Kiriath-Arba

Another Round of Devil's Advocate: Knowing When to Shut Up

2009-06-22T12:25:00.002-04:00

Another piece of mine published at America's Right.

Iran held its 10th presidential election on June 12, 2009. Polls were kept open four hours past the scheduled closing time in order to accommodate the crowds, and pre-election analysis predicted that the greater the turnout the greater the chances for opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi. And yet the official results gave the election to incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a 66% to 33% landslide.

Mousavi announced: "I’m warning that I won’t surrender to this charade," his supporters took to the streets by the hundreds of thousands, and the largest civil unrest Iran has seen since the days of the Islamic Revolution was underway.

Read the rest at America's Right.

Inventing Prejudice out of Prejudice

2009-06-10T09:56:00.001-04:00

I generally enjoy Camille Paglia for her brutal honesty and uncompromising independence, but in her most recent piece she engages in the kind of routine dishonesty that shocks me coming from her. Here it is:

the president missed a huge opportunity to speak with equal force to doubters in his own nation, where suspicion of Muslims has sometimes turned ruthless and paranoid. For example, while driving recently on the New Jersey Turnpike, I was passed by an SUV with a U.S. Marine Corps sticker and a black-and-white decal that said: "What do you feel when you kill a terrorist? RECOIL." For "terrorist," of course, substitute "Muslim" -- a scenario where a person without a military uniform can nevertheless be instantly targeted for slaughter and where the executioner, wrenched far from his native land, has deadened himself to feel nothing but the kick of his own rifle.

Where is the evidence that your typical American sees "Muslim" and "terrorist" as interchangeable? I know for a fact that some Americans do engage in this kind of bigotry. I got into a huge flame war with the owner of a small gun-rights forum when he stated that it's impossible to be both a good American and a good Muslim at the same time. But this kind of extremism is more often born from careless speech than genuine animosity towards Muslims. Some of this guys friends are Muslims and I know that - were it not for his staggering amount of pride at being called out - he would have rescinded those words not out of fear of reprisal, but because he didn't really mean them.

And that - a single example of a stubborn man refusing to admit that he screwed up despite knowing it to be true - is the closest I've ever experienced to anti-Muslim bigotry in the pro-gun, military-friendly circles I travel.

I'm not saying that there are no anti-Muslim bigots at all, merely that the number is very small, and that there's no justification whatsoever for Paglia or anyone else to swap "Muslim" and terrorist.

Why do they do feel safe in doing this?

Because it plays to the stereotype of conservatives as jingoistic, racist, misogynist, homophobic bigots. You repeat something often enough, and people start to see it as true.

Another example I saw recently was the NYT review of Glen Beck's Common Sense Comedy tour. There are a lot of unwarranted shots in the review (big surprise), but here's the germane ones:

One of Mr. Beck’s favorite tactics is a combination of misdirection and guilt by association: he doesn’t say nasty things about ethnic minorities or homosexuals, but he will slip in a reference to how all our cars will soon be built by “undocumented” workers, and he will, in a long, lame anecdote about liberal artists and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, switch into a high, lisping voice for just a second.

Mr. Beck’s appeals to racial solidarity are delivered in the same winking way: speaking of the “grand, magnificent” founding fathers, he leans toward his visibly homogeneous Midwestern audience and says, “and we’ve lost touch with how much like us they were.”

In all three of these examples we've got liberals kindly "translating" conservative code into plain English for us, without any defense of why we should be using the liberal-authored dictionary on conservative speakers.

Is there any reason we should believe that "undocumented workers" is code for "Hispanics"? None - other than the circular assumption that conservatives are racist.

The only lisping voice I've ever heard Beck do - either at the show or ever - is his immitation of Barney Frank. Who, you know, actually does have a horrible lisp. But since we already know that Beck is by definition a homophobe, we can just omit the fact that he's parodying Frank in particular.

But the last one is the most egregious of all. Beck comes out dressed in 18th century get-up for the last hour because he wants to demystify the Founders. His point is that they are just like us. Like average, normal people. That's the central theme of his entire last hour. And there isn't one damn trace of racism in it. Not even a smidgen.

So what we have here - and the irony gets tiring after a while - is an elite NYT reporter assuming that Beck is racist, homophobic, etc. Then he uses his own prejudice to interpret Beck's comments in ways that - if he wasn't already convinced Beck was a bigot - would make no sense at all. So - do you feel the irony thickening around you as you read? - the only "evidence" for Beck being a bigot is the fact that the reviewer is prejudiced.

It's getting old.

You want to show that Beck is a racist? Here's a thought: find something he said that is actually racist. Putting words in his mouth to make him fit your own narrow-minded prejudices just ain't going to cut it.

I expect this sort of nonsense from the NYT. But Paglia?

I'm disappointed.

Racism in America

2009-05-14T10:19:00.005-04:00

Two stories have attracted my attention to this issue.

Maggie and John Anderson's "Empowerment Experiment" is an attempt to go an entire year only buying from black-owned businesses. Maggie, quoted in a Fox News article, says: "It's like, my people have been here 400 years and we don't even have a Walgreens to show for it."

The movement is apparently spreading. The article goes on:

Plans are under way to track spending among supporters nationwide and build a national database of quality black businesses. The first affiliate chapter has been launched in Atlanta, and the couple has established a foundation to raise funds for black businesses and an annual convention.

This raises two questions for me.

Isn't this racism? Surely it would be racist for white folks to refuse to patronize black establishments. Now I get that it's overly simplistic to just swap "white" and "black" out as though the two were interchangeable due to the fact that the country is roughly 80% white and only about 10% black (off the top of my head). Perhaps, due both to their minority status, uniquely tragic history, and continued disadvantage, African Americans can engage in the kinds of activities that would be forbidden for whites. But on the other hand, it doesn't seem right to say that because of those factors anything goes. Surely there are some forms of racial discrimination that can't be excused?

Is this one of those things?

Secondly - I want to know what the end goal is for those who seek racial justice and empowerment for minorities. To me - and I may be naive - I had assumed that the end goal was a society where racial differences didn't matter. Maybe I am just clueless, but wasn't that Martin Luther King's dream?

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Implicit in this dream of racial color blindness is a goal of integration. But racial integration is something that can't be achieved by refusing to buy from one race or another. And so it seems to me that certain kinds of racial empowerment sacrifice the vision of Martin Luther King for an integrated society in order to achieve short-term gains through divisive tactics.

How can we come together as a society of Americans (unhyphenated) if we insist on measuring everything by race, testing everything for racial equality, and making polices based on race. Why have race-based affirmative action when affirmative action based on income or family history (e.g. scholarships for the first generation in a family to attend college) would seem to be reach the same goals without perpetuating racial divides?

If the "Empowerment Experiment" wasn't quite enough to get me to ride this short piece, news that a black executive was fired for failing to support a black candidate pushed me over the edge. The New York Post reports that Joyce Johnson was booted from her position as president and CEO of the nonprofit Black Equity Alliance by the board of directors after she endorsed Bloomberg in March. Bloomberg - who is white independent - could find himself running against Bill Thompson, a black Democrat. Adding fuel to the fire, Johnson claims in her suit that the board of directors objected to her support of Bloomberg not just because he was white, but because he was Jewish.

And so the spectre of black racism is raised again. Tense relations between some black activists and Jewish groups are well known. Hispanic/black tensions are on the rise as continued immigration (legal and illegal) creates an ever growing Hispanic minority in the country. And according to many historians, the LA riots of 1992 became essentially an anti-Korean pogrom.

And so there is one more set of questions I see in addition to the first two.

The "Empowerment Experiment" illustrates an obvious fact: you can't choose to buy from one race without refusing to buy from another race. And so I have to ask: Will all attempts to seek racial justice through segregation by race inevitably lead to racism rather than equality?

The firing of Johnson for supporting a white Jew over a black poses the question in another way: Is it possible to pledge allegiance to one race without declaring war on every other race?

And, on the most broad level, is the lesson here that there are no true alternatives to Martin Luther King's dream of integration? Are the choices we face only between integration and a perpetual cycle of reciprocating racism?

Dick Morris Explains Why Obama's Polls Are Wrong

2009-04-29T12:39:00.002-04:00

OK, the polls aren't really wrong. Obama has an approval rating in the 60s. That's pretty high. But the impression that this gives is wrong. This piece from Dick Morris reiterates what I've been saying since before Obama was even elected: Americans like Obama. They don't like his policies.

Right now America's fondness for Obama the man - and more importantly their need to believe our President has a clue - are on a direct collision course with his enormously unpopular and ineffective policies.

So Dick Morris writes:

When the Obama administration crashes and burns, with approval ratings that fall through the floor, political scientists can trace its demise to its first hundred days. While Americans are careful not to consign a presidency they desperately need to succeed to the dustbin of history, the fact is that this president has moved — on issue after issue — in precisely the opposite direction of what the people want him to do.

Read the rest at TheHill.com.

To add weight to the findings of the article, Morris only goes into the economic policies of Obama. He doesn't even touch on the social policies he has implemented, which have been almost universally unpopular.

It's a race now. Will Obama manage to push through his policies - and do irreparable harm to the nation - before his popularity runs out? It depends on what meager resistance the headless Republican Party is able to mount and how much in-fighting the ascendant Democrats engage in. And - as always - it depends on the extent to which Americans are able to see past the inspiring rhetoric to the depressing, decrepit policies.

A Tale of Two Flues

2009-04-28T08:11:00.003-04:00

Ever since news of the outbreak of swine flu in Mexico there has been a whirlwind of coverage. One thing that is impossible to miss is the incredible range in the tone of reactions. US officials have been largely muted, while countries like Russia are screening every single plan that arrives from the Americas. Randall Munroe of xkcd did a good job, as usual, of capturing the internet's reaction:

There's actually a good reason for the disparity in reactions, however. It's a tale of two flues.

Spanish Flu Pandemic (1918)

An outbreak of influenza from March of 1918 to June of 1920 that swept the entire globe, infected nearly half of the entire human species, and killed up to 100 million people. This strain of the flu was unusual in that it caused an overreaction in people's immune system which led to a higher mortality rate among young, healthy people than among the very young and very old.

Swine Flu Scare (1976)

After an army recruit died and others were hospitalized with a new swine flu outbreak, President Ford took an aggressive stance and decided to immunize the entire American population. (I guess he'd never heard of herd immunity.) It turned out this particular strain of influenza wasn't really that dangerous, but the vaccine was. About a quarter of the American population was vaccinated before the program was halted, and by that time about 500 Americans had died from reactions to the vaccine.

The memory of the 1976 vaccine debacle explains in part the reluctance of the United States to go to extremes in responding to the current outbreak. In addition, there's the fact that cases in the US so far have been fairly mild. Finally, there's almost certainly political considerations with regards to America's open border with Mexico.

It's important to point out, however, that waiting for the next deadly flu strain is like waiting for the next big California earthquake. It's a question of when, not if.

Final thought: The words "pandemic" and "epidemic" are being slung around a lot these days. These words actually have definitions that go beyond "when a disease is really bad".

epidemic - An epidemic occurs when new cases of a certain disease occur in a given human population, during a given period, substantially exceed what is "expected," based on recent experience

This separates an epidemic from a disease that is endemic. Endemic diseases exist in a society perpetually but at a relatively low rate. Chicken pox is endemic in the United States.

pandemic - A pandemic is an epidemic of infectious disease that spreads through populations across a large region; for instance a continent, or even worldwide.

So I'd say - as a non-expert - that we've already got a swine flu epidemic in Mexico. It's not the season for flu and yet we've got thousands of sick people. If the swine flu spreads substantially across the United States then - between Mexico and the US - most of North America will be infected and we can start calling it a continent-wide pandemic.

We Need Reagan, Not McCarthy

2009-04-23T15:19:00.000-04:00

Renowned American historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay called The Paranoid Style in American Politics in Harper's Magazine in 1964. Clearly, this essay--in many ways a rebuke of Goldwater--is not going to win friends and influence people here at America's Right. And that's okay. Hofstadter was wrong to write off Goldwater as a right-wing extremist, and he was wrong to write off McCarthy as nothing but a witch-hunter. The Verona papers prove conclusively the extent and depth of Soviet penetration into United States society. Just this week, news broke that documents reveal liberal journalist hero I. F. Stone was yet another KGB mole.

The importance and relevance of this essay is two-fold. First of all, it establishes the pattern for how society has dealt with movements that have been labeled conspiracy theories -- whether they were fairy tales or fact. But, more importantly from a conservative perspective, it places current fears of Obama into a historical context.

Read the rest of my newest piece at America's Right.

The Awakening of a Sleeping Giant

2009-04-22T13:07:00.000-04:00

Who do they think they are dealing with, anyway?

In 1986 an American conservative icon, Barry Goldwater, retired from his senate seat. John McCain--who is a true American war hero--defeated Democrat Richard Kimball by 20 points to assume Goldwater’s seat. He went on to win again by large margins in 1992 (56 percent), 1998 (69 percent), and in 2004 (77 percent).

But things might not go so smoothly for John McCain in 2010.

Ben Smith of Politico.com breaks the news that Chris Simcox--founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps--has resigned from his position with that organization to run against McCain in the Republican primary leading up to the 2010 general election.

It’s not hard to see why Simcox made this call. John McCain may have assumed Barry Goldwater’s senate seat, but he has clearly not assumed Goldwater’s mantle of conservative leadership.

To the casual observer, this will appear to be one more fracture in the sinking ship that is the Republican Party -- but, in this case, the casual observer could not be more wrong.

Read the rest of my newest piece at America's Right.

CNN Once Again Causes Me to Ponder the Limits of Jouranlistic Stupidity

2009-04-22T09:41:00.009-04:00

The headline is tragic: Boy finds forgotten gun, accidentally shoots self in head. I don't want to detract from the tragedy of the death of any child. I have two little ones of my own, and can't even stand to try and imagine what it would feel like to lose one. Thankfully, the 12-year old boy in this story is not dead. He's in stable condition, and I hope this means he will make a full recovery.

That's the first thing that set off mild alarms. If he'd shot himself in the hand or the leg would it have made a headline? Probably not. But usually shooting yourself in the head is deadly, so it gets promoted to CNNs front page as if the accident had been fatal. You know, "If it bleeds, it leads!"

Secondly, the age of 12 makes me wonder how they know it was accidental. Honestly, shouldn't a 12-year old know better than to point a gun at their head? I don't know. Maybe 12-year olds are a lot dumber than I remember.

And speaking of dumb, there's really no excuse for parents who forget that they have a loaded handgun in a box in their closet.

But having said all that, I then got to this part of the article:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that 17 states have child firearm access protection and safe-storage laws.

Chief Assistant State Attorney Bruce Bartlett says that although laws are needed, an accident with a firearm can be a greater penalty than any judge could ever hand down.

"Sometimes, the injury of a child is more severe from a punishment standpoint than any kind of criminal charge," he said.

The CDC says three children per day, on average, died in accidental incidents in the United States from 2000 to 2005, the last year data are available.

Notice how that last line talks about "accidental incidents" and says nothing about firearms? If you didn't know any better, you'd think that means that 3 kids a day are dying from accidental gunshot wounds. That's about 365*3*6 = 6,570 children over the 6 years from 2000 - 2005.

As someone who has actually done a little research I knew that these numbers were completely absurd. So I went to the supposed source - the CDC - and crunched some numbers of my own. Here's the site I used, in case you want to replicate my results. WISQARS Injury Mortality Reports, 1999 - 2005

First I ran a simple query to check the overall number of unintended deaths from all sources for ages 0 - 18 for 2000 - 2005. Result? 62,106. That works out to nearly 30 deaths per day. So off the bat, where does the 3 per day come from?

Well it doesn't come from firearms. The total firearms deaths for the same age and time range is 873, which works out to less than .4 deaths per day. So of all the accidental deaths from 2000 - 2005 in the age range from 0 - 18 only 1.4% come from firearms. By comparison, 60.9% come from motor vehicles (37,802 or about 17 per day) and 10.4% come from drowning (6,477 or about 3 per day).

Usually we don't have 17 and 18 year olds in mind when we talk about children, however. So I ran the same queries for the same time ranges, but limited the age ranges to 0 - 12 and 0 - 8. For the 0 - 12 age range the firearm deaths fell down to 1.1% of the total for that age range (293, or just over .1 per day) and for the 0 - 8 age range the firearm deaths fell down to 0.7% of the total for that age range (159 or about .07 per day).

Rich Phillips has the byline for the CNN article. What was he smoking when he concocted this 3 deaths per day number? Did he have drownings in mind, and forget to mention this? What, exactly, did he think could be achieved by inserting this incorrect fact about total accidental deaths into a story about the allegedly accidental injury of a 12-year old by a firearm?

I have no idea.

But I want to take this opportunity to talk about accidental firearm death facts. First of all, they aren't nearly as common as the Brady Bunch and other anti-gun organizations would have you believe. Motor vehicles kill more then 40 times as many children as firearms do. But what's more important to observe is the reason behind gun deaths.

First of all, very young children aren't killing themselves in great numbers. I doubt they are killing themselves at all, but I don't think the query results include the ability to determine who fired the gun that led to the death. In any case, they are the least likely to be killed.

It's not hard to understand why. Although I keep my guns locked at all times when I'm not actually wearing one in a holster, I know that there's absolutely no way my 2-year old daughter could rack the shotgun or release the safety. Nor could she chamber a round in my AR-15. Even my wife has trouble racking the slide on my Glock 19, so my daughter couldn't do that either. It will be many years before she can do any of these things. Which means that to hurt herself the only chance would be if I left a loaded gun with a round in the chamber and the safety off for her to find. (Just a loaded gun wouldn't do it.)

The idea that a gun is ready to just go off at any second if you so much as bump into it is the kind of hysterical paranoia that only someone who doesn't actually own or shoot guns can believe in.

In order to fire a gun, the kind of strength and coordination that comes with age is required, which is why older kids have more firearm accidents. And the thing about older kids - say 12 years old - is that you can definitely teach them not to point a gun at their head.

You see, the parents in this article owned a gun, but it was a gift that they had never fired and had forgotten they even owned. That's not exactly your average gun enthusiast, is it? How much training do you think they had given to their kid? None. If it was truly an accident the parents are guilty on two fronts: first of all for leaving the gun in the open, but more importantly for failing to teach their children the basics of gun safety. I believe in the 2nd amendment, but that doesn't mean I think it's morally acceptable for people to buy a gun without understanding the responsibilities that come with firearm ownership. Especially parents.

I said that I keep my guns in my safe. This is true. But I've also taken it out to show my 2 year old, and explain to her that it's dangerous and could hurt her. I knew that she wouldn't understand bullets at her young age, so I worked the slide a few times. When you pull it back and release to chamber a round, it slams forward with considerable force. I explained that this could hurt her, and she understood that. From time to time when she sees me moving the handgun from safe to holster or back, she will say "That's Daddy's gun! Sophie no touch. Hurt Sophie's fingers."

As she gets older I will continue to teach her lessons appropriate to her age, strength, and maturity. I will teach her the fundamental gun safety rules, and we will go shooting together to practice them. So if she is ever at a home where guns are not kept in a safe, they will not have a forbidden fruit allure to her and she will know the basic rules that will keep her safe.

I am not saying safety training is a substitute for securing your firearms. But securing your firearms isn't a substitute for safety training, either. Even if you never forget to secure your firearms, there's no guarantee your neighbors will be as conscientious.

I am saying that we need to realize that a lot of things can kill children. Mostly cars. Also buckets of water and baths. Also firearms. The way to respond to these threats is the same: minimize the danger and educate your children.

This is what responsible firearms owners do.

Now if only we could get journalists to understand common sense and responsibility...

An Obsequent Precedent (and some extra thoughts on race)

2009-04-08T12:27:00.007-04:00

That was the title I submitted, anyway. Jeff changed it to "An Obsequent President". I thought the play on words was more clever. A little too clever, apparently. Anyway, here's the intro:

When the news first trickled out about President Barack Obama’s bow to the King of Saudi Arabia, I rolled my eyes. Really, I thought, are we going to take him to task for every protocol violation?

I don’t like sounding shrill. It turns off moderates. More importantly, it’s my moral obligation to strive for objectivity. If I would make an excuse for George W. Bush or Mitt Romney or Ronald Reagan, after all, then I certainly could not fault Barack Obama. It’s my duty to do my best to hold everyone to an equal standard. Besides, I could see myself, in a moment of confusion, forgetting protocol and bowing to a king.

As far as I was concerned, the bow was a non-issue.

Two things have changed my mind.

Read the rest of the article at America's Right.

When a Video Game isn't a Game

2009-04-07T15:43:00.004-04:00

The headline came to me courtesy of the Slashdot RSS feed: Konami announces a Game Based On a 2004 Battle in Fallujah. I thought back to an article, I'm not sure who had written it, in which a younger video game journalist had showed his grandfather - a World War II vet - some of the numerous WWII genre video games out there. You've got Call of Duty and Medal of Honor and Company of Heroes and who knows how many others out there. The elderly man, who had seen his own friends die in combat, said the games didn't set well with him. It wasn't right to turn the sacrifice of a generation into fodder for adolescent amusement.

So I followed the link to the main article at the LA Times - titled Konami announces Six Days in Fallujah, based on 2004 Iraq battle - with a feeling of mild nausea. It's bad enough that we turn half-century old wars into games, are we going to do the same thing with a war that hasn't even ended yet? There had to be something beyond the headline.

And there was.

While we've got the requisite "What are they thinking quote?" from an expert (Celia Pearce, professor of digital media and director of the Experimental Game Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says "Making a fun game about war is hypocritical, because war is not fun."), the real story is that the folks who got this initiative rolling are not conniving game studio executives, but actual veterans from the battle.

The idea for the game, called Six Days in Fallujah (The Times spells the name of the city differently), came from U.S. Marines who returned from the battle with video, photos and diaries of their experiences. Instead of dialing up Steven Spielberg to make a movie version of their stories, they turned to Atomic Games, a company in Raleigh, N.C., that makes combat simulation software for the military.

Wars throughout the ages have inspired great literature, including Homer's "The Iliad," William Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida," Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" and Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front." Wars also have provided grist for Hollywood's mill, which has churned out numerous World War II films with cigar-chomping soldiers played by square-jawed actors such as John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Recently, movies such as "Apocalypse Now," "Full Metal Jacket" and "Black Hawk Down" presented grislier views of war.

Today's warriors are more likely to pick up a game controller than a paperback. "The soldiers wanted to tell their stories through a game because that's what they grew up playing," said John Choon, senior brand manager for the game at Konami Digital Entertainment in El Segundo, the publisher of Six Days in Fallujah.

Although LA Times writer Alex Pham doesn't think to bring the issue up fully, this really raises the question again: are video games art? I don't believe that's a question that has an answer yet. I believe it's a question that the people who make video games are going to answer through the types of games they make.

The problem, of course, is that a "game", by definition, is something you do. It's not something you receive as an audience. This is even more important than the trivial connotations of the word "game". After all, the military calls many of its training exercises "war games", so there's nothing inherently light-weight about the word "game".

A novel, a symphony, a play, a movie: all of these things can be seen as art, entertainment, or both. I'm not going to hazard a definition of the word "art", but I will say that as a general rule it should both be well-crafted (the meaning of which depends on the medium) and that it should have that extra component: whether you want to call it "moving" or "uplifting" or "challenging" it should engage the audience in a way that leaves an impression beyond the final credits.

Video games like Tetris are, I think, probably not art in this sense of the word. But narrative games - such as Call of Duty 4 - have begun to rise to that level. And I believe this game could raise the bar yet farther by taking seriously the subject matter it addresses.

The game, scheduled to be released sometime next year, is ground in the intimate and harrowing experiences of three dozen U.S. Marines from Camp Pendleton's 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment.

At first blush, the game looks like many others in its genre, including Medal of Honor and Call of Duty.... What separates Six Days in Fallujah, however, is the game's primary goal, expressed by Atomic Games President Peter Tamte, during an interview last week:

For us, the challenge was how do you present the horrors of war in a game that
is also entertaining, but also gives people insight into a historical situation
in a way that only a video game can provide? Our goal is to give people that
insight, of what it's like to be a Marine during that event, what it's like to
be a civilian in the city and what it's like to be an insurgent.

Is it possible for a work of art to be at once entertaining and true to such grisly subject matter? I am not sure. The closest we can look - both in terms of medium and subject matter - would be movies like "Saving Private Ryan" or the miniseries "Band of Brothers". Superficially then, the answer would have to be "yes". But it's not so simple. The objective of a game like this is to shoot the bad guys first. This isn't something you do of necessity. It's something you do for fun. You get points for doing it right.

