced and announces he's not going to waste the American people's money with this and this and this and too much else to mention. He takes out a magic marker and writes a big block-letter VETO that he holds up for the cameras. Saying "Madame Speaker, take this back and fix it," he starts to hand the bill to Pelosi, but then he stops and says, "No, just start over." And marches out.
Seriously, "the President is who you vote for to protect you from other people's Congressmen." Obama should make it publicly clear that he is such a President. (Is he?) Note that early in his administration, Reagan fired government air traffic controllers who were striking illegally, even though their union had supported him in the election.
In other words, Obama should set up a kinder, gentler Sister Soujah moment with Pelosi.
Straight talk from Maureen Dowd: We need leaders to help us through our crises, not provide us with crude evaluations of our character. And we don’t need sermons from liberal virtuecrats, anymore than from conservative virtuecrats.
The whole thing is worth reading. I'm gobsmacked to find myself agreeing with Maureen Dowd, but good for her. More like this, please. From all sides. This is America.
At least, not without taking society with it.
I've remarked, elsewhere if not here, that Congress routinely passes bills that are too long to read. Obviously, things are being insinuated into those bills. Here's an example in the 'stimulus' legislation:The provision, which attracted virtually no attention in the debate over the 1,073-page stimulus bill, creates something called the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board...The board would oversee the in-house watchdogs, known as inspectors general, whose job is to independently investigate allegations of wrongdoing at various federal agencies, without fear of interference by political appointees or the White House.
In the name of accountability and transparency, Congress has given the RAT Board the authority to ask “that an inspector general conduct or refrain from conducting an audit or investigation.”...(p)The language means that the board — whose chairman will be appointed by the president — can reach deep inside a federal agency and tell an inspector general to lay off some particularly sensitive subject. Or, conversely, it can tell the inspector general to go after a tempting political target.
I asked Grassley how he learned that the RAT Board was part of the stimulus bill. You’d think that as a member of the House-Senate conference committee, he would have known all about it. But it turns out Grassley’s office first heard about the provision creating the RAT Board last Wednesday, in a tip from a worried inspector general...(p)When I inquired with the office of a Democratic senator, one who is a big fan of inspectors general, I was told the RAT Board was “something the Obama administration wanted included in this bill.”
Note both the power grab by the White House and the fact that it was snuck into an unrelated piece of legislation that the people who passed it did not read in its entirety.
Things fall apart?
Attorney General Eric Holder speaks.
Well, after that, I wait for Elder to crack down on unnecessary speech codes that stifle legitimate free expression in the academy and workplace. I wait for him to crack down on spurious litigation about 'hostile work environments' and the like. I expect to be waiting a long time.
To be fair, a passage in Obama's Inaugural Address--We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve...
--speaks to my sense of American exceptionalism: that the US has the opportunity to become the template for an advanced post-tribal society. The opportunity...
Despite plummeting oil prices, gas prices went up 15% in January. I didn't keep track of the dates, but at my station the price is up from a low of $1.57/gal to $1.88--while the price of oil has continued to drop.
1. Is this the invisible hand in action, or is it one hand washing another? Surely the oil companies wouldn't try price fixing in this market...or would they, with or without government collusion? Are new taxes being passed on to the consumer? What's going on?
2. Why hasn't this obvious price increase been mentioned by the media?
3. Why hasn't it been mentioned by our representatives, who are ever vigilant on our behalf?
I thought it was out of reach for the foreseeable future. In fact, I thought it was out of reach for humanity as we know it.
But look here (HT: arXiv blog).
Or here.
(Of course, detecting it--which remains to be established--doesn't mean you understand it, or that you've learned enough to try to understand it. Nevertheless this post's label is valid.)
After a day like today in the market, voicing optimism feels like, ah, spitting into a strong wind.
The fact remains that insider buying continues robust. Knock on wood that they don't start selling after this major drop in the indices.
Here's another professor with a constructive attitude. Money quote (written just before the meltdown): Our Venturesome Economy (TM !) has demonstrated a capacity to develop and deploy innovations that sustain our long run prosperity in good times and in bad. Personal computers recall took off in the dark days of the early 1980s. But we mustn’t let the ill-will generated by bad financial innovations lead to policies that harm innovators in the good economy! Clean out the stable, but please keep the horse.