That is a chasm away from the depiction of violence in Band of Brothers where violence is taking seriously from a moral perspective. A video game with the objective of killing sounds more like James Bond than Band of Brothers - with row upon row of faceless henchmen to dispatch without a qualm as the protagonist proceeds towards the objective.

I don't think we can know how this game will turn out until it's available to purchase and play. I applaud the efforts to take the material seriously, and hope that they can succeed. But - as words like "game" and "play" suggest - they must either redefine the medium of games or we must adjust our language for this effort to succeed as art.

America's Rights Posts

2009-04-07T15:35:00.002-04:00

I've had three additional posts up at America's Right since the last one. This blog is getting a bit neglected. Since Jeff seems to like most of the politics stuff I right, and since Facebook is a lot easier for the quick comments on articles that I think are interesting, I'm not sure what will become of this blog.

I will probably start to balance out the politics a bit with some of my original style of posts about technology and such.

Not that I'm sure this is a life-changing even in my dozen or so readers. :-) So here are the America's Right pieces I've written:

Stop the War on Success!

As a married man, I hear the phrase "I told you so" a lot more than I get to use it. Therefore, when I do get to use it, I relish the opportunity.

So, to anyone who thought that the mob frenzy wouldn't drive talent out of AIG -- I told you so. To anyone who thought innocent people wouldn't bear the cost of this insanity -- I told you so. To anyone who thought that legislating out of anger wouldn't come back to bite us in the butt both culturally and financially -- yeah, I told you so.

I'm referring to a letter of resignation from AIG executive Jake DeSantis to AIG CEO Edward Liddy published in full in yesterday's New York Times.

Read the rest at America's Right...

President Obama's Brave New Ethics Stance: Anti-Life

With the emerging controversy over President Barack Obama's scheduled commencement address at renowned Catholic university Notre Dame, specifically complaints from students and bishops alike as to what could be perceived as the school's tacit endorsement of an openly pro-Abortion president, conversations have once again turned to life and death in the wombs of America.

Abortion is one of the most contentious political issues in the United States. As a result of the highly charged emotional atmosphere of the debate, you can find extremists on both sides of the issue -- from those who want to bomb abortion clinics to those who think infanticide should be legal up until several months after birth. So when I say that President Barack Obama stands out as the most extreme politician on life issues to ever hold national office I want that to sink in.

Even in an argument defined by controversy, he’s playing in a league of his own.

Read the rest at America's Right...

President Obama and the Danger of Overreaching

Back before the election, I summed up my view of Barack Obama’s campaign by calling it "The Biggest Con Job in American History." The reasons for this are simple: 60 percent of Americans view themselves as conservatives and only 36 percent self-identify as liberal. If you do the math, this means that for Obama to win the election with 53% of the vote, more than one in five conservatives who voted cast their ballot for Obama.

Why would conservatives vote for Obama? Perhaps a sense of history outweighed politics. Perhaps they simply didn’t realize how astoundingly liberal Barack Obama’s record was. Most likely it was both. A pre-election Rasmussen poll found that 27 percent of Americans viewed Obama as "a political moderate." Considering that, now you know why over 20 percent of American conservatives voted for Obama: the benefit was being part of something historical and the cost was mitigated by the mistaken belief that he was a centrist.

The problem with this scheme has always been what to do after the election. In an ordinary con, once you get the goods you skedaddle, but Obama has to stick around for 4 years and actually govern.

Read the rest at America's Right...

The AIG Diversion: Numbers and history provide much-needed perspective on the populist outcry

2009-03-24T11:28:00.001-04:00

This is my most recent piece written for America's Right.

If I had said just two weeks ago that the most riveting headlines in America would include Eric Cantor agreeing with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid on one side of a hotly contested debate while Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson agree with Barack Obama on the other side, you’d have thought I was insane. But that’s exactly what has happened, and it's precisely where we stand on the question of how to handle the populist feeding frenzy that is the AIG bailout fiasco.

Read the rest here.

Another Piece at America's Right:

2009-03-20T23:32:00.002-04:00

President Harry Truman made the expression "The Buck Stops Here" famous by placing a sign with that phrase on his desk in the Oval Office. It was a great statement precisely because it was unqualified. Responsibility stops here -- no exceptions, exclusions, or excuses.

With headlines like "Obama Takes Responsibility for AIG Bonus Fiasco", President Barack Obama has received a lot of positive press for making similar, Trumanesque remarks at a town hall meeting in Costa Mesa, California yesterday. And, if you listen to all but the last eight or ten seconds of his remarks, you could indeed mistakenly think that he is taking a "buck stops here" position. You could come away with an impression of a man rising above political squabbling and partisanship to embrace the accountability that comes with our nation’s highest office. But if you do listen to the last sentence from this clip, everything changes.

Read the rest of my piece Conveniently Trumanesque at America's Right.

How much are those AIG bonuses?

2009-03-17T12:46:00.003-04:00

Everyone keeps throwing around the total amount of all the AIG bonuses: $165 - $170 million dollars. But how much money are we really talking about per-person? There's no way to know for sure because the company has refused to divulge the specifics (as well they should!), but this article gives some ideas.

First of all, the top 7 execs aren't getting a bonus. They already passed. Then the next level down is 43 execs, and their total payments are about $9.6M. So we're talking $204,255.30 per person. That doesn't sound nearly as bad as "$165M", does it?

There's a ton of controversy over the Financial Products unit that cost these guys so much. There are 370 people there, but I don't know what portion of the $165M they are supposed to be getting. There's also supposed to be another $600M in bonuses/retention going out 4,700 people throughout the company. That would be about $127,659 per person. You have to wonder why these guys are being given a bonus for ruining the company, but there are a few things to consider:

1. Bonus is a misleading term. A lot of folks on the sales side are paid on a commission or other variable bonus. Most Americans who work hourly or on salary (if they get a bonus at all) see it as a bit of extra money, but for these guys it's not extra. It's their salary.

2. These bonuses are being called "retention bonuses". This makes sense. Sure, the folks at the Financial Products may have screwed AIG over, but if you get rid of them all who's going to fix the problem?

3. On a broader scale, the backlash against AIG is going to cripple the company. They've got guards posted to protect the offices, and some employees are too afraid to come to work. There are 116,000 employees at AIG. If we chase away the new talent and the existing executives that's a lot of regular Joes and Janes who are going to lose their shirts.

As some one who was recently laid off (from a financial firm I understand) that people plan on those bonuses. I got terminated with within weeks of getting my first bonus. It was only going to be a 4-figure bonus because I was a low-level salaried employee, but I understand that folks plan their finances around those bonuses. Not getting it hurts.

And there are some other things to consider. First of all, it's ironic that the public is against nationalization, but apparently in favor of the government telling companies how to run their businesses. Exactly what do you people think nationalization looks like? Secondly, AIG is the whipping-boy for a lot of the other banks. The bailout money that we're funnelling to AIG is being funnelled right back at the door to other banks as fast as we can throw it at them. That's because AIGs problems come from being the counterparty to credit-default swaps.

One reason the securities that were made from sub-prime mortgages got such high bond-ratings is that you could get insurance on them. You buy the security, and then you pay a bit more and you get insurance on it. Well AIG was the company that took the other end of the insurance bargain. As the counter-party, if the securities went belly-up they were the ones who promised to pay the difference.

This means that all those other folks (including very large financial institutions) who bet on the securities are getting a government bail out without any flack or strings attached. The government hands the money to AIG, AIG hands the money to the folks who owned the securities. Presumably they are paying their employees bonuses as usual (and getting credit for not needing government money) and no one bats an eye.

This is ugly populism at its worst. The folks at the Financial Products division of AIG are - from what I've read - some shady folks. They operated out of London because the US laws wouldn't tolerate their activities. They deserve to be prosecuted if possible, and they deserve the blame to the extent that the knowingly sold AIG to the brink of bankruptcy for their own profit. But what do the other 116,000 employees at AIG - thousands of which are waiting for those bonuses - have to do with it?

Nothing.

And what good do we think it will accomplish to try and take their money? Money they were contractually entitled to before there was ever a bailout?

No good at all.

And how much sense does it make to whine and complain about nationalization of the financial sector while also calling for the government to use its equity stake in AIG to control who gets paid what?

None at all.

Americans need to take a breath, calm down, and stop acting like an angry mob. And I've got nothing but disgust for Obama cowardly scrambling to take his position at the front of the mob with the biggest pitchfork. As if we needed more evidence that his brand of "pragmatism" includes a thorough absence of scruples.

The Economics of Social Justice

2009-03-09T09:53:00.005-04:00

On Wednesday, October 15 2008 I wrote the the Obama campaign was "The Biggest Con Job in American History". The math behind this equation was simple: 59% of Americans self-identify as conservative and only 36% self-identify as liberal, and yet Obama (at the time) was polling at 50%. Assuming that all 36% of the liberals were pulling for Obama, that means that about 20% of America's conservatives (or more) were pulling for Obama. I pointed out that experts like noted political scientists Professor Larry Sabato had plainly expressed the reality of the situation: "His record is liberal, and his rhetoric is moderate." And I pointed out that Americans - to their discredit - were buying the rhetoric over the record. A Rasmussen poll indicated that 27% of Americans believed that Obama was politically moderate.

When the election results came in, and after the initial shock of disappointment had faded, I decided to put the best face on things and hope that Obama's rhetorical shift to the center had been more than a con job. I hoped that it had been a genuine embrace of the American center. Most conservatives took the same approach - with even noted talk-show hosts from Glenn Beck to Sean Hannity (Limbaugh being the exception) congratulating the President on his victory and wishing him the best. Obama's approval ratings soared, and the country enjoyed the historic nature of the inauguration together.

Since then, Obama's poll numbers have plunged. He is not polling not as an exceptionally popular president, but just about average for our chief executive one month into his term. Obama's favorite tracking poll - the stock market - has also resumed a downward plunge that had been largely on pause between late October-November and the inauguration.

The falling polls have been concentrated among American conservatives who are finally waking up to the fact that - despite our best hopes - Obama truly is a radically left-leaning president. Numerous articles have been written especially in the last week by former Obama supporters who are coming to this unhappy realization.

It has reached a point where even the mainstream press - also known as Obama's PR department - asked him yesterday point-blank: "Are you a socialist as people have suggested?"

Obama answered the question with an emphatic no, and then subsequently called reporters back from the White House to reiterate that response. The President doth protest too much, methinks.

Clive Crook - a transplanted Brit and chief Washington affairs commentator for the Financial Times - weighed in yesterday with his explanation of "Why Obama's left leaning is not tactical feint".

He points out that it is all well-and-good for Obama to defend himself from the socialist allegation by pointing out that Bush started it or to claim that desperate times call for desperate measures, but that there are details in his own proposals which these excuses simply do not dispel.

And the fundamental aspect of these plans is wealth redistribution. As Obama famously told Joe the Plumber, he plans to "spread the wealth around". He reiterated the same thing to the reporters in that call from the Oval Office. And it's built into his policies.

Here is Crook's specific charge:

A centrist administration would have thought about how to create a political constituency for cost control in health, and in public spending more generally. The administration rightly emphasises that healthcare cost control is the single biggest challenge in fiscal policy. Without it, public debt will stay on its present unsustainable path until it hits the wall of a new financial crisis. The need to create a wider constituency for fiscal discipline is the best argument for associating healthcare reform with a new and broadly based tax. Instead, the budget makes this already small constituency even smaller, telling almost all taxpayers they can have everything for nothing. (emphasis added)

The debate can get very academic at this point. A good general definition of socialism can be found on wikipedia:

Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of social organization advocating public or state ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods, and a society characterized by equality for all individuals, with a fair or egalitarian method of compensation.

The entry goes on:

Socialists mainly share the belief that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth among a small segment of society that controls capital creates an unequal society, and does not provide equal opportunities for everyone in society. Socialism is not a concrete philosophy of fixed doctrine and program; its branches advocate a degree of social interventionism and economic rationalization, sometimes opposing each other. Another dividing feature of the socialist movement is the split between reformists and the revolutionaries on how a socialist economy should be established. Some socialists advocate complete nationalization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange; others advocate state control of capital within the framework of a market economy.

The second paragraph especially should ring true of Obama's policies. Early socialists thought that a market economy could - through nationalization - be replaced by a control economy. These efforts have been abandoned. The USSR collapsed and China has embraced sweeping capitalist reforms that have led to dramatic economic growth and the rise of a Chinese middle class. Only a few stubborn hold outs - Cuba and Venezuela - cling to the idea of socialism through nationalization.

Obama is a socialist of the Fabian variety. He understands the need to keep some semblance of a market economy in place as an engine for economic production, but believes that this engine can be harnessed by draconian social interventionist policies to bring about social justice.

The funny thing about those who advocate social justice is that they tend to be the same sort of folks fond of bumper stickers like this one: The fundamental aspect of the concept of justice that they find objectionable is the idea of retribution. If you do something wrong, I will respond in kind. If everyone responds to every injustice with retribution than - soon enough - the world will be blind. Or, in terms of fiscal policy, the United States will be bankrupt.

Leaving ideology behind there are two practical reasons why "social justice" is a bad idea as economic policy.

First of all: rich folks make jobs. The reason for this is simple. If you want to start a new business or grow an existing one you need capital. You need to have extra money lying around that you don't need for your day-to-day living expenses. Every job I've ever had has existed solely because - either right now or in the past - some rich person or persons decided to take some of their extra money and turn it into even more money by starting a business or investing in someone else's business. They weren't handing out charity. They were attempting to benefit themselves. But since the fundamental rule of a capitalist system is voluntary exchange of goods and services they can't help themselves out unless they provide enough incentive for other people to voluntarily participate as either employees, customers, or both.

Obama's plans include ratcheting up the taxes that these sorts of folks pay. He is going to raise capital gains taxes (that's what we call a tax on investment) and the income tax on folks who make more than $250,000 a year. It's been rightly argued that a lot of those who make $250,000 a year are small business owners who file their business and personal taxes together, but I'm sick of using that as an argument against these tax-hikes on the rich. Even if we're talking about someone who makes $250,000 or more in salary, the fact is that he's going to take all that extra money and he's going to invest it and it's going to help out the economy. The tax on capital gains is even worse. Obama is literally punishing people for contributing to the American economy.

The excuse for this money-grab is that the government can handle the money more fairly. I doubt this. Governments spend other people's money for other people's benefits without the aid of prices to provide information feedback. Even with the best of intentions and no corruption it's the blind trying to spoon-feed the blind. If no one buys a particular iPod, then Apple either lowers the price or finds out what's wrong and fixes it. But if government programs to end poverty don't work, the government just throws more money after bad, blindly throwing away resources in the hope that eventually something good will happen.

The consequence of this kind of economic retribution is that the rich increasingly decide that they are going to take their ball and go home. Which is why the stock market is continuing to tank. Yes - there has been a lot of bad news. But Obama's open hostility towards Americans who invest in the markets provides ample additional incentive for anyone with the ability to cash out to go ahead and do so.

All this means that Obama is simultaneously heaping on a staggering load of debt for the nation (and for our children) while at the same time chasing away the only folks with a prayer of providing long-term sustainable economic growth. And this leads us to the second perverse impact of these socialist policies: higher taxes on everyone.

Of course it would be politically untenable for Obama to raise the income tax on middle or lower-class Americans. In fact, more and more Americans pay no taxes at all. At least - that's what it looks like if you look at the income tax. But there are very simple ways to tax Americans while claiming to tax someone else: corporate taxes.

Imagine that you've got two competing industries. One sells regular pencils. The other sells automatic pencils. If the price of wood-pulp used to make the regular pencils goes up, the firms that sell regular pencils have a tough balancing act to follow. They have to pass as much of the increased cost on to their customers as they can without convincing too many of them to switch to automatic pencils. But if the price of graphic goes up - which is used in both regular and automatic pencils - than both types of companies can raise their prices and the consumer will have no where else to go.

When the cost to business goes up, those costs are passed on to the consumer to the greatest extent possible.

Well what do you think corporate taxes do? They ratchet up the cost of business for all businesses. The American people feel great that those evil, greedy corporations are paying. Don't they have billions of dollars anyway? What they don't realize is that many corporations in the United States operate on very small margins (less than 10% of their revenue is profit) where increases in costs can significantly reduce their ability to invest in expansion. Furthermore, the cost of corporate taxes is not paid by the corporation. Corporations get all their money from consumers, so it is consumers who are paying corporate taxes. Corporate taxes are just a sneaky way of taxing the American people.

There's definitely some poetic justice in knowing that people who clamor for higher corporate taxes so that the government can give them more money end up paying for those taxes in the end, but it's certainly not what I'd call social justice.

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Call Obama a socialist or not. The specific label is immaterial. What matters are the two simple facts:

1. He's far, far more left-leaning than the American electorate that voted for him ever realized.
2. His leftist agenda for this country will lengthen and deepen the recession, cripple the recovery, saddle us with insurmountable debt, and fail to provide any meaningful social justice.

The only question that remains is how much irreparable damage he - along with the Congressional Democrats - will inflict before they are stopped.

A Tracking Poll?

2009-03-05T13:12:00.009-05:00

The stock market is sort of like a tracking poll in politics. It bobs up and down day-to-day, and if you spend all your time worrying about that, then you're probably going to get the long-term strategy wrong.

That was President Obama speaking just a couple of days ago. And if you look at the stock market on a day-to-day basis, he's right. Here's the stock market over the last 3 days (through about 1pm today):

See all those jaggies? Up and down she goes, full of random variation and fluctuation. On a micro-level the stock market is random. It always frustrates me when journalists pick reasons - seemingly at random - to "explain" the performance of the stock market at the end of a day. It was "concerns about Mid East tensions" or it was "enthusiastic response to better than expected earnings" etc. The fact is that none of these "explanations" are worth anything. If they were, they could be used as predictors.

But is the stock market really so random? Or is the market sending a message? That may seem just as ridiculous as trying to read a motive into the market, but a fundamental theory about economics is that prices convey information. You just need to zoom back to filter out some of the noise and see broader trends rather than day-to-day or even hour-to-hour fluctuations.

So here's the stock market over the last month:

Not looking quite so random now, is it? We can zoom back again to get a 3-month picture:

Here's the stock market at 6 months:
And at 1 year:
And at 5 years:

Now starting with the 5-year picture it's easy to see that with all the random variation there's a gradual upwards trend to a peak during 2007 and then a descent from that peak. You can also see where the most dramatic collapse occurred in late 2008.

Up to that point we'd already had the Bear Sterns fiasco and globally financial companies had already written down more than $500 billion in sub-prime related securities (which means that they'd changed their financial statements to devalue the securities to reflect the fact that they weren't worth so much after all). Then on September 15, 2008 the news about the collapse of Lehman Brothers came out and the markets dropped 500 points (more than on any day since 9/11). That was the same day that McCain said "the fundamentals of our economy are strong". Having a candidate for President so dramatically and publicly fail to grasp the extent of the crisis - combined with increasing political rhetoric and news coverage - led to a far more pronounced decline in the Dow later in October 2008.

The immediate impact of the initial event (500 points lost in one day) was dwarfed by the subsequent reaction of the market over a period of the entire month of October (about a 3,000 point drop). The market's initial reaction to news events is less important than the long-term trends.

After the October decline, there was a lot of fluctuation in the market but no real trend emerges from later 2008 through January 2009. There's a largish spike around the time of the election, and smaller but distinct spikes around the Inauguration and at the time Obama unveiled his plans before Congress in a nationally televised address. But despite these blips (tracking polls, Obama might call them) there has been a second pronounced downward trend starting around the time of the inauguration and continuing to this day. The picture emerges is one of three distinct trends:

1. October 2008 was a steep decline
2. November 2008 - January 2009 was roughly flat
3. Late January 2009 through today have been a second, steep decline

None of these declines can be mapped to any significant event that I can find, indicating that the market's function as a political tracker in the short run is eclipsed by its function as a barometer of investor confidence in the long run.

Now as a stats guy, I have to tell you I've done zero quantitative analysis on this. I've got a chart (which I should add I generated at MoneyWeek.com) and I've added some pretty lines. That's it. If anyone wants to pay me to do the analysis I'd love to do it, but in the absence of funding this is all the time I have.

Despite this, I believe you can draw a couple of general conclusions from this. First of all, the reason Obama dismisses the stock market as unimportant is that every time he talks it goes up for a day or two, but that ever since his inauguration it's entered a steep decline which it wasn't in before. If we pay attention to the stock market, then the news isn't good for Obama's political or economic credibility.

Secondly, the stock market is important because - in addition to reflecting dollars that are very much more important than poll numbers to the Americans who depend on them for retirement and to send their kids to school - it's a reflection of just what America's investors think of the job Obama, Pelosi and Reid are doing with our economy.

During the campaign Obama walked a tight-rope between class-warfare rhetoric and praise of capitalism. His praise of capitalism won over pragmatic Democrats like Cramer. His class-warfare rhetoric rallied the radicals like ACORN. Now that the time for policy-making has forced action to replace rhetoric, Obama is increasingly taking a punitive "make the rich pay" approach that is alienating investors. And with good reason.

If you have a lot of money to invest in stocks you're not going to take it out now based on a tax hike in the future. Investors aren't just reacting to Obama's threats on their pocketbooks. The trouble is that tax breaks for the middle and low income might be nice, but they're not going to stimulate the economy like tax breaks on investment because consumption doesn't do as much for our economy in the long run as production. And as long as Obama is going to maintain taxes on production (such as corporate taxes and capital gains taxes) than his tax-reduction strategies will have little impact while the impending tax-hikes will have a debilitating impact on our economic recovery. Investors aren't just concerned for their own well-being, they are reacting to a threat to America's economy at large.

That is the message from the stock market. And if Obama doesn't like that message, than tough. Increasingly more Americans are going to start to realize that penalizing economic production is a pretty stupid thing to do in the middle of a recession. Unless, of course, you happen to like depressions.

The Crisis of Credit Sanitized

2009-02-26T08:13:00.004-05:00

So an Obamacrat friend of mine posted this video on his Facebook profile:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

He tagged it with the line: "must see; dispels misnomers/myth re: the current credit crisis" Sadly, it doesn't dispel anything. It just omits certain aspects of the crisis. The omitted aspects are important both politically and economically. Having said that, it actually gets what it presents mostly right. (Other than the odd implication that if you have more children you smoke and are credit risk, of course.) It's got a great illustration of the concept of leverage, and also does a good job of explaining exactly what mortgage-backed securities are and how they work.

Having said that, let's get into what's not in the video that should be.

Political Half-Truths

The narrative of the video is that Greenspan lowered interest rates to stave off recession following the .com bubble bursting. As a result, investors who had formerly bought treasury bills had oodles of cash, but no longer wanted to buy government bonds because the rate of return was so low. The idea is that these guys were out there hunting for a place to stick their money.

This is questionable. Government bonds are generally considered the safest place to put your money, and as a result they bring the lowest return. If you've got huge numbers of investors looking to maximize their rate-of-return they are not going to be buying government bonds. They are going to be in hedge funds, commodities futures, and stocks.

The larger problem, however, is that this picture presents only the demand side of the equation. You've got all these investors with money to burn who want to find a way to invest it. Then the investment bankers figure out how to securitize bundles of mortgages and the investors flock to those, and this demand causes the investment bankers to pressure the mortgage lenders for more mortgages, and they in turn lower their standards and thus we get the sub-prime lending.

The glaring question you might ask is: why now? Why didn't this happen before? The suggestion that the interest rate being 1% on government bills doesn't satisfactorily answer the question because there are always investors looking to place their money. Something's missing. Then there's the larger question: why did the rating agencies give these mortgage-backed securities such high grades? Why did the mortgage brokerages go sub-prime? Why did the loan originators provide the funds for the loans? Who guaranteed them?

The theory of the video is that it was just basic avarice. Everyone along the chain thought they could pass the buck to someone else, and so no one cared. Subtext: capitalism is for evil, greedy people who try to swindle each other.

So what's missing from this picture? A lot, as it turns out. The entire video manages to never once mention government intrusion into the market after a brief discussion of Greenspan lowering interest rates via the Fed (which isn't actually a government agency anyway).

Start with the Community Reinvestment Act. The purpose of the law was to "encourage commercial banks and savings associations to meet the needs of borrowers in all segments of their communities, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods". Sounds good right? Well basically it was a law that forced companies to issue subprime mortgages. The law was originally passed in 1977 (thank you Jimmy Carter) but didn't get substantial teeth until the Clinton administration when changes were made that increased the ability of "community groups" to go after lenders that weren't handing out enough mortgages. Clinton even threatened to sick Janet Reno on the banks if they didn't start pumping out more loans. So rather than having a pull of investors clamoring for subprime loans, you see push of government forcing banks to send out these subprime loans.

But then you might ask the question: why didn't banks bundle securities until this century? What was stopping them? The idea that there just wasn't any demand for it is naive in the extreme. There is always demand for new ways to make money on Wall Street. Again, the change was a change in the laws. And once again this was under Clinton. The Glass-Steagall Act was originally passed way back in 1933 to more tightly regulate banks and prevent speculation. Once again it was under the Clinton administration in 1999 that this act was partially repealed, which paved the way for mortgage-backed securities. How much of an impact did this have?

The repeal enabled commercial lenders such as Citigroup which was in 1999 then the largest U.S. bank by assets, to underwrite and trade instruments such as mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations and establish so-called structured investment vehicles, or SIVs, that bought those securities. It is therefore seen by some that the repeal of this act contributed to the Global financial crisis of 2008–2009. However, such SIVs existed before the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

The year before the repeal, sub-prime loans were just 5% of all mortgage lending. By the time the credit crisis peaked in 2008, they were approaching 30%.

So not only did the government act to directly force increases to sub-prime lending (remember, the Clinton changes that allowed community groups to go after banks under the CRA was passed at the same time that the G-S was partially repealed), but the government also provided for the ability of the market to provide mortgage-backed securities on a much larger scale, and thus also increased the demand for sub-prime loans.

None of this is addressed in the video above. And it gets worse.

The second major question, if you recall, was why people treated the mortgage-backed securities as safe. And the answer boils back down to government intrusion in the market. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government sponsored enterprises. Their job is to guarantee home loans, and they set to with a will to guarantee the sub-prime mortgages. Because they are so large - but mostly because they are connected to the government - this created an illusion that the mortgages inside the mortgage-backed securities were guaranteed by the government and led to the perception of the mortgage-backed securities as "safe".

All of these things: the CRA, the repeal of G-S, and the operations of Fannie and Freddie change the political outlook but are also economically relevant. They should have been included in the video.

But when my friend the Obamacrat said the video would "dispel misnomers/myths" he was referring to the "myth" that the government - not just the free market - was responsible for the credit crisis. This is a political question at least as much as an economic one. As we've seen, the video doesn't dispel anything. It just leaves lots of relevant facts out of the explanation to create an impression that fits the Obama party-line. But as long as we're talking about political question I think it's time to show this video again:

YouTube

What's more, it was the Bush administration that called for increased regulation of the markets that the Clinton administration deregulated. Then there is the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 that attempted to do the same thing. Sponsor? Senator John McCain.

The only "myths" I see here are the myths of the immaculate conception of the housing crisis and the anti-regulatory nature of capitalists. Let's get this straight, because the facts speak for themselves when you actually bring them all into the picture. The economic crisis involved several parts:

1. rapidly rising home prices
2. large amounts of subprime mortgages (caused by demand and also forced supply)
3. creation of mortgage backed securities
4. mortgage-backed securities being perceived as safe

It is impossible to peg these parts to specific parties. Greenspan's low interest rates without doubt contributed to the rapidly rising home prices and contributed indirectly to demand for subprime mortgages. But the CRA - a Democratic project for the last 3 decades - was equally responsible for the number of subprime mortgages. Furthermore, Clinton was the one who repealed the G-S Act to open the flood gates of mortgage-backed security creation, and it was the intervention into the free market by GSEs Fannie and Freddie that further increased the number of subprime mortgages and largely contributed to the illusion of the safety of mortgage-backed securities.

And the more insidious lie - myth is too gentle a word - is the out-and-out lie that free-market capitalists always favor deregulation. Free-market capitalists favor the operation of free-markets, and free-markets often require regulation. This is especially true when the government acts to distort the free market as it did with Fannie and Freddie, and this is why you had Bush and McCain calling for their regulation - not Democrats (who profited nicely from the campaign donations of Fannie and Freddie officials).

Obama talks a great talk about the "rules of the road" and "common sense regulation", but like any good liberal Democrat his real motives are to use government power to shape society, and as a result he attempts to warp free markets rather than guarantee their smooth operation.

Economic Lessons

I mentioned earlier that the omitted aspects were both economic and political. Of course there's a lot of overlap between the two, but the prior section dealt with the political end of things. There's an economic lesson as well.

From a very big-picture perspective, here's the history of the current economic crisis.

The Dot-Com Bubble got started around 1995 and lasted until 2001. Bubbles are bad because they lead to large discrepancies between perceived and actual value. This is actually a good thing - while it lasts. The problem is that eventually the bubble bursts, and then suddenly you have a dramatic loss of value/wealth as the market adjusts to reality. Remember that things like stocks or houses (anything that's not cash) has the value represented in dollars, but doesn't actually consist of dollars. So if you held stock in a Dot-Com startup that was worth $100/share on Friday afternoon and the company goes belly-up on Monday, then Tuesday your shares are worth nothing and that money has just evaporated from the economy.

Bubbles are a crisis of valuation.

But bubbles threaten the economy at large because when the value disappears from the economy, there is less momentum in the economy at large. When you had that $100/share investment you were a millionaire and spent money. But when your stocks crashed you lost your money and now you're not consuming as much. So the valuation crisis can lead to a liquidity crisis that effects the economy as a whole.

That is what Greenspan saw in 2001, and it's the reason that he drastically reduced interest rates and kept them there. He was attempting to compensate for one bubble bursting, but in the process he created a new one: the housing bubble. Democrats are castigating Greenspan now for creating that bubble, but if he hadn't they'd be castigating him for letting the economy slide into recession back in 2001. The 9/11 attack further damaged the US economy, and gave Greenspan additional motivation to keep interest rates low. The housing boom that followed lifted the entire American economy and kept us out of recession.

But the cost is that one bubble replaced another bubble and now that bubble is bursting and it's even larger then the first one. Everyone talks about "frozen credit markets" and liquidity, but the current crisis is also fundamentally a crisis of valuation. The reason the credit markets are frozen is because mortgage-backed securities were over-valued. This is due in part to the false sense of security, and in part to the fact that home prices were over-valued. The discrepancy between real and perceived value is what has led to the liquidity crisis.

So the very clear economic lesson - which the video leaves out - is that government intervention to soften the blow of a bursting bubble creates an escalating pattern of successively more dangerous economic bubbles. The housing bubble is about value, and it's not an isolated incident. It's one in a chain of bubbles, each created to stave off the bursting of the previous bubble.

This has critical importance for our perception of where to go from here. Obama's stimulus bill is in essence the same thing Greenspan already tried. He and the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate are attempting to replace one bubble with another. But instead of a housing bubble, we are looking at a currency bubble. The Fed has printed trillions of dollars, and the Federal Government is borrowing billions more. This can create the illusion of wealth, but it's fundamentally the same as a bubble. Dot-Com stocks were listed as $100/share, but were in fact worth next-to-nothing. Home prices doubled to $500,000 when in fact the house was worth $250,000. And when the government prints a trillion dollars, those trillion dollars decrease the value of every dollar in existence and lead to the same kind of discrepancy between real and perceived value.

The bailout might work - temporarily. But the risk is that if it doesn't work, we've saddled ourselves with a huge debt that our economy can not support. And if it does work, we may well end up with a bubble bursting that is far more catastrophic and leads to a crash of the dollar and a subsequent world-wide depression.

The only safe strategy is to allow perceived value and real value to come back into parity. Part of this is hard: watching fortunes evaporate and the economy groan under the burden of readjustment. Part of it is optimistic: increasing value-generating economic activity by stimulating new private enterprise.

Government spending - and even increased debt - can play a role in this recovery, but it absolutely must be efficient spending. If the government pays people to dig holes and then fill them in we're just throwing money into the system without creating value. That's the danger with Obama's stimulus bill. Too much of the economic activity it generates is not genuinely valuable. The private sector is far, far more efficient at maximizing value for the simple reason that they have to get people to voluntarily pay for their products, while the government can extort your taxes and therefore is insensitive to consumer feedback.

Conclusion

I know this is a long piece, but it's an important issue. We need to be honest with ourselves about the crisis. It's not the fault of one party or the other Greenspan was a Republican appointee, and many Republicans failed to stand up to Fannie and Freddie when they had the chance. The CRA was a Democratic boondoggle, and Fannie and Freddie are essentially progressive agencies as well. It does no one any good to lie about why we are where we are.

Only if we truly understand the history of this crisis will we be able to see a way out of it. My greatest fear - if my Obamacrat friend is any judge - is that Obama and his supporters are willfully blind to aspects of this crisis that are uncomfortable to them. If we accept their sanitized version of this crisis then we will truly be a country where the blind lead the blind.

Why Mormons Should Not Vote for Democrats

2009-02-21T14:32:00.004-05:00

(Although the subtitle of my blog is "One Mormon's musings" I generally don't bring religion into it. I do so in this post, but it's an anomaly and doesn't represent a new direction for the blog. Hopefully it will be interesting to Mormons and non-Mormons alike.)

Mormons have a very unique understanding of human eschatology: why we are here, where we came from, and what the point of it all is. Much of our insight comes from the small book of scripture called The Pearl of Great Price, in which Jesus reveals that his work and his glory is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man (Moses 1:39).

The opposing plan is also outlined just a couple of chapters later in Moses 4:

1 And I, the Lord God, spake unto Moses, saying: That Satan, whom thou hast commanded in the name of mine Only Begotten, is the same which was from the beginning, and he came before me, saying—Behold, here am I, send me, I will be thy son, and I will redeem all mankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honor.
2 But, behold, my Beloved Son, which was my Beloved and Chosen from the beginning, said unto me—Father, thy will be done, and the glory be thine forever.
3 Wherefore, because that Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power; by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down;

This makes Lucifer - known thereafter as as Satan - the original progressive. The fundamental hallmarks of his plan are the same basic principles as modern American liberalism. The outline consists of :

1. ambitious and virtuous goals
2. that are sought by abridging freedom

Despite the fact that Mormons ought to have a unique fear of centralized power, too often the tendency among intellectually-minded Mormons is quite the opposite. I believe that part of this is an understandable - if lamentable - reaction to widespread Mormon anti-intellectualism. It can be downright uncomfortable to sit through our hour-long monthly testimony meetings. One after another tearful Mormons confess that they know the Church is true. Such unqualified statements of epistemological certainty must strike those with more nuanced views of faith as both condemnatory and offensive. That is how they have often struck me. The endless drumbeat of this phrase creates a hostile environment for anyone who can not so unequivocally phrase their own testimony (not without guilt, anyway). The corresponding urge to separate oneself - intellectually, socially, or even physically - adds to the dilemma with a compounding dose of guilt.

This microcosm of tension between faith and the intellect echoes throughout Mormon culture, and leads many Mormons to seek ways in which to distinguish themselves from what they see (often quite rightly) as the "cultural" (and therefore optional) aspects of Mormon identity. Quite high on the list is politics. As Utah is perhaps the most Republican state in the nation (I believe Clinton finished third in 1992) the knee-jerk reaction is to head in the opposite direction.

Another part of the issue has nothing to do with Mormons in particular and much to do with our historical view of the right and the left. Consider the Nazi party from World War II Germany. Despite the name of the party (National Socialists), Americans think of the Nazis - along with Mussolini's fascists - to be the epitome of far-right politics. The explanation for this is that any party which is rabidly nationalistic must be right-wing.

This axiom needs to be questioned.

The historical fact is that Mussolini was considered the darling of the American left at the time. He was a representative of progress. His movement was a youth movement, and his vision was of the future. Anti-Semitism was not a part of the plan. Similarly, the apologists for Stalin during the Cold War were to be found among the intellectuals of the American left, not the right.

What is the common thread that attracted progressives to both Stalinism and Mussolini's fascism? There are several similarities. The most obvious is that both were forward-looking, progressive philosophies. They were also collectivist. In fascism individual identity is subsumed beneath national identity (often personified in a charismatic leader) and in Stalinism the State - ostensibly working for the benefit of all - is the greatest consideration.

Seen through the lens of collectivism vs. individualism, the Nazi party, fascism, Stalinism and the various other forms of revolutionary socialism or communism are all closely aligned. In opposition to these movements stands classical liberalism as epitomized in the concept of limited powers found in the Constitution of the United States and other founding documents.

This should all be very ominous to Mormons. Although perhaps we do not routinely read the Pearl of Great Price, we certainly are expected to read the Book of Mormon on a daily basis. The Book of Mormon - especially Alma with the wars between the Nephites and Lamanites under Captain Moroni - is so replete with apparently anachronistic philosophy about liberty that that is considered a major piece of evidence against the historicity of the text.

And nothing stands out as much as the story of the Title of Liberty. Moroni - seeing his people on the verge of catastrophic defeat because internal dissensions have weakened their ability to resist an external invasion - tears his cloak and turns it into a banner emblazoned with the words: "In memory of our God, our religion, our freedom, and our peace, our wives and our children". He then rallies his people to quell the internal dissension before leading his armies in an epic war against their enemies.

Moroni's idea of freedom was not much like the idea of the current American left, however. In opposition to their view (epitomized by the quote misattributed to Thomas Jefferson) that "dissent is the highest form of patriotism", Moroni executed every Nephite who would not take up arms to defend their country from the invaders. Whereas the modern liberal view of freedom is a one-sided coin where both sides are heads and mean "the license to do whatever you want", Moroni's view was a double-sided coin: heads meant agency, tails was responsibility.

The dissenters Moroni defeated - and executed if they would not join his cause - were the "King Men". They got their name because of their desire to establish a Nephite monarchy in place of their democratic form of government - complete with a simplistic form of checks-and-balances. It is not hard to imagine that many of the King Men fervently proclaimed that a monarchy would be a more efficient form of government - especially in a time of national crisis. And yet it would also have undoubtedly led to a form of elitism and coercion.

And that is the common thread between Lucifer's plan, the King Men, Hitler's Nazi party, Mussolini's fascism, and modern American liberalism: elitism.

Elitism is an unavoidable result of as well as a leading argument for non-voluntary collectivism. For collectivism to be enforced, a central power must be erected with the capacity to enforce the rules. Furthermore, this central power must be guided by a class of bureaucrats with the ability to administer those rules to the masses - who are incapable of running their own lives. The objectives of this system are always noble. Satan wanted to preserve us all from sin. Marx wanted to free the workers. Mussolini wanted the trains to run on time. And modern American liberals want economic "justice", health care for all, education for all, housing for all, etc. etc. etc.

Just as the objectives are always noble, the cost is always the same: our liberty. The slide from a view of government as a necessary evil which must be vigilantly guarded against to the solution to all our ills has been a long and gradual one. It has been perpetuated by those with an interest in expanding government power. And the more power government has to regulate business and every day life, the more people have a vested interest in controlling the government and expanding their coercive influence. The damage - as measured by American opinions of what the role of government ought to be - is extensive. And the march towards greater government power continues as emergencies - both military and now economic - are used to increase the scope of federal powers by leaps and bounds. We now have a president who laments the fact that the Constitution viewed all civil liberties as inherently negative while admitting that this was in fact the express design of the document. Negative rights pen government in and keep it from acting to eclipse individual liberty. Positive rights empower government to take from one to give to another in the name of the common good.

Mormons - more than any other Americans - should recognize this trend for what it is. And that is why Mormons should not vote for Democrats.

There are two major concerns I'd like to preempt.

First of all: no, I didn't just call Democrats Satanists. I believe that there are dangerous and ominous parallels between the current Democratic party and coercive elitism, but I do not believe that they are equivalent. You'd have to go from Barack Obama to Kucinich and then on to Marx and eventually Mussolini and Hitler before you got anywhere close to Satanic.

Secondly: no, I'm not absolving Republicans of all blame. President Bush dramatically enlarged the scope of government power both in reaction to 9/11 and - much less forgiveably - in reaction to the government-created financial crisis. It would be a mistake of the highest order for Mormons - or any group - to simply and blindly vote for one party or another because the other is perceived to be "worse". The objective is not to embrace the Republican party as-is, but to pick the party that is most redeemable and work to improve it.

The Cartoon Was Funny, OK?

2009-02-18T22:12:00.006-05:00

If you haven't seen it yet, here it is:

In case you haven't been reading the news lately, the chimpanzee in the picture is without a doubt Travis. Travis was a 14-year old, 200 pound chimpanzee who was famous for appearing in a variety of TV commercials. He lived with his owners and was treated much like a human being:

Travis became well known in the town and had been known to like police officers. The chimpanzee had been domesticated and was toilet trained, able to open doors using keys, could dress himself, watered plants, was able to feed hay to his owner's horses, ate at a table with the rest of the family, drank wine from a stemmed glass, logged onto the computer to look at pictures, use the internet, watched television using a remote control, and brushed his teeth using a Water Pik. On television, he enjoyed watching baseball.Travis had also driven a car on several occasions.

I had never heard of Travis until he made the headlines for randomly and savagely attacking a friend of his owner. Since February 16th there have been (by a quit Google count) well over 100 stories written about the attack.

One thing that many of the early articles focussed on was the inexplicable nature of the attack. The chimp had been around for 14 years without any serious incidents whatsoever, and then one day it goes off and nearly kills an elderly woman. It than attacks a bunch of cops who retreat to their cars. Unfortunately, Travis is like the raptors from Jurassic Park and has no trouble with doorknobs. When he opened the door to a squad car to attack a cornered police officer, the man opened fire. Travis managed to make it back into the house where he died in his living area.

So what't the obvious point of this cartoon? That the stimulus bill was written by a deranged monkey.

Enter the Reverend Al Sharpton. He lost no time declaring the racism of the cartoon, and his calls have regrettably been taken seriously by the media. I heard a very serious report about it on NPR on my drive home today: Media critic examines NY Post Cartoon Flap. The critic in question, Eric Deggans, says that at a bare minimum the New York Post is "willfully ignoring" the uproar. But it gets much worse than that:

"Unfortunately I think the editor's response does not do that," Deggans says. "They don't acknowledge that there is a way you can look at this image and draw a connotation that references racial prejudice."

Now hang on a second. Are we accusing Delanos (the artist) of putting racist subtext into his cartoon or of not proactively considering every possible angle in which someone else could possibly find an excuse to put that subtext there? That's two entirely different questions. It's not that hard to take offense at all sorts of innocuous things if you have a little persistance and imagination.

The one, slender thread upon which this is all based is that historically blacks have been dehumanized by portraying them with simian characteristics. Which, I think, might be why everyone upset by this cartoon is over 50. I wonder how old Delanos is. I'm 28. I grew up in a world where any deliberate attempt to compare a black person to a monkey has been strictly tabboo. I learned about blackface in history class, but that's it. So the whole monkey -> black person -> Obama is something that just doesn't have any cultural relevance to me.

Or at least, it didn't. Now I suppose it does. Is this what we call progress?

CNN's Roland Martin has weighed in as well: NY Post cartoon is racist and careless. Careless? Perhaps. With nutjobs like Al Sharpton running around you never can be too careful. But racist? Give me a break. It's only racist if the monkey represents Obama. And if the monkey represents Obama than the entire point of the comic - that the stimulus package may as well have been written by a deranged, homicidal monkey - no longer works.

But it's clear Martin doesn't grasp the point of the comic:

First, mixing the two stories is ridiculous. Yes, the chimpanzee incident and the passage of the stimulus bill have a lot of folks talking, but to put them in the same element just doesn't make sense.

Yes, Martin, it does make sense. But only if you realize it's not racist. So if you're starting assumption is "anything with a monkey in any way even tangentially related to a black person must be racist" then yeah - it's not going to make sense. Try changing your assumptions.

And then he reiterates Deggan's point:

Second, the cartoonist didn't hang a sign around the neck of the chimp, so he left it up to the reader to determine exactly who the cops were referring to.

In other words, the comic isn't really racist at all, but people could possibly conclude it's racist and so it's just as bad.

But who really links the author of the stimulus to Obama? I don't. Delanos doesn't. Here he is, quoted by Martin:

It's absolutely friggin ridiculous. Do you really think I'm saying Obama should be shot? I didn't see that in the cartoon. The chimpanzee was a major story in the Post. Every paper in New York, except The New York Times, covered the chimpanzee story. It's just ridiculous. It's about the economic stimulus bill. If you're going to make that about anybody, it would be [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi, which it's not.

Delanos is the only one making any sense here. First of all, the cartoon is not about the real author of the bill. That would defeat the purpose of linking it to the crazy monkey. The whole point is that a crazy monkey wrote the bill, not anyone else. Secondly even if you are dense enough to miss that point, Delanos is exactly right that you would next look to Pelosi, then Reid, and then Obama - maybe - as the actual author of the bill.

So can you get any racism out of the cartoon? Maybe if you are a baby boomer or older, shut down 1/2 your brain, squint really, really hard and hold it up to a mirror maybe then it might look a little racist.

But by that time you're not seeing the cartoon at all anymore.

This rabid over-sensitization has gone too far. The comic is not about Obama. Not in any conceivable way. It's absurd, hysterical, and downright stupid to pretend otherwise. It's also counterproductive to race relations in the US, I might add, to flog someone over such a tenuously racist cartoon. How are we supposed to have open and honest dialog when something that is - at the worst - an honest mistake causes this kind of a firestorm? This doesn't breed racial understanding.

It breeds silence and resentment.

Life is Life, but Perception is Reality

2009-02-10T20:35:00.001-05:00

I have a new post up at America's Right.

Check it out here.

A Word on Deception

2009-02-09T23:08:00.003-05:00

I listened to Obama's press conference today. It was in many ways a textbook demonstration of the fallacy of the excluded middle. This is also known as the "false dilemma". The idea is that you present a person with an option of choosing between only two choices in order to try and get them to pick the one you want, when in reality there are many more than two choices. For Obama the options are apparently "my stimulus bill" or "the government does nothing".

That wasn't the actual false dilemma, however. At least twice Obama admitted there was a third possibility: Republicans/conservatives who understood that the government had to do something, but disagreed with some of the particulars. Although I appreciate his honesty in admitting this fact, it was perfectly clear that he intended to paint opposition his stimulus bill as being a radical set of conservative nut-jobs who believe we should just sit back and meet the coming financial crisis face-first.

But the real false dilemma of the night was far more subtle. It was the false choice of the options: do something or do nothing. The idea is that we have to first decide whether or not to do anything at all and then decide what to do. But that's unrealistic and silly.

The fact is that some of the things we might try can make the situation worse. Which means that we actually have three options:

1. Do something to make the situation worse
2. Do nothing
3. Do something to make the situation better

I believe that the vast majority of fiscal ultra-conservatives (I may or may not be one depending on where you're standing) are open to the theoretical possibility that the government could take some action that would mitigate the coming catastrophe. I'm not opposed to a stimulus plan in principle.

But that doesn't mean that I will take just any stimulus package over doing nothing, because I believe some stimulus packages could make the situation worse. And I believe this is one of those packages.

Obama is attempting to define the terms of the argument in a way that hems conservatives in. They either have to embrace his plan (possibly with cosmetic changes: he flatly rejected any substantial changes at this point) or they are the kind of people who think we should just lie there and take whatever the future has in store for us.

In reality, there are substantially different conservative proposals that offer alternatives to the current bill rather than merely rearranging some of the wasteful spending. Just because we don't want to pass the bill that we see now does not mean we want to do nothing.

It only means we think this bill is worse than doing nothing.

I would also like to add that I'm extremely disappointed that some conservatives have started to run rough shod over the truth as well. For example, I've seen articles which claim that Obama is taking the deficit to $10 trillion. First of all, as Obama quite rightly stated, he inherited both the crisis and a substantial portion of the debt. Secondly, a lot of the money in that $10 trillion dollar figure is in the form of loans which the government expects to recoup. Making a loan is not the same thing as writing a check, and it's dishonest to conflate the two.

I expect better from conservative journalists/pundits.

A Promise Impossible to Break

2009-02-09T22:45:00.002-05:00

Obama promises to "create or save" 4 million jobs. That sounds audacious, and it's a comfortingly solid number. Something we can hold him to, right? Wrong.

If we pass the stimulus bill we will never know what would have happened to jobs if we hadn't passed it. Which means we won't k now how many jobs would have been lost. Which means that no matter how many jobs are gained or even lost (yes, that's right, lost) after the stimulus bill goes into effect apologists can always claim that thing would have been even worse (4 million worse, of course) without it.