I hope he's right.
Dinocrat smells a rat behind Geithner's bad speech.
From the FT piece linked in the update:...Mr Geithner’s sketchy plan raised suspicions of internal disagreement over the bail-out. Officials strongly deny those rumours, particularly any hint of divergence between Lawrence Summers, the head of the White House National Economic Council, and Mr Geithner, a former protégé of Mr Summers – though some acknowledge differences between the government and independent agencies involved in the process.
Bush-appointed FDIC head Sheila Bair is necessarily the only culprit, but she is an obvious one. This is worse than a leftist cabal. It's a compassionate conservative who cares about The Children.
Bair has essentially no private-sector experience. Apparently she views her agency, which is independent, as having powers which parallel some of the Treasury Department's functions. She gets fawning write-ups in the liberal media:The high-ranking government official most likely to attack Obama's economic policies from the left is ... a Republican?
I take it as a contrarian indicator that Larry "Goldilocks Economy" Kudlow likes her.
To be fair, Bair spotted the housing trouble in late 2007, but her proposed solution was to have ARM teaser rates be made permanent. Unsurprisingly, the banks were not enthusiastic. (And lots of people saw the problem looming. Bair's approach, arguably, is to demagogue the situation and grab for power that she seems unqualified to wield.)
No worries, though. According to the Examiner piece linked in the previous paragraph:Bair, though, said she remains "very much a capitalist."
For more reassurance, let's hear Obama say that he remains very much committed to holding elections in 2010 and 2012...
My instincts with respect to pornography and drugs are (ah, hard-core) libertarian.
Nevertheless, my gut feeling is that a society which flaunts genital flirting on the cover of a mass-circulation publication has gone signficantly awry.
Just because the government shouldn't control it doesn't mean it's healthy.
Just because it's suitable for discreet private use doesn't mean it should be splashed all over every public forum.
****************
The cover of the 2009 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue shows Israeli model Bar Refaeli toying with the microscopic bikini bottom that she has taken partway off. Refaeli:"This is the one I felt the most comfortable with...You have the beach, blue water and a body. That's it. I liked that the top of the suit was on."
Well, of course. She may act naughty, but she's really a nice Jewish girl. Gotta stay eligible to snag that tycoon hubbie, y'know...
SI speaks:It's the cover that matters most, says SI group editor Terry McDonell...Refaeli wears a string bikini by Missoni — and the strings on the bikini bottom are being tugged south.
"The cover has to reflect the athleticism and sexiness of the culture. This photo is modern, her hair and swimsuit look natural. You see her freckles. Her body is amazing and she looks intelligent," McDonell said.
I'm all for athleticism and sexiness, but I wonder how much of the exercising is performed to enable people to spend more time f***ing. Not healthy.
Meanwhile, the libertines' counterparts in the culture wars, the cornfed religious right whose focus is on exorcising, are also obsessed about sex, but in a repressive way.
Both have me uneasy about the future.
Addendum. I had mixed feelings about whether Refaeli's ethnicity and citizenship were germane to this post. It turns out that they are:In 2007, Refaeli became a source of controversy when it became known that she had evaded military service, mandatory for Israeli citizens over 18-years-old, by marrying a family acquaintance and divorcing him soon after. Refaeli stated in an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth, "I really wanted to serve in the IDF, but I don't regret not enlisting, because it paid off big-time," further adding, "Why is it good to die for our country? What, isn't it better to live in New York City?" Refaeli has since said the interview didn't accurately reflect her statements and threatened to file a lawsuit for libel. Consequently, the Israeli Forum for the Promotion of Equal Share in the Burden threatened to boycott the fashion chain Fox if they hired Refaeli, but the two sides reached a compromise in which the model agreed to visit injured IDF soldiers on visits to Israel and encourage enlistment in the army.
Societal acquiescence to her prominence is not a positive indicator for the futures of America and of Israel.
Dinocrat writes: President Obama has no executive experience. It would be an indication that he is learning on the job if he starts cutting back on his hyperbolic rhetoric. Otherwise, it’s going to be a long four years.