"The stimulus bill passed, and we lost 500,000 jobs!"

"Yes, but without the stimulus would have lost 4.5 million."

"Really?"

"Trust me."

In addition to being impossible to verify it's not exactly confidence-inspiring that it's a complete non-estimate. In some ways you can't blame Obama for this. He's just admitting the obvious: he has no idea what the economy is going to do. If he did, he could say how many jobs the package would save and how many it would create. Then again, if he did that he'd actually be accountable (fairly or not) for the results.

I was very impressed with his willingness to take the fall for the Daschle debacle, but I would be even more impressed to see him take on that kind of "buck stops here" mentality with issues of greater and broader import than his own nominations to fill his own cabinet.

Sadly, the only folks I've found willing to give an outright estimate of the stimulus package (the folks at the Congressional Budget Office) concluded that while it will create jobs in the next year or two, over the next ten years it will be a net drain on the economy because the gigantic government spending will squeeze out private investment. Here's the report from the Washington Times. A very intelligent liberal friend of mine suggested that posting this article constituted "fail fail fail" and rebutted it with an article from the American Prospect that cheerfully concluded the CBO report was nothing to fear because the crowding out of private investment is:

not really a function of stimulus policy. Rather, it's a function of "not paying back our massive debt" policy. And "not paying back our massive debt" policy would primarily require two separate policy decisions: That we refuse to reform health care -- thus refusing to reform Medicare -- and that we refuse to eventually increase taxes in order to pay for our increased spending.

So we have nothing to fear, because government will stimulate private investment by raising taxes. These taxes will invariably be capital gains taxes and taxes on high-income individuals, which translates to taxes on private investment and small businesses. I suppose penalizing private investment is one way to stimulate private investment if by "stimulate" you actually mean "suffocate".

As for his reform health care suggestion: I can only tremble in fear at that prospect. Let's be clear, entitlement spending is killing our budget. And right now that means Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. They desperately need to be reformed. But when any liberal worth his or her salt talks of a desire to"reform health care" he or she is talking about nationalization in one form or another. This in turn necessitates:

1. exacerbating the systemic flaws leading to spiraling health insurance costs (making the mess worse)
2. transferring the unpayable debt load from the private sector onto government ledgers (making the mess a government problem)

The second effect isn't that bad in and of itself. It's an academic concern whether it's worse for a private health care system to fail or a government health care system to fail since a failed health care system doesn't seem to be much good no matter who owns it. But the effect of #2 is that the failure of our national health care apparatus is likely to take the solvency of the federal government down with it. I suppose taking on billions of additional spending and bankrupting the federal government is one way to pay down the deficit if by "pay down" you actually mean "inflate".

On the bright side, a bankrupt federal government would probably be an improvement at that point to a functioning one.

The Philosophy of Government Welfare Inefficiency

2009-02-09T12:32:00.009-05:00

I recently decided that it was time to stop being a poser and actually read Milton Friedman for myself, and so I'm currently working my way through Free to Choose. The book was originally published in 1980, so it's a little bit dated. The Cold War was still going on, and so many of the examples seem quaint 30 years later. Many of the principles and much of the history is compelling and enlightening, however. I was particularly impressed by Milton and Rose Friedman's take on government inefficiency with regards to welfare.

He starts the discussion (this in the chapter "Cradle to Grave") with the following chart:

He then gives an overview of the 4 categories in terms of two principles: cost and benefit. When you're buying for yourself (category 1) you have a strong incentive to maximize the benefit and minimize the cost. When you're buying for someone else you have a strong incentive to minimize the cost (it's still your money) but the incentive to maximize the value has gone done somewhat. Of course there are exceptions. If you're buying a gift for your wife you probably have a very strong incentive to get the best value, but we've all bought gifts for acquaintances where we know we were balancing a desire to get them something nice with the fact that we just don't feel like spending that much effort tracking down the perfect something.

When you move onto category III there's still a high incentive for benefit (because you're buying something for yourself), but the incentive to minimize cost has gone down dramatically. Imagine the difference between buying yourself a new laptop out of your own pocket versus what you would pick out if your company was picking up the tab. And then there's category IV where you're spending someone else's money for someone else's benefit. So there is minimal incentive to either minimize the cost or maximize the benefit.

The Friedman's then observe that all government welfare programs are either category III or category IV. What's more important, the actual legislators who create the programs and bureaucrats who administer them are always category IV spenders with the least incentive to minimize cost and the least incentive to maximize benefit.

This is a very classical analysis of the problem because it is based on the assumption that human beings are rational agents: that is to say that they are motivated primarily by self-interest. This is not the only way to look at economics, but it is a fairly reasonable and almost ubiquitous assumption. Based on this reasoning, government waste is first and foremost a result of the fact that legislators and bureaucrats lack the incentive to look for good value and so we end up with mediocrity.

The Friedman's don't go far enough in their analysis, however. While it is true that legislators and bureaucrats are disconnected from motivations to seek efficiency, it would be incorrect to see them as unmotivated. Legislators in particular tend to be highly motivated towards getting and re-elected, and bureaucrats have their own careers to attend to. So how do those motivations interact with the policies they oversee?

In terms of bureaucracy the answer is simple to see: the larger the agency's budget, the more prestige, power, and salary accrue to those who run the agency. So bureaucrats are not merely uninterested in saving money, they have a vested interest in spending as much as possible. In this case category IV spenders aren't just too lazy to find the best benefit for the least cost - they are unmotivated to solve problems and highly motivated to spend as much money as they can get away with.

The problem with legislators is similar. Legislators win elections by promising to fix problems in the future, not by providing evidence of problems fixed in the past. Since the solution they promise can only be as big as the problem it solves, they have a vested interest in both fear-mongering and in grandiose campaign promises to bring sweeping reform. Once elected, however, they have every motivation not to solve the problems they raised during their campaign. If the problem is truly solved, then the legislator has to start from scratch with a new problem/solution narrative. Instead, the strategy is to be in a position to once again offer the best solution to the worst problem during the next election, and that requires an appearance of working very hard without actually producing substantial results at all. Which means that legislators have every motivation to create new agencies and increase funding to existing agencies, but no motivation at all to squeeze those agencies for real results. The optimal position for a legislator is to have a never-ending war against an ill-defined but terrifying enemy: the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terrorism all fit the bill.

If this sounds too cynical to be true, just ponder the fact that after leading his nation to a courageous victory in World War II the people of Great Britain thanked Winston Churchill by defeating him in the 1945 election.

What all this means is that we don't just have legislators and bureaucrats who lack good motivations to provide value, we have legislators and bureaucrats who suffer from perverse motivations to ignore benefits and maximize costs. And these factors do not recognize party lines, which is why the Republicans of 2000 - 2008 were no better than the Democrats they replaced in terms of fiscal conservatism.

The Friedmans continue their analysis with two additional points: corruption and inequality of political power. They observe, quite rightly, that category IV spending is rife for corruption. They also point out that the same poor folks who are the intended recipients of welfare and government aid programs are also politically disadvantaged, which is why so much government aid often ends up funneled to middle or even upper-class benefit. A prime example are ethanol corn subsidies which are allegedly for the good of all (by reducing carbon emissions) and in fact for the good of the massive and very wealthy corn lobby at the disproportionate expense of America's working poor (for whom gasoline makes a higher proportion of income).

There is one additional aspect of the problem which the Friedmans do not review: feedback. Feedback is essential to the smooth operation of any complex, error-prone system. As long as those responsible for making the decisions feel the direct impact of those decisions the system will be self-regulating. But in the case of government programs the people making and executing the laws very rarely need those benefits. As much as Biden tries to preserve his every-man, "I'm from Scranton and I take the train home every day" image, he's got nothing in common with the working class. Nor does Barack Obama. Nor does the Bush family. Nor do the McCains. Nor did my favorite candidate Mitt Romney. The only one with remote credibility as a regular Joe was Sarah Palin, and we saw how that went.

The lack of direct feedback means that the only way the system can work is if voters fill in to bridge the gap between those who require government assistance and the politicians in charge of meting it out. As long as Americans vote based purely on who offers the best packages for their wallets, however (which liberals argue conservatives are too stupid to do) this feedback will be perpetually missing, and the system will continue to degenerate further. (This is a major topic in William Easterly's brilliant book White Man's Burden.)

Now to all my liberal friends who read my blog: I'm not using this as a blanket dismissal of all social welfare policies or any particular policy. The point is to explain why government welfare efforts are often doomed to failure. Whether any particular initiative - be it SCHIP or the FDA - is worth the cost or not is an open question. What is not an open question, however, is the sad fact that well-intentioned liberals have for decades drastically underestimated the costs of their social welfare programs and dramatically overestimated the benefits because they have not studied carefully the way these programs function in practice. The result has been one costly failure after another, with each additional boondoggle creating an additional strain on the American economy that in turn lowers the amount of goods available for all to enjoy.

These are the exact same problems that are leading to the spiraling costs of medical care in the United States: insurance (as it currently exists) puts patients in a position where they are apparently spending other people's money which leads to drastic over-utilization. Meanwhile hospitals and service providers get their feedback from the insurance companies and not from patients, with the result that they have little incentive to offer a better patient experience. Moving to socialized medicine to solve these problems would do nothing but dramatically compound them.

I am not opposed to all government welfare projects. Sometimes inefficient is better than nothing. I am simply in favor or a realistic assessment of the cost/benefit of these programs rather than a childlike faith that Big Government can solve our ills and make life fair, when in reality the consequence of over reliance on government is less freedom and less prosperity for all Americans.

One Young Parent to Obama

2009-02-07T11:14:00.004-05:00

This week has been rough on Obama. First there were taxes. Timothy F. Geithner - Obama's pick for Secretary of the Treasury didn't pay $35,000 in required self-employment taxes while he worked at the International Monetary fund. Although he claimed it was an honest mistake, the facts belie this. An IRS audit in 2006 caught the first $14,847 (from years 2003 and 2004) but even after repaying those taxes, he tried to get away with not paying for the same tax evasion from 2001 and 2002 until after Obama nominated him..

Despite these issues, Geithner's nomination was passed by the Senate. Next, however, came Tom Daschle. Daschle, who was once the Senate Majority leader, was by all accounts the lynch pin of Obama's health care reform effort. He was nominated to fill two posts simultaneously: Health and Human Services Secretary and a related White House post. President Obama was depending on Daschle's extensive Senate connections and widespread credibility to grease the wheels of upcoming national health care reform.

It turned out, however, that Daschle had tax problems of his own. The tax problems were soon eclipsed by his lobbying efforts, however. Daschle made over $5 million after losing his Senate seat in 2006 for what was essentially unreported lobbying.

If Daschle had gone first there's a good chance he would have passed and Geithner would have had to withdraw, but as it is Daschle withdrew the morning after Obama had expressed his staunch, continuing support for the nomination. A more minor nominated official with tax problems of her own also withdrew after Daschle.

President Obama does deserve real credit for his handling of the debacle, however. In a noted contrast to President Bush's evasion whenever asked about his own mistakes, Obama made it clear that the final responsibility for the mistakes lay with him. He deserves credit for that.

The news hasn't been much brighter with regards to the stimulus. Despite much talk of bipartisanship, the House passed their version of the bill on party lines. Making matters worse, the Republicans (who only seem to be remotely competent when in the minority) went after the bill as an exercise in pork instead of stimulus. Eventually Obama, who had largely turned the bill over to House and Senate leaders, had to get behind the bill himself.

In a statement at the White House on Friday (some audio from this NPR story) he said:

Somewhere in America a small business has shut its doors. Somewhere in America a family has said goodbye to their home. Somewhere in America a young parent has lost their livelihood and they don't know what's going to take its place.

This kind of emotionalism always makes me think of Stalin's quote: "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic". Small businesses in America shut their doors every day - even during economic booms. Foreclosures happen all the time - even when the market is strong. And people lose their jobs no matter how low the unemployment rate is. I often think that liberals are on a quixotic quest to use government to make sure bad things don't happen anymore.

In any case, my ears perked up at the "young parent" line. I'm 27. My wife is 24. I suppose we're young. And we have two children. I lost my job in January. I don't know where I'm going to find work again. I've had one job interview already and didn't get the position. Yesterday I ran around the house yelling with triumph when I got an interview at a different company.

So I fit the mold Obama is speaking about. And I'd like to tell my president: "Thanks, but no thanks". I'm not interested in a "stimulus bill" that is in actuality (I've read about 200 of the 600+ pages) nothing but a Democratic spending wish list full of funding pledges for all 1960s era progressive laws. And I'm especially not interested in passing this bill at the expense of my children's future.

Sure, another $1 trillion in debt, how much can that hurt? It can hurt a lot. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (reported at the Washington Times), the stimulus package will lead to long-term debt that will become a significant drag on the economy starting just few years out:

CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.

I've already had one liberal friend express disbelief that I would be disconcerted by this news. After all, his rebutting article maintained, we can always raise taxes. So apparently that's the change we can believe in. We're not tax and spend anymore, we're spend and then tax. We'll lower the GDP, squeeze out private investment, and then raise taxes which will of course further sabotage the economy.

And none of this even brings up the elephant in the room: we're printing money like a tin-pot dictator. The Fed has already rolled out trillions of imaginary dollars. Add that to our staggering debt burden, toss in spiraling entitlement costs for good measure (and don't forget the Democrats want to increase spending for health care!) and there's a very real recipe for economic collapse the likes of which this country may have never seen before. Including the Great Depression.

So when I say "No thanks" to Obama (much good that will do me) I'm saying it because, out of work parent I may be, I am willing to grow through hard times myself so that my kids can have a better shot, rather than spending their inheritance before I've earned it and shoving my problems off on their shoulders.

Isn't that what it's supposed to be all about?

Israel and Gaza

2009-01-07T14:20:00.002-05:00

I started to write a long piece about Israel and Gaza yesterday, but eventually gave it up. I've been incredibly busy trying to get my graduate school applications off and study for a GRE retake so I don't have a lot of time. And the Israel/Gaza conflict is not the kind of issue one can say much meaningful about without spending a lot of time researching and writing.

There's one small aspect of it that I'd like to address today, and that's the news that Israeli bombs landed on a UN school where Palestinian civilians - including women and children -were sheltering leading to dozens of deaths. Israel is taking heat for this, and it's leading to intensifying international pressure on Israel to stop their attack on Gaza.

Well, here's some footage of the school in question. It was taken 2 years ago.

YouTube

So you can see that Hamas using this UN school as a launching pad for attacks on Israel is nothing new. Israel formally protested over this event to the UN, which did what the UN does best. That is to say: nothing.

Hamas is very good at using their civilian population not only as a shield, but as a sacrificial lamb. The blog A Soldier's Mother (written the mother of an Israeli soldier) goes into detail about both the most recent controversy over the school (Hamas was launching mortars from it again before Israeli retaliated) as well as the larger issue of the way in which Hamas treats their children. She points out that they get a lot of mileage from geuinely tragic photos like this one:

But that they would get considerably less favorable press if photos like these found more widespread distribution:

There are several more such images in the original blog post. Now I don't agree with every conclusion that she draws. She repeatedly takes the parents to task for allowing their children to take shelter in the school while it was being used to fire mortars at Israel. Where else were they supposed to go, exactly? Where else is safe? But her central point - that Hamas deliberately sacrifices their children for the sake of demonizing Israel - remains. I even have to ask, honestly, which pictures are more tragic in the long run?

Just as Hamas willingly sacrifices their own children, their Arab neighbors seem very willing to sacrifice all of Palestine for their own causees. The Arab nations make a general show of protesting Israel, but have done next to nothing of real benefit for the Palestinians. Egypt didn't even want to take over Gaza when Israel withdrew. "Hey Egypt, want some free land?" "With those crazies living there? Hell no!" I can't really blame them (would you want to try and run Gaza?) but it makes their sympathy for the Palestinians a lot harder to believe. For most Arab nations the primary function of the Palestinian crisis is to make sure that their popualtion has someone to hate more than the leadership of their own country. Matters are even more complicated when you consider the fact that - after successfully training Hezbollah to fight Israel to a standstill in Lebanon back in 2006 - Iran has been backing Hamas heavily in recent months. Hamas rocket attacks on Israel have penetrated farther and farther with the aid of sophisticated rockets from Iran as well as military training.

Hamas is thus functioning as a proxy army for Iran against Israel much as the way the Americans used the Mujahideen against the USSR in Afghanistan. If Israel had waited longer to respond the attacks would only have grown worse. If they stop their attack now, Iran will be pleased with their proteges and farther rearm them to inflict yet more damage down the road.

The Arabs and the Persians have a long history of bitter rivalry (see the Iran/Iraq war for an example) which is why Arab rhetoric against Israel has actually been relatively light this time around. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other Arab states know full well that this is a proxy conflict between Iran and Israel, and they have very little love for Iran.

One final thing that should be brought to the attention of the general public is the wave of anti-Semitic violence sweeping through the world and especially Europe in protest of Israel's actions. At first blush this may seem natural, but you have to stop and realize that Judaism is a religoin. Israel is a country. If the conflict is really political and the Palestinians just want their own territory (which is what their apologists say) then why are synagogues in Europe being defaced?

I feel badly for the innocent Palestinians. Despite their stupidity in electing Hamas (can you really elect a government that is at war with your neighbor and act surprised when you end up in a war as a result?), they have had the short end of the stick ever since the British Empire decided to give the Palestinian Mandate to the Jews and the Arabs at the same time. (Oops). They are treated as canon fodder by their own government and by their allegedly sympathetic Arab neighbors. I don't know what the solution to the Middle East crisis is, but I am learning that it's not about who had what land 2,000 years ago. It's about perfectly mundane power struggles between Israel, Arab states, and Iran today. Expecting Israel to just sit and take a beating from Hamas isn't just wrong because no nation has a right to endure military assault without response, but it's dangerous because these days it plays to the hands of a resurgent and dangerous Iran.

Piece at America's Right

2009-01-07T14:09:00.002-05:00

Jeff Schreiber runs the blog America's Right. He asked me to write an exclusive piece about Obama's pick for Labor Secretary for the blog, and so I did. You can read it here. You'll notice that in my intro, Jeff says he doesn't always agree with what I write on this blog. Well, I don't always agree with everything he writes on his blog. So there. Neener neener. :-D

Choose Life Virginia

2008-12-30T10:49:00.003-05:00

Virginia readers: There's a great pro-life initiative that needs your help. The initiative is to get a new Virginia license plate template with the slogan "Choose Life!" Here's some info from the Facebook group:

Senate Bill 801 has been introduced to the Virginia General Assembly by Senator Ken Cuccinelli. (http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?091+sum+SB801) Its passage will make “Choose Life” License Plates available to Virginia drivers. This license plate is a clear and colorful pro-life message that travels with you.

Virginia currently offers over 200 special license plates from wildflowers to your favorite college football teams. Why not a plate that expresses the value of human life?

In 2003, when a similar Choose Life license plate bill was introduced, it passed both houses but was vetoed by then Governor Mark Warner.

And here's what they need from us:

1. Sign the Choose Life Petition in support of the Virginia General Assembly offering the “Choose Life” license plate, found here: http://www.petitiononline.com/rcl2008/petition.html

2. Complete a “Choose Life” License Plate application and write a $35 check to the Richmond Coalition for Life in order to own the first Choose Life plates. A minimum number of pre-paid applications is required to cover the cost of production for the first plates. We must have a significant number of people pre-paying to show support for this bill to ensure its passage. If the bill does not become a signed law, your money will be returned. The application can be found here: http://www.vachoose-life.org/images/DMV-Application.pdfMore details on how you can complete these two steps is available here: http://www.vachoose-life.org/sign_up_forms.

The group has not yet reached it's goal of 350 members, and the more applications they have in hand when they present their case to the Virginia Senate Transportation Committee on January 16th the better. Sign the petition and send in your application ASAP to help make this a reality!

Blue-Ray Dying?

2008-12-30T10:17:00.003-05:00

Sony has a history of losing format wars. They like to develop their own proprietary formats, keep tight-fisted control over those formats, and then watch their format go down in flames as someone else takes a less miserly approach to a competing format. This has happened at least half a dozen times since VHS trounced Betamax.

So when the HD-DVD vs. BlueRay war began, I though Sony was the longshot. I was surprised when they managed to pull off a victory. But it seems that surprise was premature.

Robin Harris of ZDNet.com has a couple of articles detailing Sony's amazing capacity to find a way to fail even when the competition has given up. The first, from October 28th of this year, is called Blu-ray is dead - heckuva job, Sony! Robin nails a couple of reasons for BlueRay's death spiral:

1. BlueRay's advantages over regular DVDs when viewed on HD TVs is not as great as people thought it would be. Since HD tvs have more pixels than regular DVDs, showing a regular DVD on an HD tv results in an extremely bad picture. If you've ever watched streaming video with a poor internet connection and seen "jaggies" in the image you get the idea. But modern DVD players include built-in software that smooths the images when they are scaled up to HD, meaning that even regular DVDs look pretty good on HD TVs.

2. BlueRay costs too much. They cost too much in the store (which I already knew), but they also cost too much to producers. Here's a sampling of the fees you have to pay if you want to sell your movie in the BlueRay format:

Service bureau reproduction runs $20 per single layer disc in quantities of 300 or less.
Hollywood style printed/replicated Blu-ray discs are considerably cheaper once you reach the thousand unit quantity: just $3.50 per disc.
High-quality authoring programs like Sony Blu-print or Sonic Solutions Scenarist cost $40,000.
The Advanced Access Content System - the already hacked DRM - has a one-time fee of $3000 plus a per project cost of almost $1600 plus $.04 per disk. And who defines “project?”
Then the Blu-ray disc Association charges another $3000 annually to use their very exclusive - on 4% of all video disks! - logo.

This is a big part of the reason you have to spend $30 or more to buy a BlueRay DVD. Sony thought that DVDs would look so bad on HD TVs that they could force people to buy them. But since they don't look that bad most people (like me) refuse to have anything to do with BlueRay.

3. BlueRay selection is limited. The reason for this is that it costs too much to publish movies on the BlueRay DVD format, so smaller movie makers don't bother. They have their movies in HD, but they can't afford to sell them on BlueRay.

4. There are alternative ways to get your HD fix. We have a nice HD tv. We have an Xbox 360. We have a Netflix account. We have fast internet. So my wife and I routinely watch our favorite shows - like The Office or 30 Rock - streamed in HD over the internet. There are numeours other ways to get HD content either downloaded or streamed. Sure, lots of America can't get cheap 16Mbps internet, but the folks with broadband are the folks who want to see high def movies.

5. Robin doesn't mention it, but I will: piracy. The ethical and legal issues around pirating software and media consent are murky, but what it comes down to is convenience. I pay $50 or so a year for XBox Live and about $18 a month for Netflix. I get basically all the shows I want, so pirating movies or TV shows isn't worth the trouble for me. When it comes to the latest and greatest movies, however, if I wanted to see them piracy would be a temptation. It's not for me because with a 2 year old and a 4 month old I don't watch many movies these days. But I can certainly see that charging $30 for an HD movie when it's not that tough to get one for free is not a smart way to make money. I'm not making a moral judgment on piracy here, just stating the economics of the situation.

Combine all these factors together and you get what we have today: BlueRay has won the HD format war and is going to lose anyway. Current market share (by discs sold, not by money) is 4% - 5%. Original projections for 2008 had it at 50%.

If I were at Sony I'd slash fees and prices. Judging from past performance, Sony will just stubbornly watch yet another once promising format be reduced to a hobby niche. Given the lackluster sales of the PlayStation 3 in the US (which many thought could be saved only if it came to be seen as a video game console and a BlueRay player), it looks like they might have a lot more to lose this time around than just a format, however.

(You should really read the original articles here and here. Robin is a very funny writer.)

New Education Proposal

2008-12-19T12:19:00.002-05:00

The bachelor's degree used to be optional for making a good living, but increasingly a college education is a requirement for a good job. The problem is that a liberal arts education is not well-suited for preparing people for the vast majority of careers out there. I have nothing against the liberal arts philosophy, but it's the wrong tool for the job of educating America's workforce.

In theory the liberal arts - or the "classical education" is a good idea. In medieval times there were 7 liberal arts:

the Trivium

grammar
rhetoric
logic

the Quadrivium

geometry
arithmetic
music
astronomy

In modern American colleges you'll find a distinct lack of most of these subjects even though some - such as logic and arithmetic - are no less indispensable to modern life. Instead, modern American college curriculum are long on soft and easy courses like English literature and short on anything remotely challenging like logic or geometry. Those subjects which are both difficult and still within the liberal arts curriculum - like the study of a foreign language - are so watered down as to be all but useless. I studied German for 9 years in middle school, high school, and college. I couldn't carry on a conversation in German now if my life depended on it. Nor could I at the conclusion of my last class. The fault for not speaking German is mine, but the fault of giving me A's despite my utter lack of ability is not. I did not deserve an A. I know what it's like to speak a foreign language (I speak Hungarian, although not very well at this point), but it was an experience that nothing in my liberal arts career had anything to do with.

The essential worthlessness of liberal arts education as it exists today is especially ironic given the rising cost of college tuition. A bachelor's degree functions as a screen for most jobs. It demonstrates that - while you may not be particularly intelligent - you can at least be expected to function at a minimal level of adult human behavior. Reading Charles Dickens might not have anything to do with insurance underwriting, but showing up for boring lectures even though you don't want to is a great indicator that you'll probably show up for boring work meetings even though you don't want to.

As a screen to weed out people who wouldn't be responsible employees the college degree probably does OK, but why not replace it with a degree that imparts useful content?

I'd like to see associates degrees garner more respect. I assume - having never been through a program - that the standards are even lower than the those for a liberal arts degree. And no one wants to raise the standards on a 2-year program because it's considered a sort of inferior version of the "full" 4-year program. But honestly most of what is learned in that 4 years is a waste of time and money when it comes to entry-level positions. We're treating 4-year degrees as professional qualifications. This is silly. We have 2 year degrees for that purpose.

This isn't to say I'm opposed to 4-year degrees. But if they are really going to purport to be a kind of comprehensive survey of critical topics, then that's what they should be. So here's my idea of the required curriculum for a 4-year degree. Call it a rejection of liberal arts philosophy or a return to it, I don't care:

microeconomics
calculus I
linear algebra
symbolic reasoning (logic)
ancient greek philosophy
modern western philosophy
western literary canon
modern/alt literature (elective - pick something from feminist lit to sci fi)
foreign language (time in-country required, ability to speak and read proficiently required)
ancient language (greek or latin, reading proficiency required)
science class with lab (pick bio, physics, or chemistry)
world history
american history
american government
intro to computers

A single semester of each would work for everything but the language requirements (so that's 13 classes without the language requirement) and then we'd probably need 4 classes minimum for the language requirement. So let's make that foreign language/ancient language an either/or for a total of 17 required classes. At a light load of 4/semester that's 4 semesters, leaving at least 4 more semesters for concentration in a major. Of course some folks would have to work up to stuff like calc 1 or linear algebra, but that's their tough luck. If you're not up through pre-calc in high school you're doing it wrong. Add a couple of semesters of remedial math and call it a day.

I'd also like to specify that the way science labs are taught is retarded. They try to introduce the use of scientific instruments at the same time as the principles of experiment design and data-gathering and they do everything in groups. The result is an awful mess where one person per group who is especially motivated does most/all of the work, while everyone else muddles through. Furthermore, trying to do the experiments while learning the instruments just means the experiments have to be basic and contrived. They should spend the first couple of labs doing nothing but pointless work with the instruments and grading based on proficiency. Experimental theory should be taught separately as well and then it makes sense to have the kids try to run some experiments. After they know what they are doing in a lab. Not before.

The computer class also needs to be specified. The goal should be an intro to how to learn to use specific programs, not to teach a couple of programs. You can instruct a bunch of people how to use Excel 2003, but if that's all they are learning they are going to be lost trying to use another version (say Open Office) and lost when Excel 2003 is replaced with Excel 2007. So the class should focus on the basics of how computers work: an intro to binary, breakdown of the basic parts of a computer, and a brief intro to programming using a super-simple scripting language should all be included.

You get college kids going through a degree like that and I guarantee you make the world a better place. It's time to expect more from our students.

A lot more.

The Auto Bailout Will Fail

2008-12-19T11:30:00.002-05:00

I respect President Bush for trying to thread the needle on the auto bailout. He is trying to balance the long term need to preserve the free market against the short term economic crisis, and the auto bailout plan reflects this.

There are a lot of reasons that the automakers are failing. Part of it is the economic downturn - as the country goes through a recession all retailers of normal goods will face a declining sales while retailers of inferior goods like WalMart and McDonald's will actually do better. But the American automakers have been sliding towards failure for decades now, and the fundamental reason for this is their inability to compete with the foreign - especially Asian - automakers.

There are a variety of competitive advantages for the foreign car makers. They concentrated on smaller cars and fuel-efficient technologies much faster while American companies placed their bets on SUVs. American attempts to recalibrate towards smaller cars have been lumbering and clumsy because so much of the American car ethos is about strength and power. American products and - more importantly - branding have been behind the curve.

An even older problem dates back to World War II. The unprecedented scope of the war caused a revolution in engineering and math fields leading to the developments of operations research, systems engineering, complexity theory, control theory, and other related fields. The American statistician W. Edwards Deming dramatically boosted American production for the war effort, but after the war American corporations were reluctant to embrace his quality-control theories. The Japanese, on the other hand, welcome him with open arms and the result was the Japanese manufacturers dramatically outperforming Americans in everything from electronics to cars. American car quality has started to catch up to Japanese quality, but in general Americans are still far behind the cutting edge in manufacturing and management science. New foreign plants located in the United States are agile and can be retooled to produce different cars in a matter of hours. American factories have to be shut down for weeks to accomplish the same switch overs.

The most controversial difference, however, has to do with the unions. Off the top of my head the average cost to the American car companies is something like $70 per worker per hour, while the foreign factories located on American soil must pay something closer to $40 per worker per hour. The foreign plants do pay a lower salary, but not by much. Most of the difference is in rich benefits that the unions have negotiated. The foreign plants hire non-union labor, and so they don't have the huge legacy costs. The end result of this imbalance, is that an American car costs at least a couple thousand dollars more to make than an equivalent Japanese car. To compete on quality, American cars have to cost more. To compete on price, American cars have to have lower quality.

This is why many folks - like Mitt Romney - have called for allowing the automakers to go into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This would allow the automakers to break their contracts with the unions and renegotiate them. You might remember that many airlines have been in and out of bankruptcy multiple times without actually shutting down. The risk, of course, is that the renegotiations take too long or even stall out altogether leading to automakers shutting down and liquidating in whole or in part. The airlines survived, but there's no guarantee the automakers would.

President Bush has decided to take the safe approach and extend a bailout rather than wait to see what Chapter 11 bankruptcy brings. As CNNMoney article outlines, the plan, he is making $13.4B available in loans to Chrysler and to GM. The money is going to come from the stash that was supposed to be used for the bailout of the financial markets so that it doesn't require additional congressional approval. (So much for oversight.)

Here's the major problem with the bailout plan:

The loans are for three years but the money will have to be repaid in full within 30 days if the firms do not show themselves to be viable by March 31. It is expected that the companies will have to negotiate new agreements with unions and creditors in order to do so.

The hope that unions will negotiate new agreements is a false hope. There are two key reasons the unions are going to fight tooth and nail against making concessions. The first is that the bail out - which gives the most money to the worst company (Chrysler) and none to the best company (Ford) is yet another lesson in socialism: we reward failure. Rather than negotiate deep concessions to ave the companies that employ them, the union has one more reason to believe that if they play chicken with car executives the US government will step in to save the day.

But the real problem is a little more subtle. Here's another quote from the article:

The government wants the automakers reduce their debt load by two-thirds via a debt for equity exchange with current bondholders and get the United Auto Workers union to agree to wages and work rules competitive with non-union plants operated by Asian auto manufacturers by the end of next year.

The government wants the unions to agree to provide benefits and pay for their employees that are equivalent to those which non-union employees get. Which raises the question: What's the point of having a union at all if it doesn't get the employees a better deal? The answer, of course, is that there isn't any point to it at all.

So the government's bail out plan depends on the hope that rather than play another round of brinkmanship after winning this round, the unions will instead publicly demonstrate their own irrelevance. Without a bailout the unions are offered two alternative choices: demonstrate your own irrelevance by cutting benefits to keep your companies afloat or stick to your guns and go down with the ship. In other words: a threat to your long-term survival or a threat to your short-term survival.

But thanks to the bailout the unions face a different pair of options: demonstrate your own irrelevance by cutting benefits to keep your companies afloat, or depend on the government continuing to enable American companies that can't compete in the free market.

The result is easy to predict. The unions will make a lot of noise about concessions, but the concessions they make will be the bare minimum to try and prove to the government that the companies are viable (not profitable, it's a pretty low standard). As a result, the competitiveness of American automakers will increase marginally, but continue to lag substantially. The demise of the automakers will just be postponed a few years and - more importantly - they will not be able to participate in any meaningful way in an economic recovery in the short term.

This bail out, like previous ones, is made with good intentions and even a genuine attempt to preserve free market principles. But, like the financial bail out, it is ultimately a failure that does nothing but incentivize failure, penalize success, and turn a crisis today into an even bigger crisis for the future.

The Rick Warren Strategy

2008-12-18T10:59:00.004-05:00

Like a lot of people I was surprised by Obama's decision to have Rick Warren pray at his inauguration. This is because I underestimated Obama. I think I understand the strategy behind this pick.

It goes back to Karl Rove. Karl Rove is largely credited with identifying and recruiting the evangelicals of America to augment the Republican coalition. Before George W. Bush, they represented a demographic that was largely disengaged from politics. Rove believed that drafting them into the Republican party was such a fundamental shift in the electorate that it could lead to a "permanent Republican majority".

At first I thought Obama's rhetorical opposition to gay marriage was just rhetoric to avoid overly offending social conservatives during the general election. As a Democrat it's assumed that really he's supportive of gay rights, he just has to lie because we're a nation of homophobic bigots.

But the Rick Warren decision ruins that hypothesis.

My new theory is that Obama's vision is much bigger than just winning the election in 2008 or even re-election in 2012. He senses a vulnerability in the Republican coalition, and he aims to drive a wedge into it.

The vulnerability is that a evangelicals are bleeding-heart liberals who happen to be pro-life and anti-gay marriage (think Huckabee). While I see causes like welfare and universal health care as both counterproductive and a betrayal of Christian ideals (an attempt to foist our personal, moral obligation to be charitable off onto the government), they see it as the embodiment of Christ's teachings. (Keep in mind these aren't the kind of folks to shy away from church-state co-mingling.) They have no real understanding of or loyalty to the ideals of limited government, and are prone to be foreign policy doves as well. Even environmentalism is growing among the younger generation of evangelicals.

If Obama neutralizes the gay rights issue, the only thing left to distinguish socially conservative evangelicals from Democrats is abortion, but Obama even managed to make inroads there. Considering that he's the most radically pro-abortion politician in American history, this is truly amazing. If Obama can successfully convince evangelicals that overturning Roe is a lost cause and that more welfare will lower the abortion rate then what's left to keep them from switching to the Democratic cause?

Nothing.

It looks like Karl Rove's dream stands a good chance of becoming Obama's reality.

Schadenfreude

2008-12-18T09:40:00.002-05:00

Schadenfreude: “largely unanticipated delight in the suffering of another which is cognized as trivial and/or appropriate.” I should be clear, I don't think that shadenfreude is a particularly noble feeling for anyone to have. So I'm not proud for feeling it. But, then again, I really can't resist.

What I'm talking about, of course, is the left's growing dismay with their anointed savior Barack Obama. We're still a month away from the inauguration, and already liberals are starting to feel betrayed and hard-done by. The most recent flap is over gay marriage. In case you hadn't heard, Obama has picked socially conservative evangelical leader Rick Warren to pray at the inauguration. Warren is pro-life so I imagine NARAL, NOW, Planned Parenthood and the like aren't too pleased, but the ones who are really annoyed are gay rights leaders.

This is humorous on two levels. The first is that Obama professed to be opposed to gay marriage throughout the entire campaign, so it's odd that gay rights activists are angry that he's picked an anti-gay marriage advocate to pray at the inauguration. It exposes a pretty serious fault line in the Democratic coalition (blacks are staunchly Democratic and staunchly anti-gay marriage), and it seems fitting that gay rights advocates who must have thought Obama's opposition to gay marriage was mere political posturing are finding that the opposition is deeper than they had believed. Or, more realistically, that Obama's pragmatism runs deeper than expected. Who are they going to vote for next - a Republican? They've got nowhere else to go, Obama knows this, and he is already preparing for his re-election campaign.

The second is that Obama's position has never really made sense on gay marriage. He's against gay marriage, but he also opposed Proposition 8 in California. So, he's against gay marriage and he's against being against gay marriage. Usually a candidate who so blatantly took both sides of an issue would wind up with no support, but somehow Obama ended up with support from both sides. The triumph of hope over reason, it appears, ends in disappointment.

Gay rights advocates aren't the only ones pre-emptively unhappy with Obama's presidency. Environmentalists are full of dismay as well. Obama's pick of Colorado Senator Salazar is seen as a repudiation of a all-out environmentalism. Even though he has consistently opposed drilling in ANWR, Salazar is considered a moderate over all and even has ties to the mining and ranching industries.

The anti-war crowd is also upset, although at least their let-down was more gradual. Obama went from flaunting his opposition to the Iraq War (he claimed he would not have authorized the use of force to draw a distinction between himself and Clinton during the primaries) to much more hawkish defense rhetoric during the general campaign. Long before election it was clear to anyone who paid attention that Obama's Iraq strategy was essentially the same as McCain's. Only the rhetoric differed. He continues to play up the idea of getting out of Iraq, but the substance of his plan is not only the same as McCain's, it's the same as Bush's: bring the troops home as soon as the Iraqis can manage their own security. Newsflash to anyone who thought "Bring the Troops Home Now" was ever a viable option: you're crazy. I believe that Obama's opposition to the war may very well be genuine, but once the invasion happened a precipitous withdrawal was never a real policy option.

And last but not least, we have the flood of Clinton-era staffers into the Obama transition team and cabinet - epitomized by his appointment of Hillary Clinton to be the new Secretary of State. He's even got President Clinton's personal secretary answering phones for the transition office. Ideological liberals who say Clinton as far too centrist are dismayed. The Clintons 2.0 doesn't really seem like the change they believed in.

I should be clear - I think that many of Obama's strongest supporters recognized early on that he was a pragmatist and a savvy politician. I haven't spoken to many of them, but I'd wager that they are neither disappointed nor surprised by these appointments. But the voters who put Obama over the top were the wide-eyed Hope & Change crowd who came out for the hype. Remember all of the rejoicing from the left about how the Republican party had fallen apart in the face of resurgent liberalism? Well newsflash, folks, the guy you just elected sounded like a conservative Republican half the time. The Great Left Hope and Change didn't just steer hard to the right for the duration of the general campaign, he's apparently there to stay.

Of course this also means that I was very, very wrong in my alarm about Obama's policies. I believed that his radical left-wing past was a better indicator of what his policies would be like than his centrist rhetoric about free markets and individual responsibility. It seems I was wrong. But in this case the benefits of being wrong far outweigh the costs so I'll take it. Don't get me wrong - he's still to far left for me. So was Clinton. So, for that matter, was Bush on a lot of issues. But at least it seems the danger of the USSA is not as imminent as had been originally believed.

On the other hand I was right about one fundamental fact: if you succeed in being everything to everyone during the campaign, it inevitably means you've set a lot of your supporters up for disappointment. It appears that Obama knew that too, however, because he certainly isn't doing much to soften the let-down. I'm more impressed than ever with his political calculation and savvy. This is a guy I would not want to mess with.

Of Economics, Bailouts, and Value

2008-12-15T14:12:00.004-05:00

Two headlines from today launch today's thoughts on economics, bailouts, and the concept of value. The first is from CNN with the headline: Home Equity Stripped Away in 2008; Nearly $2 Trillion in Home Values Lost This Year. The second is another article (this one from Breitbart.com) about the fallout from Wall Street's newest Ponzi scheme: Top banks admit huge losses in Wall Street 'pyramid' fraud.

Before we get to that, however, a word on the current recession. The housing bubble led to 2 problems. The first problem is easy to understand: the bursting of the housing bubble. This means that everyone thought that homes were worth more than they were really worth. More importantly, they thought that the values would keep rising. If the value on a home is rising, that means that banks can go easy on refinancing and mortgage conditions. (The fact that the federal government was artificially supporting sub-prime mortgages didn't help matters.) Now the bubble has burst and home prices are coming down. As a result people are finding themselves in the position of owing more on their home than it is worth and in addition all those sub-prime mortgages that seemed like a win-win as long as home values were on a stairway to heaven have turned "toxic".

But what does it mean for a sub-prime mortgage to turn "toxic"? That's where we get to the second problem, and it's harder to understand than the first problem. Imagine for a second that the entire US economy was worth a single dollar. Just $1. Now imagine two scenarios. In the first scenario, the person holding that single dollar bill decides to hold onto it for a full year, without spending anything. Now in the second scenario imagine the person holding the dollar bill spends it within 5 minutes of getting it, and that the person they gave the $1 to (in exchange for a burger, a very small payment on a car, whatever) turns around and spends the $1 within 5 minutes again, and so on.

Which economy will be healthier? Obviously the one where everyone is spending that $1 really quickly, shooting it through the economy and leading to all kinds of beneficial transactions.

The principle here is that the amount of money isn't all that matters, the rate at which that money travels through the economy is also very important. There's a name for the ease with which money can travel through the economy, and it's a term you have probably heard: "liquidity". The more liquid an asset is, the easier it can be converted into cash or even used in a manner similar to cash. A home is a very illiquid asset. It can take months to sell it and convert it to cash and there's no method to easily barter and exchange homes. Cash, checks, and credit cards on the other hand, are very liquid.

And this is where we get back to toxic sub-prime loans. Imagine you're a big financial company. Say an insurance company. People pay you their premiums and every now and then you pay them back if they crash their car or their house burns down. Since you've got thousands or millions of policies, you also have ginormous stack of money. But that money isn't going to do you any good just sitting there. You need to invest it. Traditionally one way to invest it is to originate loans. When someone goes and gets a loan from their local bank, a lot of time the actual cash doesn't come from the bank, it comes from an insurance company trying to find a way to put their cash reserves to work. This has been going on for a long time. But in recent years the insurance companies have been looking for ways to make their money work even harder. Remember - it's not just about how much money you have - it's about how fast it circulates. So once they originate the loan that means that they're receiving regular payments from the homeowner. The right to receive that stream of payments itself is an asset but - like a home - it's a generally illiquid asset. There's not a lot you can do with it.

So in comes the process of "securitization". That's the legal process of taking an illiquid asset and converting it into a more liquid form. In this case, you take a whole bunch of those mortgage cash streams, bundle them together, establish rules for trading and valuing them and a market to trade them, and then you've created a much more liquid asset.

As the economy grew more and more liquid, it grew more and more profitable. Think of it as that $1 dollar bill circling faster and faster, going through more and more hands. That's all well and good, except that people started to rely on the extreme liquidity of the market. You may not have $1 on hand, but you know it's going around really fast, so you think nothing of taking out a $1 loan because you want to buy another burger now. A short-term loan is no big deal because you know that at the rate that $1 bill is traveling around you'll get it back in no time and you can pay your debt. This is what happened in the American economy, borrowing money got really, really cheap and companies started to depend on short-term loans for business expenses so that they could keep use their investments as strategically as possible.

But when everyone realized that the mortgage securities were actually overvalued (because the homes themselves were overvalued) all of a sudden that $1 bill that had been racing around the country came to a screeching halt.

And this is why Bear Sterns went under. It wasn't that they lacked money. Their stock price was so low at one point that just the real estate value of their headquarters was worth more than their combined stock. But a giant building is an illiquid asset and they had short-term debts that needed to be paid now. Imagine that you've borrowed $5,000 from a loan shark and it's due by 5pm today. It doesn't matter if you have $50,000 in equity in your home, that's not liquid. You can't pay the loan off by giving him 10% of the equity of your home, and there's no way you could go through the legal hoops of selling your home between now and 5pm. So no one cares how much money you have, they care how much liquid money you have available to spend right now.

So those are the two fundamental problems in the recession: decreasing value and decreasing liquidity.

Now the original bail out plan, as you might remember, was a plan to spend up to $700B buying up those toxic mortgages. As long as those toxic mortgage-backed-securities (MBS) were out there, no one wanted to loan money because no one knew who had a stinking pile of rotten MBSs hidden in their balance sheet. So the results was extreme illiquidity in the market. The idea was that if we clean up those toxic MBSs, people will start lending money again, and that $1 bill will start circulating around the country again.

That didn't work out so well, and instead we ended up scrapping the original plan and just injecting billions of dollars directly into banks. The goal was the same: get some liquidity back in the market to speed up the rate at which that $1 bill circulates.

So far, it's not really working.

Now along come The Big 3 with the claim that they too have a liquidity problem. If only we could borrow money like we used to, they say, we'd be able to get through these tough times and restructure our businesses so that people would buy our cars. Yes, yes, they say, we admit that we've been losing market share for decades, but we all have brilliant schemes that would make everyone buy our cars and trucks again, if only the markets weren't so illiquid!

Now here's the key - and the reason I think the bailouts are such a bad idea - the Big 3 and the original bailout for financial instruments are based on the notion that we can address the liquidity issue without addressing the value issue. This is impossible.

The reason there is a liquidity issue at all is because all those MBSs turned out to be overvalued. No matter how much money you throw at the problem, you can't cover up that fact. The word "bailout" itself is misleading. It conveys the idea of a ship that is essentially watertight, we just need to get the water that is currently in the boat back out of the boat and we'll sail right along. But that's not the case at all. The boat has a hole in the bottom, and no amount of bailing is going to address that problem.

And so we come to the central issue: value. Value is a tricky subject. It's is clearly both relative and objective at the same time. A lot of people think paying $1.50 (or more!) for bottled water is ridiculous, especially when they can just fill their water-bottles from a public fountain. So the value of a half-liter of water varies between "nothing" and "$1.50" depending on personal preference. Then again, if you took either of those folks and put them in a desert, they'd probably be willing to pay a lot more than $1.50 for water. So in one sense the only way to value an asset - a home, a mortgage, a bottle of water, whatever - is to simply see what people will pay for it.

According to this theory of value as strictly relative, flooding the markets with cash should work. After all, a stock is just worth what people feel it should be worth, so if the good times are rolling again people will buy stock, stock price will go up, and we can all get back to living large.

The problem with this theory of value, however, is that eventually value has to come down to actual utility. The size of our economy measured in dollars is really not as important as the amount of stuff we make. How much milk there is to buy, how many shoes, how many TVs, how many cars, how many homebuilders, how many babysitters. What really determines the level of affluence in American society is not the price tag on any given TV set, it's the number of TV sets that there are to go around. This is because the less scarce an item is (the more there are) then - as long as supply and demand are allowed to do their thing - the cheaper that item becomes. Value is a consequence of utility and scarcity, which are largely objective realities.

So there's a difference between actual goods and services (like houses, TVs, hours of babysitting) and financial derivatives (MBSs, stocks in companies that make TVs, and, well, I don't know of any financial derivatives for babysitting). The value of a financial derivative may be a purely irrational number with no connection in reality, but the value of an actual good and service is directly linked to how much use people can get out of it and how rare that good and service is.

And the problem with the bailout schemes is that they are all trying to save our financial derivatives by fixing liquidity, when the reality that matters isn't liquidity or derivatives, but the value of actual goods and services.

And so we get back to our original headlines. In the Ponzi scheme Madoff was selling financial securities. As long as more people kept giving him money he could pay off the original investors and keep a tidy sum for himself and the perceived value kept growing up. When some of the original investors got skittish and tried to withdraw their money they found that it was a giant pyramid scheme. The value of the assets went to $0. They were worthless.

Meanwhile, Americans may have lost $2 trillion in home value, but the homes themselves are still there. The roof still works, the yard hasn't shrunk, and the ceiling hasn't lowered. The value of the home price fluctuates, but there's a certain amount of utility that you get from a physical house that doesn't rise and fall with the stock market.

And here's the final lesson. You can't rescue a Ponzi scheme. It's value invented out of nothing. When it collapses, the value goes to 0 and now amount of shoveling more cash at it is going to change that. The best you could to is restart the Ponzi scheme and lead to an even greater collapse down the road. On the other hand, you don't really need to rescue a housing market because it's value based on the very real utility of having a place to sleep at night. When the value of shares in Ponzi scheme readjust to reality they drop to nothing. When the value of homes falls, we have what is called a "market correction". The end up being the valued based on the very real utility of having a home (which leads to demand), and the actual scarcity of homes in the marketplace (the supply).