I agree completely, just as I agreed with George Will a few months ago:It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?
No guarantees.
With fingers crossed, I remember that Bill Clinton got off to a very rocky start and wound up with a successful Presidency (one that would have been extremely successful if not for his personal flaws).
Richard Lindzen has broken the scientific establishment's 'blue wall of silence'. His Introduction has something important to say about how our culture has devolved.
Somewhere, Lysenko is laughing.
Here. The article has much to agree with, but I am uneasy with wording like this:So if it is the physicists who are to blame, how do we explain the fact that large and not-so-large crashes have been appearing with frequencies that are approximately time-independent?
Just because no single component of a system is exclusively responsible for a systemic failure does not mean that every component is blameless.
And all the children sing:"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
(Tom Lehrer, understandably, perhaps is too harsh on von Braun--but not off target.)
Jack Risko quotes Business Week about the new conventional wisdom at Davos.
1. Everyone stupidly failed to see the financial calamity coming except roughly four economists who now must be heeded in everything they say and all they predict.
Ouch. I thought the shoe would drop at some point, but didn't expect it in 2008. I made decisions on the basis that the establishment had the minimal competence to duct-tape together a decent election-year economy.
I'm pretty sure that some economists who were correct last year have been wrong for many prior years. Hopefully sooner rather than later, the pessimists will go back to being wrong. That is not to say that their views are without merit.
Speaking of wrong economists, Alan Greenspan was just about the only major culprit with the intellectual integrity to admit he was mistaken. I wish he would resume speaking out. His thoughts have value and the derision they would attract would be appropriate penance.
2. The private sector has ruined the global economy and can no longer be trusted. 3. Government is ascendant, with regulation closest to godliness.
I don't mean to shug off a dangerous and inexcusable situation, but it remains true that risk is a cost of progress.
IMHO the people who are shocked shocked to discover they can't trust the private sector have, in fact, never had much good to say about it. Since we can't trust the private sector, apparently it follows that we should trust the government.
Regulation keeps us brutish greedy peasants to a semblance of civilized behavior. Regulation is not intended to waste the invaluable time of the extremely busy idealists who serve as regulators. (/sarc)
4. These conclusions are correct and will stand the test of time…
Per Jack, my fear is that these conclusions are incorrect but will stand the test of time.
Romney returned to Massachusetts to run for governor. He won and had a successful first term. He chose not to seek reelection in 2006, presumably in order to focus on preparing a Presidential campaign.
Rhetorically gifted Deval Patrick upset an establishment candidate for the Democratic nomination and easily won the general election to become the state's first black governor.
Suppose Romney had braved the odds and defeated a charismatic black challenger in a Democratic year. He would have entered the 2008 primaries as the sitting conservative governor of a liberal state. He would have been the natural candidate to oppose Obama (and his record would have have been clearly stronger than Hillary's). Picking Palin as VP would have secured the support of the religious right and swung a few female votes. IMO his chances would have been far better than McCain's (and don't forget that McCain had taken a small lead before his intemperate reaction to the financial crisis). IMO the financial crisis would have strengthened his candidacy.
The moral also applies to Hillary 2004:
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch
To win or lose it all.
The text is here.
In contrast to many online reactions, I liked it at first reading. (Is much of the widespread negative tone online due to the fact that it's easier to criticize than to formulate something defensibly constructive?)
A key paragraph:For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.
As an American exceptionalist in my fashion, I was pleased to read that. IMO a major, essential part of American exceptionalism is the USA's unique opportunity to become a template for a modern post-tribal society.
Unfortunately, I do not see how creating protected classes and quotas--almost fifty years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964--is a step in this direction. It is necessary to accentuate tribal distinctions in order to dissolve them? Ben Tre logic?
My gut impression: King does not strike me as a great moral leader. He strikes me as a great political leader who harvested a ripe moral issue.
This is meant as objectivity, not as criticism.
Bank of America, which supposedly was going to save Merrill Lynch's role in the financial system, now wants more TARP money to absorb Merrill's losses. After its stock nearly tripled from its recent low, Citicorp is plunging again.
Barney Frank and Phil Gramm have indignantly declared themselves blameless. Bernanke is an expert on the Great Depression, but he let Lehman fail. Paulson was going to buy up troubled assets, and then he wasn't. (Geithner didn't do his taxes correctly.)