Any bailout that tries to avoid a market correction is going to fail. It will fail dramatically now, or it will fail even more dramatically in the future. The only way to jump start the US economy with any kind of lasting positive impact is not to try and increase liquidity without increasing value, but to try and increase value first and allow liquidity to come back afterwards.

No one wants to hear this because everyone wants a quick fix. Everyone wants to find the solution that will bring back prosperity today, or in just a couple of months. It may be possible to do that, but it would be an illusory success. It would be replacing one bubble with another the way the housing bubble replaced the .com bubble.

I say: no more bubbles. And that means: no more bailouts. We have Chapter 11 bankruptcy for a reason. Let the automakers figure out why. We have a free market for a reason, when unsuccessful companies fail, they get removed from the market. That's the fundamental force that makes companies improve with time. Bailing out the failures is the one sure way to make our economy stutter and fail in the long run, because it penalizes success and harms failure.

For what it's worth, the current looming replacement bubble is a currency bubble. The Federal Reserve has already resorted to printing money in an effort to add liquidity. This is a disaster waiting to happen. Currency is not value. Currency represents value. You can't invent lasting value by printing money. You only devalue the money. Either printing money won't work at all, or it will work for now and then we'll have a collapse of the American dollar down the road which will be even worse - for America and for the world - than collapsing home prices or collapsing .com start-ups. When the we're not printing money to try and solve the bail-out, the US government is going even farther in debt, which leads to pretty much the same problem. In plain English: the bail outs may work temporariliy, but the cure is worse than the disease in the long run.

Now I'm writing this as someone who works for a financial company. My job is not secure. I'm a low-level guy, and I may very well face a lay-off in the immediate future. I'm not thrilled about that, and it sucks that my family and I may have to go through hard times when I personally didn't do anything wrong. I'm all for any plans to give Americans jobs and put them to work as long as we're adding real value to the economy.

What I'm opposed to are money hand-outs to uncompetitive companies (financial, auto manufacturing, or other) that attempt to fix the symptoms of this recession without addressing the cause. What I'm opposed to is replacing one bubble with another bubble and making a big disaster now an even greater catastrophe down the road.

Voter Reform (Part 2 of 2)

2008-12-03T12:36:00.002-05:00

On Monday I described the first of my two suggestions for voter reform: switching from plurality-wins to instant run-off elections. As promised, here's the second - probably more controversial - suggestion.

First: The Nay-Sayers

So here goes: only those Americans able to pass a basic civics test should be allowed to vote. Before I even get to my reasoning in favor of this proposition I want to deal with the two knee-jerk reactions I expect. The first is the myth that in the United States we have a universal right to vote, and the second is the idea that a civics test would somehow be discriminatory or elitist.

The fact is that there is no such thing as a universal right to vote in the United States - neither in the Constitution nor in any federal statute. Originally states restricted voting in many ways usually to only those who owned land within the state, or who owned property of sufficient value. Since then, there have been 4 amendments to the Constitution that dealt with the issue of who gets to vote.

The fifteenth amendment specifically forbids the use of race as criteria for who can vote and who can't. The nineteenth amendment rules out gender as a criteria for voter eligibility. Amendment twenty-four added poll taxes to the list of things you can't require as a precondition for voting. Finally amendment twenty-six prevents the government from banning anyone older than age 18 from voting based on their age. As far as the Constitution is concerned, you can't use a test based on age (other than 'older than 18'), gender, or race and you can't impose a poll tax. Subject to Constitutional review (e.g. you couldn't ban people based on religion because that would be establishing a state religion by exclusion), anything else goes.

The major federal law in addition to these amendments is the Voting Rights Act. The purpose of the VRA - passed in 1965 - was to stop states from circumventing the 15th amendment by (for example) using literacy test as a way of disqualifying large numbers of African Americans from voting. But even the VRA did not go so far as to establish a federal right to vote, as the Supreme Court made clear in Bush v. Gore in 2000: "The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States."

Despite public perception to the contrary, there is no federal right to vote. It was not a part of the original founding of this nation, and it has not been added at any point since then. It is up to the states do determine eligibility, subject to the constraints of the amendments above and the VRA. As long as the eligibility requirements are not designed to and will not in practice discriminate against potential voters based on race, religion, gender, or age they are legal.

It is possible, however, that blacks would fail a basic civics test at a greater rate than whites. If that is the case, then the civics test would violate the VRA. (Am I more racist for suggesting that possibility, or are we as a nation more racist for protecting lower standards for minorities?) In that case, a civics test could not be implemented without a repeal or modification of the VRA. I'll address this issue when I get to the practical implementation details.

The second major contention is that any minimum standard for voting may not violate the letter of the law, but that it violates the spirit of the law by espousing elitism in the face of America's democratic tradition. After all, Abraham Lincoln said we are "government of the people, by the people, for the people", not "government of some of the people, by some of the people, for some of the people". Indeed, an intelligence or aptitude test would be an elitist standard. Tying the right to vote to a GRE score, for example, would be elitist.

But the "basic civics test" I am proposing is nothing more or less than the same questions that we expect anyone and everyone seeking to gain American citizenship to be able to answer. There is a list of 100 questions used by the U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and anyone who wishes to become a citizen must pass an interview which includes correctly answering a selection of questions from that list. The interview is oral, so it's not necessary that the person know how to write, but it is a requirement that the questions be asked and answered in English. (See the list of questions yourself.) If we expect all naturalized citizens regardles of education, nationality, race, religion, gender, or age to be able to answer these basic questions, certainly we should be able to expect the same proficiency from natural born citizens? This is not elitism. This is not discrimination. This is a reminder that with the rights and privileges of American citizenship come obligations and responsibilities. We should expect the same from those who are born into this nation as from those who seek to become citizens.

Why Have a Test?

I am in favor of this kind of reform for both philosophical and practical reasons. I am tired of the sense of entitlement that permeates American political discourse. Not only do we talk of the rights present in the Constitution, but we've woven into our legal fabric new rights that aren't actually in the Constitution (like a right to privacy) through alchemical judicial invention rather than the actual process of Constitutional modification. And as if this weren't bad enough, in common discourse it's common to hear people speak of a "right to work" or a "right to healthcare" or even a "right to a home". Jobs, healthcare, and homes are all good things that every American should possess, but a government capable of legally mandating these things is a government fundamentally incompatible with the Constitutional restraints. You can't have a government that hands out goodies like the tooth fairy without shattering the mold of limited government and creating a political equivalent to Frankenstein's monster: grotesque and dangerous.

Philosophically the antidote to this trend is to remind people that liberty carries heavy burdens, and that first and foremonst among these burdens is constant vigiliance. "Ask not," as Kennedy said. And practically the defense against the corruption of America's political heritage is to ensure that we have an informed electorate.

And that is really the fundamental difference in spirit between my proposal and Jim Crowe era poll taxes and literacy tests. I don't want to prevent anyone from voting. I just want to be sure that when they vote, they have some basic, rudimentary understanding of the office they are electing someone to hold. As I discussed previously, American performance on a basics civics test was abysmal.

Among my friends and readers of this blog the average score (off the top of my head, I haven't calculated it yet) was somewhere in the low to mid 80s, but when the test was administered to a random sampling of the US population the average score was a 49%. Nearly 3 out of 4 people surveyed got less than 60% of the answers right - barely half! Here are some other findings on the questions:

Less than half can name all three branches of the government.
Only 21% know that the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people” comes from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
Although Congress has voted twice in the last eight years to approve foreign wars, only 53% know that the power to declare war belongs to Congress. Almost 40% incorrectly believe it belongs to the president.
Only 55% know that Congress shares authority over U.S. foreign policy with the president.
Almost a quarter incorrectly believe Congress shares this power with the United Nations.
Only 27% know the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits establishing an official religion for the United States.
Less than one in five know that the phrase “a wall of separation” between church and state comes from a letter by Thomas Jefferson. Almost half incorrectly believe it can be found in the Constitution.

Just how much we should expect of our citizens can bea slippery-slope question. But, conveniently enough, we have in the naturalization quiz a conveniently established bare-minimum. This isn't going to turn the entire country into Constitutional scholars, and that's fine. In many ways the symbolism is just as important as knowledge of the civics itself. The message this sends is that in the United States you don't just have a responsibility to be a voter, you have a responsibility to be an informed voter.

Practical Implementation and Final Thoughts

The simplest way to implement this test, I think, would be similar to the way learner's permits are handed out. You could pick up a booklet at the DMV with the questions and answers all printed out, and then stop by to take the test during any working hours. The same standards used to ensure identity of the test-taker could be used. Arrangements would have to be made for illiterate test-takers (both to study, and to take the test). The test results should have a limited shelf-life, requiring everyone to renew their voter registration (say) every 12 years.

I don't know how realistic this law would be. Politically, the Democrat vote skews towards those people who have a harder time registering, which is why Democrats always want to make voting easier (e.g. same-day registration) and why voter-registration groups like ACORN have close ties to the Democratic party. So from the very beginning there will be a partisan edge to this initiative.

The bigger problem, however, will be facing the VRA standard that the test not have a racial bias. I have no doubt that a basic civics test conforms to the spirit of the VRA, but if any minority underperforms on the test it will violate the letter of the law and that will be the biggest hurdle to overcome.

Quick Shopping Tip

2008-12-03T10:25:00.002-05:00

I always knew that stores like Radio Shack and Circuit City or Best Buy like to jack up the prices of cables. Cables to connect your MP3 player to your car's AUX input (if it has one), speak cables, HDMI cables, all the cables you can think of. I recently lost my audio cable to connect my Zen MP3 player to my car, and so I thought "Hey, it may be a bit of a markup, but I'm in Circuit City anyway, so I'll pick one up."

It was $25.

Because retail stores have developed a fully-functional IQ-dampening device I actually bought it, but I soon came to my senses and returned it unopened.

Then I went to MonoPrice.com. I found a cord that was better than the one I had bought at Circuit City (this one was retractable for less messiness). The price? $1.02. The price was so good that I bought 5 of them, and got a bulk discount that dropped the price to $0.98 each. Shipping was less than $2.

With Christmas coming a lot of you may be buying electronic devices. TVs, laptops, speakers, MP3 players, DVD players, etc. And so you might be looking for cords because the device you bought didn't come with them, or because you need a longer one or a different kind. So please - do yourself a favor. Don't pay the 2500% markup at a retail store. Go to MonoPrice.com and save yourself a bunch of cash.

For what it's worth, I'm not getting paid by MonoPrice for this free advertising. I'm just passing along some good info for my fellow American consumers.

Lessons from Mumbai

2008-12-02T08:52:00.004-05:00

I'm sure you've all read of the Mumbai terrorist attacks. As usual, Wikipedia has synthesized the news from a variety of sources into one fairy comprehensive article. The total death toll stands at 172 with 293 injured. Of the dead, at least 31 are foreign nationals. A lot is still unknown about the terrorists. There are rumors that some of them are British nationals. There's confusion about whether or not the attack was in any way linked to Al Qaeda. A previously unknown group called the Deccan Mujahideen has claimed responsibility, but the one terrorist captured alive has reportedly said that the group was backed by the Lashkar-e-Taiba. It's still unclear whether or not Americans and British citizens were actively targeted, but there is no doubt that Jews were targeted.

It is difficult to predict the fallout from the terror attacks because the fallout depends on facts which are still unknown, but here are several observations I've made so far.

1. Obama Moves Farther to the Right

As the campaign wore on Obama shifted increasingly away from his radical left-wing past towards the political center. In the early days of the Democratic primaries he was courting the anti-war vote by differentiating himself from Hillary Clinton over his position in Iraq. By the time he was debating McCain, his approach to Iraq was essentially identical to his opponents. Now he's chosen Senator Clinton as his secretary of state, and is keeping Bush defense secretary Robert Gates on in his post. He has maintained the rhetoric of troop withdrawal, but his plan - to hand over security to the Iraqis as they are capable of accepting it - is basically identical to President Bush's plan: "As they stand up, we will stand down".

The tragedy in Mumbai is a sharp reminder of the barbarism and cruelty of Islamic extremism, of the relative ease with which fanatics can create mayhem in open, democratic societies, and of the fact that Islamic extremism - if not actively contained - will strike beyond the borders of those countries where it is based.

The overall Bush strategy is the only reasonable response to these facts. We can not reasonably protect every shopping mall, hotel, and skyscraper in the United States from a dozen or so terrorists with automatic weapons and grenades. The United States is essentially one big soft target. It would take every active and reserve soldier in our army to stand watch 24/7 and we would still - with troops on every street corner - not be adequately protected from terrorists. They must be engaged overseas or Americans will die. It's that simple.

Obama - who from recent actions appears to be a capable and intelligent pragmatist - is getting a crash course in these facts before he has even taken office. As an added bonus, the pressing foreign policy concerns may act to keep his administration and the American public somewhat preoccupied and slow or even halt the socialization of our country.

2. It's Never Simple

The greatest haven for terrorists in the world is Pakistan. Everyone knows this. Osama bin Laden is probably in Pakistan, or at least in the mountainous region on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The terrorists who attacked Mumbai most likely had training in Pakistan, and the email claiming responsibility for the attack orginated in Pakistan. The Taliban - after the US neglected it subsequent to Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan - was largely protected and aided by Pakistani intelligence forces.

So why did we attack Iraq instead of Pakistan?

Because Pakistan has nuclear weapons. India and Pakistan each developed nuclear weapons in an arms race with each other. According to current estimates India has 200 warheads - of which 150 are already completely assembled - along with intermediate range ballistic missiles to deliver them. Estimates for the Pakistani arsenal are even harder to come by, but 100 warheads seems a conservative estimate at this time. Pakistan also possesses intermediate range ballistic missiles.

This is why the growing tensions between India and Pakistan in the wake of alleged Pakistani origins for the terror attack are so alarming, and they are a serious handicap to American and Indian efforts to deal with radicals in Pakistan. Any attempt to either take Pakistan by force or apply too much pressure could result in political instability leading to either atomic war with India or - more likely - nuclear warheads falling into the hands of terrorists. On the other hand, Pakistan has proved so far unwilling and/or unable to significantly crack down on terrorists based internally or to effectively police its border with Afghanistan.

And let's not forget that on the other side of Afghanistan (opposite Pakistan) is Iran - another unfriendly state with nuclear ambitions.

It remains to be seen whether Obama's foreign policy - which is likely to be more nuanced and multilateral - will be superior to Bush's cowboy diplomacy, but the central fact is that in a situation this complex freedom of movement for even a superpower like the United States is severely restricted. No matter what we do, we're going to make someone unhappy. And in this region of the world unhappy people tend to blow things up. Or shoot innocent civilians.

3. "I told you so" is never helpful

There have been a lot of reports stating that the US warned India months ago of such an attack. These reports (here's one from ABC news) are counterproductive. Al Qaeda learned before 9/11 that the cheapest way to cripple the United States intelligence apparatus is not to keep silent, but to put out so much noise that the analysts are overwhelmed and can't sort out the real threats from the fake ones. One of the vehicles of the 9/11 hijackers was apparently teeming with evidence when found, but after years of exhaustive research it seems that the material was largely planted to do exactly what it did: drain American intelligence resources on a wild goose chase. Media reports are now circulating that the boat the Mumbai terrorists used had gear for 15, not 10. There were 15 bags, 15 tooth brushes, but we only have 10 attackers accounted for. Are there 5 extra terrorists on the loose in Mumbai, waiting to strike again? Or did the terrorists just plant an extra 5 sets of everything to stir more panic and drain more resources? It's almost certain that the attack would have required assistance based in India to plan and coordinate, so what better way to ensure the secrecy of these agents than to jam Indian intelligence services with false leads?

The American public doesn't usually pay attention to details such as these, and so media reports that sound a lot like "I told you so" generate unnecessary rage at officials and a false sense of complacency when it comes to the sophistication of the enemy we face. The fact is that none of these reports are telling us how often US intelligence warned Indian intelligence of attacks that didn't happen. How many false alarms were there? Furthermore, it's a mistake to think that terrorist success is dependent on our own intelligence failures. As though our enemy were incompetent and only continued bureaucratic lapses allow them to get away with anything. This creates the image of terrorists as bumbling and inept. And while it's true that intelligence lapses have occurred, it's both false and dangerous to think of international terrorists as bumbling incompetents.

4. The savagery of terrorism

Not only are Islamic terrorists competent, but they are vicious and evil. As long as there are terrorists out there willing to torture innocent people to death, it's important for Americans to be confronted with these facts. Too often it is common in the United States to equivocate between the actions of American soldiers and the violence of terrorists. All violence should be avoided whenever possible and all deaths are tragic, but that doesn't make all killing equivalent. I'm tired of people who romanticize our enemies. From Hanoi Jane aiding and abetting the propaganda of North Vietnamese during a time of war, to Michael Moore calling Iraqi insurgents "minutemen" a complacent America has a disturbing history of vilifying our heroes and putting our enemies on pedestals.

From the adulation of Mussolini to Stalin to Che American intellectuals have a love-affair with tyrants and despots. Meanwhile there have been 4 recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. All 5 were awarded posthumously. But instead of front-page celebration of American bravery and heroism, or even acknowledgment of our deep debt of gratitude to their sacrifices, instead we are treated to exposes of unsubstantiated allegations that US soldiers abuse animals in Iraq.

The world may not be composed of black and white, but there are still such things as good and evil and Americans need to be reminded of the difference:

Jewish victims made up a disproportionate number of the foreigners killed after 10 Muslim fanatics stormed a series of sites in the Indian financial capital.

Members of the beleaguered Jewish community in Mumbai gathered at a crumbling synagogue for a memorial for Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka, who ran the cultural centre targeted by the Deccan Mujahideen.

The couple's son, Moshe survived after his nanny, Sandra Samuel escaped with him in her arms 10 hours after the hostage incident started. The child cried "Ima" and "Dada," or mummy and daddy, as the service began.

...

Doctors expressed horror at the condition of the bodies recovered from the Nariman Building, which housed the Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch retreat.

"I have seen so many dead bodies in my life, and was traumatised," a mortician said. "It was apparent that most of the dead were tortured. What shocked me were the telltale signs showing clearly how the hostages were executed in cold blood."

The American armed forces are composed of professionals. In the face of a barbaric enemy that targets women and children and first responders, that tortures prisoners to death, they have an almost impeccable record of maintaining their control. I'm not advocating that we use the depravity of our enemies to loosen our own moral opposition to evil. But to fail to acknowledge the disparity between our armed forces and those we oppose is to withhold from our men and women in uniform the honor that is their due. To in any way blur the lines or make excuses for terrorists and those who make excuses for them is to betray the cause of liberty.

Voter Reform

2008-12-01T21:33:00.003-05:00

I've got two suggestions for voter reform in the United States. The first has to do with how we vote, and the second has to do with who we gets to vote.

Right now most elections in the United States are conducted by a method known as the plurality voting system or the "first past the post" system. It is the simplest form of voting imaginable. Everyone gets one vote, you tally up the votes, and whichever candidate gets the most wins. There are many direct and indirect drawbacks to this approach.

Spoilers

In an election where two candidates have similar positions, they can tear each other down while a third candidate - who is far less popular but has no competition - can end up winning. Imagine if a group of people were voting on where to spend their vacation: Hawaii, Florida, or Alaska. If most people preferred to go somewhere warm with beaches, they would split their votes between Hawaii and Florida and so Alaska could actually end up winning even though most people don't want to go to Alaska.

Insincere Voting

One response to the spoiler effect is that people will often vote for someone other than their true first candidate because they don't want their vote to be wasted. For example, a lot of people I know thought Ron Paul was the best candidate, but ended up voting for McCain because they knew Paul had very little chance. This is also known as strategic or tactical voting and it's considered a bad thing because the end result is usually a candidate that doesn't reflect the actual desires of the people.

Lack of Majority

About 1/3rd of the United States elections for presidents resulted in a president winning without actually getting a majority of the votes. The extent to which this is a problem is debatable, since the United States was never envisioned as a pure democracy. The Electoral College is case-in-point for that. However, as Monty Python would put it, "supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses". Or, as Abraham Lincoln would have put it, we believe in government "of the people, by the people, and for the people". We may not live in a pure democracy, but we still live in a country where the elected officials are intended to represent the will of the people - with some brakes on that will. A more representative system would be preferable to a less representative one.

Negative Campaigning / Non-Issue Campaigning

This is an indirect result of the spoiler effect. The idea is that if you have two candidates who are similarly in policy they have to resort to non-policy methods to attack each other. For that reason personal scandals, attacks on character, and other mud-slinging become necessary.

So those are some of the problems with plurality voting. The issue is particularly important to me this year because I think the Republicans lost in large part due to plurality voting. The loss happened not during the general election, but during the primaries when McCain was picked largely because he and Huckabee managed to split voters off of Romney - who was clearly the most representative candidate for the Republican coalition. Other candidates like Fred Thompson were eliminated early because of tactical voting. Primary voters were afraid that he simply didn't have a realistic chance - like Paul. This means that the will of the people was not reflected in the vote tallies.

This is important because it is primarily those vote tallies that the Republican party has to return to in its efforts to reform and rebuild in preparation for 2010 and 2012. But since the votes were largely insincere to begin with there is no way for the party to get an accurate reading of actual voter support based on the tallies they have in hand. As a result, the disconnect between what Republican voters want and what the Republican party offers will likely continue.

Even if a popular candidate emerges - like Reagan reborn - to unite the part the underlying disconnect will be only temporarily masked by this event. Figures like Reagan or later Gringrich come and go, but the party reverts to rudderless drift as soon as they are gone.

There are three main competitors to plurality voting: instant run-off elections, approval voting, and the Schulze method. The last two - approval voting and the Schulze method - are by far in the minority and instant run-off elections are the only real viable contender to plurality voting.

The Schulze method is a no-go because, quite simply, it's too complex. It's a voting method for nerds. It is currently used by Wikimedia, Debian, Gentoo, and Software in the Public Interest. When 2 out of the 4 organizations that use a voting method are variants of the Linux operating system, you know you're too far afield for granny and Uncle Joe. Don't get me wrong, it's my favorite method, but that's because I think a voting method that is so complex you have competing heuristics for how to figure out who won is just plain cool.

Approval voting is a lot simpler than the Schulze method, but also not viable for an American presidential election. The way approval voting works is that everyone checks off the candidates that they could live with, and the candidate who gets the most approval votes wins. Opponents point out that this is basically a way of picking the least common denominator. In case you hadn't heard, the new word that got added to the dictionary this year is "meh". From the Chicago Tribune: The expression of indifference or boredom has gained a place in the Collins English Dictionary. That's who wins approval voting methods. They guy everyone says "meh" about. Even if that's an oversimplification of the process, the fact is that Americans want to vote for someone. Not just express their lack of distaste.

And so we're back to the real contender: instant runoff elections. It's a method of voting that is actually gaining some pretty widespread support. There are at least two national movements dedicated to it: instantrunoff.com and fairvote.org. At instantrunoff.com you can see a list of pending legislation, past, current and upcoming campaigns (every past campaign has been successful so far), and a list of the small but growing number of governments in the United States that have switched to using IRV. FairVote.org is a group that will try to kill me after I post my second suggestion for voter reform, but in the meantime I agree with their IRV efforts. They have pretty similar info on governments in the US that use IRV or are considering the switch.

But what is IRV? I know the post is a bit long, so I'll switch to a video that actually gives a pretty good explanation of it. The video is hosted on YouTube and sponsored by FairVote:

So while the math behind the method can get pretty complex, the actual implementation is easy. Instead of voting for just one person, you get a ballot with all the candidates on it and you can rank as many or as few of them as you want in order of preference. This drastically reduces the likelihood of a spoiler effect. In the Hawaii, Florida, and Alaska example, most folks that like Hawaii first will pick Florida second and vice versa, leaving Alaska third. This means Alaska will get eliminated, and either Florida or Hawaii will win.

Because the spoiler effect is less likely, this drastically reduces the incentive to vote tactically. In the Republican primaries there would have been no harm, for example, in voting for Paul first and someone more practical second. Or third. I don't believe this would have helped Paul win, but we'd have a much more accurate understanding of the mood of Republican primary voters because they would have actually been voting their preferences. Our post-defeat conversation would be a much different one if we had primary votes that represented actual preference.

A simple side effect of IRV voting is that every vote ends with someone getting a majority of the votes. So no more would we have presidents in office when most of the American public voted for someone else. At the very least, it would be a lot less common.

I certainly don't think that negative campaigning would stop if we switched to IRV, but I do believe that - especially during the primaries - there would be more voting based on policy and less based on personality or on scandal. In an IRV election voters are free to express more nuance in their decisions, and so candidates would be as well.

So that's my first suggestion for vote reform: move to IRV elections. These would be especially important in state primaries, but also in Senate and House races. They could also be used in any presidential race where the state is already winner-take-all in the Electoral College. Basically any race where only one person can win is better served by IRV than plurality voting.

I'll get to my second suggestion in another post.

New Layout

2008-11-26T22:50:00.003-05:00

As you have probably noticed, I've revamped the apperance of my blog. This is still a work in progress, but so far I'm happy with the results. The biggest change has been adopting a template from OurBlogTemplates.com. The template I'm using - The Professional Template - is a fantastic upgrade from the hacked blogger template I'd been using previously. They give out the template for free, and all that they ask is credit for the template. So I've got a permanent notice at the bottom of my blog and I thought I'd give them props in a post too. I hope to create my own template from scratch eventually, but CSS is an arcane and confusing language that makes my head hurt whenever I try to figure out how to use it.

The title image in the header is actually a photograph that I took on the Joseph Smith farm in upstate New York in 2006. My good friend Tamas flew in from Hungary for a conference, and my wife and I drove up to meet him. I cropped the photo, converted it to black and white, and then fiddled with the levels and contrast to get it how I liked it.

There are still some bugs in the new layout, so expect some minor changes over the coming weeks. For some reason most of my links highlight in red when you mouse over them, but some randomly don't. I have no idea what is causing this.

The 'Interesting News' section is also not finished. I would like to be able to put up short mini-posts there of interesting news stories with a few comments of my own, but right now I can't find a way to do this so I'm just using a link list. This means there are no comments, there's no way for me to add my own thoughts, and it's a pain to update. I'll try to muddle through until I can create a better solution.

In the 3 years that I've run this blog I've accumulated a grand total of almost $25.00 in imaginary ad revenue. I say "imaginary" because Google doesn't cut anyone a check until they hit $100 (which is fair enough) and so until that fateful day when I hit $100 (probably around the time my currently 2 year old daughter graduates high school) and Google sends me a check, then it will be real money. Maybe I'll take her out to dinner to celebrate.

The logic behind my decision to keep the ads up goes like this: there's a faint, distant chance that one day enough people will visit my blog that it could generate some ad revenue. It could possibly cause some drama, or at least disturb my layout, to add ads then. So I'll ad them now instead. I'm not sure if that logic is very logical, but there you go. So we've got text-based ads on the left, and I've added a bigger AdSense block to the right that gets image and video ads. It's probably pathetic, but I'm actually excited about finally getting some image/video ads on the site. I feel like I've hit the big leagues.

Finally - or at leaset this is the last thing I can think of tonight - I've accidentally nixed the search feature for my blog. This is a devestating loss to everyone, I'm sure. I should be able to figure something out and add that back in, however. I probably used it more than any of my readers did when I was trying to find some article I'd written two years ago to prove a point in a debate, so I'm sure I'll have the motivation to figure it out.

Finally, I just want to say thanks to everyone who reads and comments on my blog. I know that practically everyone who reads what I write is either a friend or family member, but several of you have let me know you appreciate what I do, and that's enough for me to want to keep on doing it. If I'm helping anyone out by passing along information or just a new perspective, then I feel my hobby isn't entirely a waste of time.

I'll keep working to write better articles and put together a better blog, and ya'll keep reading. And click those ads every now and then too. I'd rather get that $100 check in time for my firstborn's high school graduation... not my grandchild's.

Civics Quiz Time!

2008-11-25T11:16:00.002-05:00

I stumbled upon an interesting American Civics Quiz. It's interesting for two reasons. First of all, the quiz itself is pretty challenging. Secondly, they have the results of administering the quiz to the 2,508 Americans. The results are not surprising, but they are depressing.

There are 5 Major Findings from the survey results:

Americans Fail the Test of Civic Literacy (71% failed, average score was 49%)
Americans Agree: Colleges Should Teach America’s Heritage
College Adds Little to Civic Knowledge
Television—Including TV News—Dumbs America Down
What College Graduates Don’t Know About America

My initial response to the first finding is: "duh" followed closely by "I wonder how the civics scores would break down by who voted for Obama vs. McCain a couple of weeks ago". I would wager good money that you'd see a significant gap between Obama and McCain voters. This is partially born out by the in-depth results. They point out that conservatives and liberals are nearly tied (liberals: 49%, conservatives 48%) but when it comes to party votes, Republicans score higher than Democrats at 52% to 47%. Independents also did well at 52%, but no matter how you split that group the Obama voters are going to end up scoring lower than the McCain voters.

Even setting partisanship aside, it really bugs me that people this stupid get to vote. I understand the dangers of elitism, but isn't ignorance at least as dangerous? We've got a bunch of Americans who can't pass a basic civics test electing the people to run our government. So it's not really surprising that additional findings is that Elected Officials Score Worse than the General Public. This number was derived from the 164 respondants of the total who said that they had held an elected office at some point, but I'd like to hope that at least most of those who make it to the federal government could pass this test.

Aside from the expense of a polling test, the big problem is that it would be possible to try and skew the test questions in a way to exclude specific demographics or parties. So it may be wishful thinking, but I still think that if you can't name at least a couple cabinet members of the current president, as well as the names - or at least the parties - of the majority leaders in the House and Senate you shouldn't be allowed to vote.

The other thing I found noteworthy was the questionable conclusion that college education doesn't help. It does help, and the numbers reflect this:

Education Level - Average Score
No High School - 35%
High School - 44%
Undergraduate - 57%
Master's - 64%
Doctorate - 72%

I'm not sure why they tried to spin the results to somehow claim that college didn't help. I suppose if you're only counting the percent that fail then yes - shifting from a 35% or 44% to a 57% is not real accomplishment since all those scores are below an F. But no one can look at those numbers and not discern that more education leads to better scores.

The most interesting thing of all, however, was which questions people missed. I'll post on that in a couple of days. Ya'll should take the test first. Here's that link again.

Oh, and yes - I did alright. I'll reveal my score later too.

Last Word on Gay Mariage - I Hope

2008-11-20T20:51:00.003-05:00

There are two parallel arguments about gay marriage in this country. The first is about gay marriage itself, and the second is about the use of gay marriage as a political sledgehammer.

In the run up to the vote on Prop 8 in California, the Yes on Prop 8 folks highlighted the way gay marriage is being used as a weapon in Massachusetts. The No on Prop 8 crowd tried to defend themselves by saying that there was nothing intrinsic about allowing gay marriage that would require (for example) that young children be taught about gay marriage in school without the option for their parents to withdraw them from those courses. This may be true, but unfortunately the same groups that argued you one didn’t have to lead to the other were making the exact opposite case in Massachusetts. Most likely, they simply could not believe that – in California of all places – the people would vote to ban gay marriage. Again. Their hubris without doubt played a role in getting Proposition 8 passed.

If the gay rights community wants to use gay marriage as a weapon to go after religious groups who preach that homosexual acts are sinful, they are going to have to reap what they sow. Traditional religions will quite rightly feel under siege, and – acting out of self-defense – will continue to pass laws and constitution amendment to prevent gay marriage from being used against them. Furthermore, gay rights groups will no longer be able to count on the goodwill of Americans who feel like this is a religious decision that the government shouldn’t be involved in.

But all of this debate about gay marriage as a weapon means that we’re not having any debate about gay marriage itself. Part of the reason behind this is that the gay rights community frequently takes the position that the only possible viewpoint other than their own is so bigoted that it doesn’t deserve any public consideration. Either you are for gay-marriage, or you are a homophobic bigot.

The question that underlies this position is simple: what harm does gay marriage do to you? As the slogan goes: “Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t have one.”

On the surface this is an entirely reasonable position. If something does not harm you, then why on earth would you want to oppose it? Clearly the only reason could be animosity towards those who are doing you no harm, and therefore everyone who opposes homosexual marriage must be acting out of ill-will towards gays.

In a conversation with my father over the last year or two he said something that has stuck with me ever since. He said that as a nation we’re drifting away from the classical liberal/libertarian roots of the Founders and replacing libertarianism with libertinism. Liberal, libertarian, libertine: these are similar words for similar concepts, but the subtle differences are important.

Ignoring the modern usage of the word, liberalism is “is a broad class of political philosophies that consider individual liberty to be the most important political goal”. Furthermore:

Within liberalism there are various streams of thought which compete over the use of the term "liberal" and may propose very different policies, but they are generally united by their support for a number of principles, including freedom of thought and speech, limitations on the power of governments, the rule of law, an individual's right to private property, free markets, and a transparent system of government.

From there we move on to libertarianism:

Libertarianism is a term used by a broad spectrum of political philosophies which prioritize individual liberty and seek to minimize or even abolish the state... The word libertarian is an antonym of authoritarian.

And finally libertinism:

Libertine has come to mean one devoid of any restraints, especially one who ignores or even spurns religious norms, accepted morals, and forms of behaviour sanctioned by the larger society.

When dealing with broad terms like these, there’s always a danger of generalizing too much, but there are some important differences we can draw. First of all, libertinism and libertarianism are very closely related – more to each other than to liberalism. Libertarianism is the antithesis of authoritarianism – it views government as a fundamentally evil thing that is sometimes necessary. For example minarchists might view government as necessary for national defense and nothing else. It’s a reaction against political authority. Libertinism is a mirror image of libertarianism, but instead of rejecting political authority it rejects moral authority.

The difference between these two concepts and liberalism (we can call it “classical liberalism” to distinguish it from modern liberalism which is not the same thing at all) is that classical liberalism does not view the state as an inherently bad thing. Inherently dangerous, yes. But not intrinsically evil. In fact, liberalism depends on the state not only to get out of the way and allow people to express their natural rights, but to proactively defend those natural rights. Two quotes from Thomas Jefferson illustrate the dual-obligations of government according to classical liberal ideology:
The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government.

In other words, government has a certain obligations to protect human freedom which it must proactively obey. For example, classical liberals believe in a free market, and therefore a liberal government should proactively guard against monopolistic or oligarchic practices like collusion and price-fixing.

But liberals also believe that government is dangerous, and must therefore be restrained. So, as Thomas Jefferson rights, a liberal government should never engage in wealth redistribution.

To put it very simply: classical liberals believe in a balance between using government powers for good and restraining government control over people’s lives. Libertarians and libertines do not see balance, they see extremes: merely rebellion against authority.

So let’s get back to gay marriage. Oliver Wendell Holmes said: “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins”. Libertarians use this as their guiding star: anything is permissible right up until the moment where you are directly harming someone else. Holmes’ quote is not incorrect. The problem is that he was speaking of direct harm. He wasn’t saying anything about indirect harm. But, by ignoring the possibility of indirect harm, libertines and libertarians effectively enable it.

The fact is that some things that have no directly harmful results are still wrong – to the point of being criminal – because of the indirect harm which they cause. As a simple example: receiving stolen goods. You didn’t steal them. The theft already occurred. So why is it wrong to buy goods you know are stolen? You’re not hurting anyone. It’s wrong because by receiving the stolen goods you’re incrementally increasing the demand for stolen goods and this will indirectly lead to more theft.

The point needs to be hammered home even farther, however. My first ethics professor announced that he was opposed to killing animals for food and to factory farming. But he ate meat anyway. His reasoning was this: the market for meat is not responsive to individual choices. No single cow or chicken can ever be spared or killed because of the decision of a single person. So his choice to eat a quarter-pounder was in no way causally related to a cow being killed. The cow was already dead, and his demand for one cheeseburger was not enough – by itself – to cause another cow to die. So, as far as he was concerned, his hands were clean.

Most of the kids in my class were outraged by this apparent hypocrisy but – using strict libertarian logic – he was absolutely right. There is absolutely no real harm, and so how can there be a foul? It’s the same with stolen goods. If you accept a single stolen iPod does anyone seriously think this will cause one more iPod to be stolen? In practice the market is completely insensitive to stolen goods. There are too many other factors in the equation for your decision to buy a single iPod to have any significant impact on the outcome.

To review:
Some things are wrong because they cause indirect harm
The indirect harm does not have to be a cause-and-effect relationship, it is enough to support harmful practices in principle

That’s the liberal – the balanced – position. If you think factory farming is cruel: don’t eat meat. (At least, only eat free-range meat.) Don’t buy stolen goods.

This doesn’t all add up to gay marriage being wrong. But it illustrates that the gay marriage opponents have set the bar much, much to high. Libertines and liberals won’t be satisfied that gay marriage is harmful until you can establish something like a direct link between gay folks getting married and everyone else getting lung cancer. A kind of second-hand smoke where gay marriage directly and measurable hurts other people. This kind of connection is never going to be found.

But it doesn’t need to be found, if we reject libertinism and libertarianism, and run with liberalism. What we need to find instead, is whether or not gay marriage contributes indirectly and in principle to societal harm.

I believe it does.

Marriage licenses are not about love. They aren’t fundamentally about the couple getting married at all. The government has absolutely no interest – nor any right to interfere in or regulate – strictly private interpersonal relationships. If you think marriage is for husbands and wives, then why on earth should there be licenses at all?

Marriage, as far as the government is concerned, is strictly about conceiving and raising children. And, as far as all psychological research to this date concludes, the optimal environment for raising children is for them to be raised by their biological parents. And this means that society has a vested interest in treating marriage between a couple capable of producing offspring as a special relationship with special status attached.

I’m not against all the benefits of civil unions for gays. Everything that is strictly related to interpersonal relationships (thins like next-of-kin status, joint taxes, hospital visitation, etc.) should be allowed for any couple that wants them regardless of gender. Or, for that matter, familial status. Why bar siblings or first-cousins? It’s not our business. Communal marriages would be OK too, but clearly it defeats the purpose of having probate rights (next of kin status) if there are more than 2 people involved. So we’d have to work the kinks out for communal marriages, but once we do that: great. Go head. Gay unions, incestual unions, communal unions, whatever.

But I believe that society benefits from having a special status for married couples who can produce offspring because it creates a mild incentive for folks to get and stay hitched, and thus helps indirectly to ensure more kids are raised by their biological parents. Allowing couples that can not in principle procreate voids the special status of marriage and, as a result, erodes the already tenuous advantage the institution has in our society.

So those are the reasons I oppose gay marriage. First of all, I oppose it out of ideological self-defense for my religion and all traditional religions. Secondly, I oppose it because I believe that, in a small but pervasive way, it will do farther damage to marriage which is the bedrock institution of our society. If you think marriage is just two people loving each other, than gay marriage can’t hurt. But that’s not what marriage means from a government standpoint. Marriage means procreation, and since homosexual acts are by definition infertile, adding them to marriage intrinsically changes the definition of marriage to be about the love of partners rather than about raising families.

Prop 8 and Tolerance: Followup

2008-11-14T08:39:00.007-05:00

I have two main followups for my original post Proposition 8 and Tolerance.

The first one concerns the gay friend who had messaged me on Facebook to tell me he was taking me off his friends list, apparently because I'm Mormon. At the time of the original post he had not responded to my response, but since then he has. His message read (in part):

Actually, I defriended you because I couldn't figure out how to block your discussions from my feed. After reading a few that really made me angry and hurt, I decided I didn't want them showing up on my page.

I wasn't actually accusing you of intolerance, or arguing my knowledge or lack thereof of what's going on across the country.

So - though he continues to remain anonymous - I need to point out that he's at least one example of a gay man who is not demonstrating any religious bigotry and willing to discuss the matter openly. For what it's worth, I respect the reasoning behind his decision to take me off his friends list, and as far as I know we're on good terms. Just not as far as Facebook knows.

The second concerns religious intolerance. As you might be able to tell just from the comments to my original post, the main line of attack from the gay rights community has been that Mormon opposition to Proposition 8 can not be attributed to anything else other than hatred and intolerance of and for homosexuals. Furthermore, homosexuals are "social outcasts" who are uniquely vulnerable to persecution from Mormons. It's David vs. Goliath.

This line of attack rings true with people because it fits a familiar narrative, not because it has any basis in fact. We're all used to the template of the rich, white, patriarchal Christians oppressing the naive, idealistic, vulnerable minority. In part because this has happened far too many times throughout history. I don't want to rehash all the crimes of Europeans throughout history. Instead I just want to point out that Mormons hardly qualify for that description.

For starters, there aren't enough of them. There are something like 12 - 14 million Mormons in the world, and less than 1/2 are in this country. So we're talking about less than 7 million Mormons in a population of 300 million. Hardly a majority. In addition, Mormons are not - for social or political purposes - part of the mainstream Christian community. They kick us out of their clubs and reject our baptisms even while they acknowledge each others. I'm not complaining. We don't accept theirs either. It just illustrates that you can't write off Mormons as part of a unified block of oppressive Christian hegemony. And finally, Mormons have a unique history of persecution themselves in this country. There have historically been laws against homosexual behavior. In the 19th century, Illinois declared that all Mormons had to leave the state or be exterminated. Leading homosexual advocates who pioneered the transition of gays as a culture out of the closet have been shot and killed (like Harvey Milk). The first Mormon prophet - Joseph Smith - was also shot and killed. Gay rights activists are currently fighting to change the definition of marriage to suit them. Mormons fought that battle in the 19th century and lost. The Church had to abandon polygamy or face destruction.

I'm not going to try and quantify the exact degree to which gays and Mormons qualify as social outcasts to see who gets the annual aware for "Most Persecuted". I am simply showing that the notion that gays are unequivocally more outcast than Mormons is, at best, questionable. So much for that part of the David vs. Goliath myth going on.

The second major contention is that Mormons hate gays. I've yet to see any evidence of this whatsoever. All of the Church's official pronouncements deny this, and in addition Mormons individually have (as far as I've been able to find in the press) expressed themselves carefully and thoughtfully. There may be no nice way to say "I don't think you qualify for marriage", but the Mormons are sure trying.

On the other hand, the response on the part of protesters without doubt qualifies as hatred. My wife sent me an email last night with the subject line "and the witch hunt begins". In it, she linked me to an article about Mormon Scott Eckern who has been chased out of his job at the artistic director of the California Musical Theatre after a threatened boycott due to his support (as a private citizen, without any connection to his job) for Proposition 8. How many homosexuals has the Mormon church tried to kick out of their jobs for opposing Proposition 8? Vandals are attacking Mormon meeting houses in California, Utah. (6 in Utah, another in California, and that's just one google search and the first 2 results). What buildings have Mormons defaced?

The protests outside Mormon temples are often being described as "peaceful", but that's not the impression of one of the LAPD officers assigned to assist in crowd control. Meridian Magazine (which, incidentally, has hacked and redirected to a gay porn video) has a story from Paul Bishop (a Mormon) where he describes some of what he has seen before Prop 8 was passed, and in the protests that resulted.

Before:

During the Proposition 8 rally, as I stood with my wife and friends waving Yes On 8 signs and waving to the passing rush hour traffic, I learned several things. I learned supporters of both Yes On 8 and No On 8 liked to honk their horns. I learned the way to tell the difference is the No On 8 supporters usually accompanied their horn honking with an obscene gesture or a string of obscenities. They also liked to swerve their cars toward the children on the curb.

I learned at the rally several of our ward members had received hate mail after their names, religious affiliation, contribution amounts, and addresses were published on a website inciting No On 8 supporters to target the listed individuals. Their houses and cars had been vandalized, their campaign support signs stolen, and opposition signs planted in their place.

Election day in California saw numerous No On 8 activists distributing literature and vocalizing at polling sites in clear violation of election laws. Police were called, 100 yard distances from the polling places were paced off, yet the agitation continued.

After:

The late local news showed scenes of several Hispanic females in tears outside the temple trying to remove the signs desecrating the walls and fences surrounding the temple. As these individuals – who according to a temple spokesperson were not church members – removed the hate-filled signs, the mob exploded and began beating the individuals to the ground. Police intervened and arrests were made, but the fact this was allowed to happen at all was appalling.

As if a hate-filled mobs (and the Mormons know a few things about hate-filled mobs) beating down anyone who stood up for the Mormons wasn't enough, here's how some LAPD officers feel about the protests:

In the Bureau command post there was a large screen television displaying scenes from the protest outside the Los Angeles temple. Imagine my surprise, when angry protesters began rushing the closed temple gates, and I heard an officer in the command post say, “I hope they burn that place to the ground.”

Imagine my even stronger surprise when another officer replied, “They better hope they don't get through the gates, because the Mormons have an army in a bunker under the temple that will come out and kill them all.”

Read the article for yourself. Scroll through and look at all the pictures of the peaceful protesters and their demonstrations in the name of love.

How does Mr. Bishop react to this outpouring of hatred directed at his own faith? He quotes one of our Apostles:

Challenges to our faith are not new. Nor are they likely to go away anytime soon. But, as Elder Hales reminds us, “True disciples of Christ see opportunity in the midst of opposition. We can take advantage of such opportunities in many ways: a kind letter to the editor, a conversation with a friend, a comment on a blog, or a reassuring word to one who has made a disparaging comment. We can answer with love those who have been influenced by misinformation and prejudice – who are ‘kept from the truth because they know not where to find it' (D&C 123:12). I assure you that to answer our accusers in this way is never weakness. It is Christian courage in action.”

So much for a secret, subterranean Mormon army.

All of this was enough, when I read about it last night, to convince me my next post needed to be on this issue. But when I got to work this morning, I found out that the vitriol and hatred continues unabated. The AP News is reporting that fake anthrax has been sent to Mormon temples in California and Utah. As my coworker (not Mormon) said: "At least it wasn't real anthrax." In Littleton, Colorado some kind soul left a Book of Mormon on a church doorstep. In flames. (Dakota Voice) Are there Mormons out there burning rainbow flags? Are there gays out there burning the Koran? I don't really have the heart to go around digging up all the various ways my faith has been insulted and denigrated over the last few weeks so I'm going to leave the anti-Mormon incidents there.

Despite all this, we still get articles that read like this:

That they hate us and they want us (L.G.B.T people) wiped of the face of the earth by any means necessary. Oddly enough I have a little respect for the god hates fags church. Because they’re honest on where they stand when it comes to us. They would like us to kindly drop dead...Once upon a time these monsters had no problem openly pointing to the parts of the bible that say kill gay people and saying it over and over as loudly as possible. Why not as much now? Why did Mormons stop preaching that being dark skinned meant that you had the mark of cain and where hell bound unless you are a slave to a white person. Did African Americans win them over with their sunny disposition. Nope! Being racist looked bad and Mormon colleges needed more atheletes. Luckily you can still make a buck from hating queers.

So the objective is not to actually substantiate allegation of Mormon hatred for gays, but just express outrage at the hatred we assume exists and use that as justification for burning the holy books, lying about their religion (the alleged preaching in the paragraph above is totally false), and beating up bystanders who try to prevent the desecration of their holy buildings.

Overall I'm not seeing a huge rush to defend Mormons from all this vitriol. At least one Catholic bishop has stood up against the hatred, and I found an editorial in Human Events that pointed out the hypocrisy of expressing hatred for people because (you claim) they hate you. The title is to-the-point: Same-Sex Movement Demands Tolerance But Won't Show Any, and in it Gary Bauer describes some additional examples of how the gay movement responds to perceived hatred (not all of it directed at Mormons this time):

At Mount Hope Church in Michigan, a radical homosexual group disrupted an evangelical church service last Sunday. The activists rushed the pulpit, throwing condoms and buckets of glitter, using noisemakers and megaphones to scream at churchgoers and frighten children. Women ran to the pulpit and began to kiss; others shouted, “Jesus was gay!” Protests erupted outside Mormon temples in Utah and Seattle to protest the church’s support for the California marriage amendment.

Three hundred gay activists picketed outside Pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, in protest of the pastor’s support for Prop. 8. Other large protests were held in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego. Several arrests were made at rallies across California.

In perhaps the most hideous response, an elderly woman holding a cross to show her support for the California marriage amendment was attacked by an angry mob of protestors at a same-sex marriage protest. The 69-year-old woman’s cross was torn from her hands, trampled on and destroyed by the crazed protestors. Police are considering pressing assault charges.

Can anyone really read these facts and come to the conclusion that it is the Yes on Prop 8 crowd that behaves hatefully? Or that the gays are "social outcasts"? A powerless minority of victims?

I would be remiss if I didn't conclude this article by bringing up my first point again. After my friend's initially caustic email to me, he expressed himself in a civil and even friendly way. Most gay-rights groups are calling for an end to the violent and hate-filled portions of the protests (although whether that is out of concern for Mormons or concern for publicity I am unsure of at this point). But the fact remains that the movement behind Yes on Prop 8 has acted peacefully, legally, and civilly. The movement behind No on Prop 8 has acted violently, illegally, and in total disregard for civil debate.