This as though we'd broken the Japanese code in 1940 and then let Pearl Harbor happen anyway.
Addendum. Someone--I didn't save the link--argued that a binding government guarantee to cover unforeseen Merrill losses must have been part of the inducement for BofA to do the acquisition. Plausible but not compelling, IMO.
Glenn Reynolds harrumphs about government waste and links to the Porkbusters site. As I type, its front page has not been updated since 2* May 2008. About Porkbusters:Porkbusters was conceived of by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame in the fall of 2005. Seeking help implementing his vision, he approached N.Z. Bear (now "out of the bear cave" and known also by his given name, Rob Neppell) and Porkbusters.org was born.
Ah, yes, a visionary. Experience has made "visionary" a dirty word to me...
I liked Instapundit a lot more when Reynolds had the 'If you have a modem, I have an opinion' logo.
The logical but (as-yet) unspoken corollary to this.
Addendum. Times commenter Don L of Hartford, CT anticipated the above post, using words identical to my title.
Addendum 20090114. US News reports that both Google and Alex Wissner-Gross, the author "quoted" by the UK Times, dispute the report. Network World:Wissner-Gross said he did discuss Google with the newspaper in broad generalizations, in that Google uses energy, and that the generation of that energy would cause CO2 to be released.
However, Wissner-Gross said one of The Sunday Times writers seemed eager to confirm the seven-gram figure and link it to Google. The researcher said he did not do so. Wissner-Gross said he saw a draft of the story before publication and suggested some changes, but those edits were not made.
Efforts to reach the writers at The Sunday Times were unsuccessful.
How shocking to learn that a major newspaper might be slanting the news according to a predetermined agenda...
Several bloggers have noted that the Huffington Post, of all places, has published a slam against Gore and his shtick.
*********************************
IMO the real issue is not whether warming--ditto for cooling--is real and (if real) humanly caused. The real issue is whether we can make a determination with enough confidence to warrant immediate reengineering of our economy.
I don't question that there are forces that tend to warm (or cool) the earth. I don't doubt that the magnitude of each of these can be estimated reasonably well, but I am dubious that the short- and long-term feedbacks can be adequately quantified. I doubt that every relevant force has been identified.
And I am completely unconvinced that reliable predictions can be made about the resultant of offsetting forces.
It's possible that in the foreseeable future the climate will continue muddling along; it's possible that warming or cooling will emerge as an overriding ecological threat. However, it would be foolish or worse to reconfigure our civilization on the basis of what is understood today.
After I've been thinking a semblance of normalcy is returning and watching the stock market move upward, this is chilling:...the economic underpinnings of the US have become so fractured that it risks being marginalized on the global stage. This "change in fundamentals" that is creeping up on us? Our creditor's willingness to hold dollar-denominated assets in general and to finance our persistent budget deficits in particular. This is the real credit crisis facing the US.
Why are things different this time? The Great Depression is held up as the singular economic event in the US to be avoided at all costs. The Government put "safety nets" in place to help those who cannot help themselves in difficult times. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. We, as a nation, have been spending far beyond our means for generations; so much so, in fact, that the purported safety nets place a greater risk to our future than the risks they were created to avoid...
(Boldface mine.)
The bad news: Whatever Happened to Silicon Valley Innovation?, asks Business Week.
Since Business Week covers have a reputation as contrary indicators, the good news is that What's Wrong With Silicon Valley (And How To Make It Right) is this week's cover.
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I wonder whether much--not all--of what Silicon Valley has done should be called exploitation rather than innovation. In particular, I'm thinking about the creation and basic infrastructure of the Internet. Libertarian purists are not keen to note that the Net is a child of the military-industrial complex.
Chris Weigant:Two images will bookend the history of George W. Bush and Iraq: the "Mission Accomplished" banner, and an Iraqi journalist throwing his shoes at Bush's head.
Some would prefer a photo of Bush being led away in chains and orange pajamas, but IMO such criminalization of foreign-policy decisions would significantly accelerate our decline.
Find a rationale to throw him in jail for gross economic mismanagement and you've got my attention.