The David vs. Goliath image may suit gay-rights PR, but it does not suit the facts.

This post is a followup to the original post Propostion 8 and Tolerance from 11/5/2008.

Follow Up: Meridian Magazine has a new article on this topic: The Hypocrisy of the Tolerance Movement:

Though opponents of Prop. 8 who seek for same-sex marriage tout that they are the movement of tolerance, their actions mark them as hypocrites, as they send the message through protests, property vandalism and singling out donors for vilification that anybody getting in their way had better watch out. Payback and punishment will follow for those who have exercised their right of political expression to support traditional marriage.

This, of course, is designed to inhibit and terrorize anyone who opposes redefining marriage, chilling not only discussion of the issues, but political opposition altogether. At the very least, those who support that marriage is between a man and a woman are labelled hateful and bigoted.

A particularly easy target for abuse, perhaps because they are a minority, has been The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints...

In the past few days, thousands of people have besieged LDS temples in Los Angeles , Manhattan , San Diego , and Salt Lake . Freeway ramps were closed leading to the Oakland temple because of angry protesters. Two days after the election, fearing for the safety of members, LDS officials had to temporarily suspend services at the Los Angeles temple because of the threatening crowds. More protests at LDS temples are planned and at least one website is calling for the LDS temple in Los Angeles to be a permanent protest site.

The protesters bear signs like: “Mormon scum”; “Mormon money, Mormon lies”; “Go back to Utah ”; “Latter-day H8”: “Religious bigots”. They scrawled graffiti on the walls surrounding the temple lot, calling Latter-day Saints “liars” and chanted, “Stop Mormon hate.”

This was a mirror of the sort of threats that appeared on homosexual blogs toward religious people who supported Prop 8. A blogger wrote, "Trust me. I've got a big list of names of mormons and catholics that were big supporters of Prop 8. ... As far as mormons and catholics ... I warn them to watch their backs." Another blogger wrote, “Burn their [expletive deleted] churches to the ground and then tax the charred embers.”

The AP has reported that there's a growing call amongst opponents of Prop 8, gay rights activists and others to boycott the entire state of Utah to punish the Mormon Church and Utah 's vibrant tourism industry.

Under the mantra “Tax LDS now, hate on your own dime,” a petition is also afoot to gather support to challenge the tax-exempt status of the LDS church...

What is more pointed is Prop 8 opponents have created a website called antigayblacklist.com that lists donors to Prop 8 and where they work. The call is to boycott their businesses...

This should all serve as a wakeup call to religious people across this nation:

Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon wrote in 2004, during the same-sex marriage debate in Massachusetts, ''the experience in other countries reveals that once these arrangements become law, there will be no live-and-let-live policy for those who differ. Gay-marriage proponents use the language of openness, tolerance, and diversity, yet one foreseeable effect of their success will be to usher in an era of intolerance and discrimination...The ax will fall most heavily on religious persons and groups that don't go along."

Sacred Weapons

2008-11-11T20:17:00.008-05:00

Up until the last minute I believed McCain would win. As a result, I procrastinated buying an AK-47 even though I knew that prices would start to rise if he won in anticipation of any new assault weapons ban the Democrats might pass. Prices started to rise even before the election and then after Obama's victory was certain they really took off. Prices for semi-automatic rifles like the AK-47 and AR-15 have easily doubled in the last couple of months. The model I wanted sold for about $650 6 months ago, and I doubt I could get it for less then $1,500 today.

On a whim, I emailed a Hungarian friend of mine to ask if by chance it was an easy thing go buy a Hungarian-made AK-47 there. Hungarian AK-47s aren't bad, and I thought with the transition of the army to NATO spec there was a good chance that they would have a surplus and some had been converted to American-legal semi-automatic weapons.

I didn't bother to check Hungarian gun laws before I emailed my friend. If I had checked first, I could have saved us both the email. Hungarian laws are draconian. From what I can make out even police officers aren't allowed anything stronger than a 9mm pistol.

What was really interesting to me was the level of worry and concern in my friends reply email. Why did I feel I needed an AK-47? Didn't I know that was a Kalashnikov? Didn't I know that was a soldier's weapon? He urged me to move to a new state if I feared for my safety, and ensured me that I was talented enough to find new work if that was what I had to do.

Although we agree on most political issues that I've discussed, it's clear that there is a gulf on our understanding of the role firearms have to play in a modern, civilized nation. And I know that you don't have to go to Hungary to find that attitude. I have plenty of friends who can't understand why I own a handgun and a shotgun, and the thought of me hunting around for a bargain on an AK-47 elicits a strange combination of amusement and fear. "Are you sure those are even legal?" they ask. (Yes, I'm sure.)

There are many valid reasons for owning firearms. A lot of people enjoy target shooting. They can be useful for self-defense. They can be used for hunting. But none of those purposes require something like an AK-47. An AK-47 is not the most accurate gun. It's certainly overkill for any realistic self-defense situation. And who needs to take on deer with a 30-round magazine? So what reason could I possibly have to want to buy an "assault-type weapon"? It seems my sanity is in question.

And the honest answer is not one that - at first glance - does much to allay their worries. I want an AK-47 because I believe an armed population is the best and final guarantee of civil liberties. Now I've done it - I've raised the specter of radical militias, cults, and tin-foil hats.

These sorts of reactions are a sad testament to how far we've already come from the founding traditions of our nation. If you read through the quotes from the Founders on a guns and gun rights there are three things you will find. First of all, they considered firearms to be beneficial in and of themselves. Secondly, they considered civilian possession of firearms to be vital for the defense of civil liberties. And thirdly, they considered the maintenance of arms in defense of liberty to be not a special circumstance of their own revolt against the Crown, but a perpetual consideration for this nation and free people everywhere.

This is not a fashionable sentiment. The skeptical retort is that while a handful of untrained colonials managed to best the world's best-trained and equipped army in the 18th century, this is the 21st century. Obviously no ragtag bunch of civilian hillbillies could hope to stand up against a modern army.

I'm not a military analyst, and so I'm not qualified to weigh in on a speculative debate on asymmetric warfare. But such an argument misses the point. Like any military force, the chief role and best success of an armed civilian population is deterrence, and this deterrent power is alive and well in the world of cell-phone cameras, iReporters, and 24/7 cable news channels in HD.

One of the painful lessons the government has learned from Ruby Ridge and the Waco Siege is that the political cost of declaring war on armed Americans is enormous. The very unbalanced nature of the forces arrayed in both of these cases fueled the public outcry. And yet there is simply no way the government can exercise authority over Americans who resist without using disproportionate force.

So those who feel an armed populace would be ineffectual in open combat against a modern military and is therefore irrelevant miss the point: an armed populace dramatically raises the stakes for any government that wishes to impose its will on the population. The cost - both economically and politically - of widespread violence between armed American citizens and the government is actually the closest thing we have to a guarantee that such a confrontation will not occur.

When I bought my handgun and acquired my concealed carry permit, a good part of my reasoning was that by carrying concealed I was one more reason for a criminal not to try something in the first place. They don't know who has a gun and who doesn't, but the more concealed carry permits are issued the more stories get written a bout it and the more citizens are able to defend themselves against their attackers. This makes all citizens safer - even those who choose not to own or carry a firearm.

That is the same reason I want to purchase an AK-47. Despite the rhetoric around Obama's Civilian National Security Force, I can't imagine a realistic scenario in the foreseeable future in which my fellow Americans and I would have to pick up our arms against our own government. But when sales of assault-type weapons jump dramatically in response to Obama's election we are not merely illustrating our urge to get one more gun before another ban comes down. We are sending a strong signal to the United States government that the Constitution is the line in the sand it should not cross, and reminding them that the armed citizens of this nation are the final guarantors of that restriction.

That war is just which is necessary, and arms are hallowed when there is no other hope but in them. The Prince, Nicolo Machiavelli

To Make the World a Better Place

2008-11-10T09:51:00.002-05:00

Bad commercials make life miserable. And there are a lot of bad commercials. You've got the classically irritating ones like the TV ads for local car dealerships. They are low-budget, loud, and annoying. (On a side note - why are TV commercials always at least 20 decibels louder than whatever TV show they are being played on?) The worst of these is not from a local car dealership, however, it's got to be those stupid "Head On! Apply directly to the forehead!" commercials.

Then there are the stupid commercials. These ones aren't necessarily obnoxious in terms of the images or audio, but they contain claims that are the intellectual equivalent of swallowing a box of thumbtacks. Just as one example, I'm listening to Glenn Beck and just had to endure another sequence of AM radio commercials. One of them was for some money scheme that promised (among other things) to help you create "a rate of return".

Really, a rate of return? You know what else has a rate of return? Everything you do with your money. Invest $100 in penny-stock that crashes the next day? There's a great rate of return: zero. I mean - what kind of a claim is that? It's like saying "Use our product! Something will happen!" Except that my version is humorous. The actual commercial is still causing me brain pain as we head into the next segment of commercials.

So here's the problem. The world is full of people who do things that are stupid. But there's no way to really make them pay for it. I mean, I may hate the Head On! commercials, but at least I remember the product name, right? So clearly they succeeded right?

If we want to make sure we don't have to suffer through these obnoxious commercials we need to find a way to make companies that put out this toxic garbage pay. If you want there to be less stupidity in the world you have to, as the saying goes, find a way to make stupidity more painful.

This is partially a joke post, but partially very serious. I don't like NPR's solution a lot better. I don't know how many weeks a year they spend annoying their users, but I think that the local stations have semi-annual fundraisers and then NPR itself has semi-annual fundraisers and each one lasts about 2 weeks, so 2 X 2 X 2 = 8 weeks a year of annoying begging. It's not just the asking that bothers me, it's the cutesy attempts to make the pleading less obnoxious that - sadly - make it even more obnoxious. So switching from ad-supported content to donation-supported content is really just switching from repeated kidney punches to a good, sharp poke in the eye every now and then.

Another solution is subscription-based content. The amount of money isn't too bad (I think Beck's insider program is like $7 a month), but there are other problems. The biggest problem is that I'd no longer be able to listen live - which is a huge feature of broadcast media.

And, as a final consideration, a lot of commercials are actually funny and even informative.

So rather than try and find an alternative revenue stream to support content, we've just got to find a way to make bad commercials hurt the companies that make them. The problem, I think, is that most people aren't as cantankerous as I am. Those Head On! commercials? I made a solemn vow that I will never purchase that product. Even if someone were to offer me some and I had a migraine I would say "Keep your damn Head On! Just shoot me."

We need to actively unite as consumers and boycott against ads that litter the airwaves and tv channels like dog droppings on your morning walk. I want to know - who's with me? And if boycotting is not enough - what else can we do?

Those Crazy Kids at Change.Gov

2008-11-09T23:53:00.003-05:00

In case you hadn't heard, the Obama transition team has an official website: change.gov. It's "The Official Web Site of the The U.S. Presidential Transition" and according to the Inquirer (yeah, they're Brits):

The speed at which the site has been put on-line clearly speaks volumes about the Obama team's use of "modern" technology - computers, we mean- specially compared to its adversaries whose candidate made campaign noise by admitting he isn't that good with those kind of electrical appliances.

Over at the Guardian (yup, also from across The Pond):

Barack Obama channeled his supporters' enthusiasm into action using social networking, and he is showing that he might continue that as president.

From a brief survey, it seems that most of the articles (found by searching for "change.gov" on news.google.com) are pretty positive. Except the article at the top of the search rankings. It seems that not all has gone smoothly in the roll out of this official transition website, and there has been a rash of scrubbing as details of Obama's policies are changed or removed from the website.

Service

The article I mentioned is from NewsBusters.org. They detail how an initial Obama plan to pay $40/hour for community service has suddenly disappeared from the site. The old language was pretty clear:

Require 100 Hours of Service in College: Obama and Biden will establish a new American Opportunity Tax Credit that is worth $4,000 a year in exchange for 100 hours of public service a year.

But now that entire page has disappeared, and instead the same concept shows up on a different page with some changes. The $40 an hour for community service is still there, but instead of a requirement it's now a goal.

Iraq

Plumbing the depths of the blogosphere in my bathysphere I came across more shenanigans. At Macsmind.com there's a link to a Google cache of the Iraq plan which has, alas, been scrubbed. Post author MacRanger believes that the scrubbing is more than just housecleaning in an attempt to organize the new site. he writes:

No doubt somebody hit the post button too fast as just a cursory reading found more than a few eyebrow raising. After all the news inquiries yesterdays me thinks they “withdrew”.

MacRanger may be right, but until the new sections are compared with the old it will be impossible to tell.

Firearms

The NRA has done my work for me on this one and enumerated the aspirations of Obama's plans for firearms. There are 4 items on the wishlist:

Making the expired federal assault weapons ban permanent.
Repeal the Tiarht Amendment
Closing the gun show loophole
Making guns in this country childproof

I suggest you head over to the NRA website for an understanding of why these are some pretty radical goals. The AWB was and always has been a joke that bans scary-looking weapons rather than dangerous weapons. It banned "semi-automatic assault weapons", which is an oxymoron. If it's not select-fire (meaning capable of either automatic or burst firing) it's not an assault weapon. But the real kicker is making guns "childproof". That usually refers to finicky technologies like biometric devices that would make firearms both far more expensive and far less reliable - which is why they have not been adopted by either police or military forces around the world despite the obvious advantages to law enforcement and combat troops if the devices lived up to their advertising. (The basic idea is that the gun will only fire if an authorized person is holding it.)

These goals were detailed in the "Urban Policy" agenda on the site. That page is also gone, and has yet to be replaced.

I'm not willing to call this a conspiracy or even a controversy yet. The fact of the matter is that Obama - and his staff - of a huge task ahead of them between now and Inauguration Day. And, quite frankly, I don't think that any of the issues we've hit on are foremost on their minds. They are primarily concerned with the economy and jobs. The country is in sort of a crisis and, quite frankly, it's a bit silly to get worried about a new assault weapon just yet.

As president elect of the United States, Barack Obama deserves the benefit of the doubt on this issue. Most likely he was not even aware of the specifics of what was posted on the website. The quotes may or may not represent his current view, which has migrated radically towards the center throughout the campaign.

So to all my conservative friends I have this to say: let's hold our fire for now. By all means keep these records. I will be very interested to compare the original drafts with the final site. But it's simply too early to draw any conclusions about a cover up until we see what the website looks like in its finished state.

Proposition 8 and Tolerance

2008-11-09T22:29:00.007-05:00

The topic of gay rights is not my favorite issue. It's been a while since I've covered it. On October 31, 2006 I wrote a piece called A Reason to Care About Gay Marriage where I explained my opposition to gay marriage. It doesn't necessarily reflect nor was it influenced by the official position of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The following day I wrote another piece called Where is the Gay Marriage Debate? in which I decried the radical scorched-earth tactics of the gay rights community in trying to suppress debate rather win it.

Not much has changed since then. I still oppose gay marriages for the same reasons now that I did in 2006, and gay rights activists are still relying on vicious ad hominems rather than reasoned arguments to make their case for gays rights now as they were then. Whether intentionally or not they are systematically eradicating common ground where dialogue could take place in an attempt to make it seem as though anyone who does not support gay marriage must be a member of the Westboro Baptist Church.

The one thing that has changed is that in 2006 no one was protesting in front of Mormon temples, and today they are. Now there's nothing necessarily sinister about a protest outside a church. What is sinister is not the protesters outside the Mormon temples, it's the lack of protesters outside the religious buildings of any of the other faiths that worked hard for Yes on Prop 8. Mormons are being targeted by gay rights activists because they make a convenient target. Coming from people demonstrating for equal rights, this is more than a little ironic. Here are some facts on Mormons and Prop 8:

Mormons make up less than 2% of the population of California. There are approximately 800,000 LDS out of a total population of approximately 34 million.
If one estimates that 250,000 LDS are registered voters (the rest being children), then out of a total of 5,661,583 yes votes, LDS voters made up 4.4% of the Yes vote and 2.3% of the total Proposition 8 vote (11,050,301).
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) donated no money to the Yes on 8 campaign (except for a nominal, and legal, in-kind donation of $2,078.97, to cover the travel expenses of leaders coming from Utah for a meeting). Individual members of the Church were encouraged to support the Yes on 8 efforts and, exercising their constitutional right to free speech, donated whatever they felt like donating.
The No on 8 campaign raised more money than the Yes on 8 campaign. Unofficial estimates put No on 8 at $38 million and Yes on 8 at $36 million, making it the most expensive non-presidential election in the country.
Advertising messages for the Yes on 8 campaign are based on case law and real-life situations. The No on 8 supporters have insisted that the Yes on 8 messaging is based on lies. Every Yes on 8 claim is supported.
The majority of our friends and neighbors voted Yes on 8. Los Angeles County voted in favor of Yes on 8. Ventura County voted in favor of Yes on 8.
African Americans overwhelmingly supported Yes on 8. Exit polls show that 70% of Black voters chose Yes on 8. This was interesting because the majority of these voters voted for President-elect Obama. No on 8 supporters had assumed that Obama voters would vote No on 8.
The majority of Latino voters voted Yes on 8. Exit polls show that the majority of Latinos supported Yes on 8 and cited religious beliefs (assumed to be primarily Catholic).
The Yes on 8 coalition was a broad spectrum of religious organizations. Catholics, Evangelicals, Protestants, Orthodox Jews, Muslims - all supported Yes on 8. It is estimated that there are 10 million Catholics and 10 million Protestants in California. Mormons were a tiny fraction of the population represented by Yes on 8 coalition members.
Not all Mormons voted in favor of Proposition 8. Our faith accords that each person be allowed to choose for him or her self. Church leaders have asked members to treat other members with "civility, respect and love," despite their differing views.
The Church did not violate the principal of separation of church and state. This principle is derived from the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . ." The phrase "separation of church and state", which does not appear in the Constitution itself, is generally traced to an 1802 letter by Thomas Jefferson, although it has since been quoted in several opinions handed down by the United States Supreme Court in recent years. The LDS Church is under no obligation to refrain from participating in the political process, to the extent permitted by law. U.S. election law is very clear that Churches may not endorse candidates, but may support issues. The Church has always been very careful on this matter and occasionally (not often) chooses to support causes that it feels to be of a moral nature.
Supporters of Proposition 8 did exactly what the Constitution provides for all citizens: they exercised their First Amendment rights to speak out on an issue that concerned them, make contributions to a cause that they support, and then vote in the regular electoral process. For the most part, this seems to have been done in an open, fair, and civil way. Opponents of 8 have accused supporters of being bigots, liars, and worse. The fact is, we simply did what Americans do - we spoke up, we campaigned, and we voted.

The list was originally compiled by Kevin Hamilton, but my wife found it on a Facebook group that is open to the public. References for the facts are listed on the group, and you can find it here.

So Mormons represented a tiny portion of the actual voters. The Church itself gave essentially no money. Mormons did drastically outdo themselves in terms of donations, but still accounted for less than 1/2 (about 40%) of the total funding for the Yes on Prop 8 campaign - which itself raised $2,000,000 less than the No on Prop 8 campaign. Latinos and blacks voted for Prop 8 in far greater numbers than Mormons, and the Yes on Prop 8 campaign included religions from all kinds of Christianity as well as Islam and Judaism.

And yet how many predominantly black or Latino congregations are being targeted? How many synagogues? How many mosques? How many Catholic cathedrals? There is an entire site - MormonsFor8.com - dedicated to exposing the names and personal information of every single Mormon who contributed to the Yes on Prop 8 campaign. Not every single person, but every single Mormon. I tried "CatholicsFor8.com". No such site. No luck with "BaptistsFor8.com" or "ChristiansFor8.com" either. Guess what - "MuslimsFor8.com" also does not exist. Neither does "JewsFor8.com".

I have a feeling we won't see No on Prop 8 commercial that features a couple of Hasidic Jews breaking into the home of a nice lesbian couple to ransack it and then tear up their marriage license. Nor, I wager, will we see Catholic priests doing this. But Mormon missionaries? Fair game, apparently:

YouTube

It's one thing to oppose people in a political debate. It's another thing entirely to single out a vulnerable religion for persecution and scapegoating, but we shouldn't be surprised. This is standard operating procedure for the gay rights movement. Rather than have a debate on the pros and cons of gay marriage, anyone who opposes it is automatically a bigot. Does this sound like tolerance? Not to me. This can result in the kind of irony that would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.

Here's a message I got today on Facebook from an old high school friend who I hadn't spoken to in 10 years:

I love that people find it appropriate to spend SO MUCH time and energy fighting for something that hurts millions of people and benefits no one. There are much better causes out there for you to be fighting. Does not seem to be a very "Christian" thing to do, considering we were always taught in Church to "love our neighbor", respect one another's differences, etc. etc.

How would you like it if your right to marry, your right to be a father, your right to have healthcare for your family, or your right to visit an ailing spouse in the hospital were put up for popular vote and taken away? These are civil rights. What if we, as a nation, voted not to allow mormans to get married or have children?

Sorry, but I had to delete you as a friend.

Here's the response that I sent back:

"Sorry, but I had to delete you as a friend."

So much for respecting one another's differences, I suppose. I guess you can respect only those differences you find compatible with your own world view. I'm sorry for you. That's not real tolerance. That's convenience.

Perhaps you'll observe that when Massachusetts first legalized gay marriage, I didn't de-friend you. It seems one of us talks about tolerance, and the other one actually practices it.

"How would you like it if your right to marry were put up for a popular vote and taken away"That happened to Mormons about a century and a half ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_v._United_States

For what it's worth, Prop 8 does not rescind health care, hospital visitation rights, or anything else connected to a civil union. It seems that in addition to being intolerant, you are also uninformed.

Then my wife pointed something out: up to this point I had not put anything on my Facebook profile about whether or not I supported Prop 8. We hadn't spoken or communicated in 10 years. It had been 2 years since my blog posts on the topic. How did he know where I stood on Prop 8? Simple: he didn't. He had singled me out for being Mormon (that is displayed on my personal info on Facebook). I fired off one more message:

Also - I never actually stated my support for Prop 8.

Did you defriend me because you assumed I supported it? Or just because of my religion?

I haven't received a response yet.

FOLLOW UP: I posted a followup piece here on 11/14/2008.

The Steep Learning Curve of Firearm Purchases

2008-11-06T23:25:00.010-05:00

Each successive firearm purchase seems exponentially more difficult than the one before. My first purchase was simple. I looked up "home defense", read a lot, and decided a 12-gauge was the best choice. As far as I knew, the only thing that really mattered was barrel length - the shorter the better since I'd probably be using it inside.

So I went to the store, saw the shortest 12-gauge shotgun, and bought it. This was especially easy since I could get it at Dicks and that's an easy store to buy from. I'd still never set foot in a gun store to this point. I ended up with a Mossberg 590 (didn't know much about them) and after a couple years of ownership I am still very pleased with it.

Next up was a handgun. This was a much harder decision. First there are the eternal caliber debates (.38, .357, .40, .45, 9mm). Then there's revolver vs. autoloader. And even once you settle those questions (9mm autoloader for me) the sheer number of companies, models, options, and add-ons make the entire decision a nightmare. Analysis Paralysis.

Everyone always says to try a gun out first, but how are you supposed to try out 300 guns? I did shoot a few, but the newness of shooting a handgun vastly outweighed the individual differences between guns. Eventually I settled on a G19 because it was economical and everyone has heard of Glock.

After about a year of ownership I'm pretty pleased with it, but not as pleased as I am with the Mossberg 590. I'd probably go with a Sig if I had to do it again. Maybe in .45. (Yes, yes. You can always buy another gun. But I don't have the money to justify two, and selling/trading is just one more foreign gun-thing to learn.)

So now I'm contemplating my next purchase, and I find the situation is even worse than before. I'm looking for a good assault-type rifle. I'm sure 1/2 my readers can't fathom why I'd want to buy one, and the other 1/2 are irritated that I'm calling a semi-automatic rifle an "assault-type rifle"! My good friend has a nice AK-47, and I've shot it a few times, but I just can't shake the impression that I should consider the AR-15s. I like the idea of smaller, higher-velocity ammo. Less recoil, more accuracy. Plus most ARs are lighter.

But the real problem isn't AK vs. AR because, quite frankly, I'd be happy with either one if someone would just say "Hey, here's a good model. It's reliable, good condition, and a good price." But that's not how it goes.

The incredible variety of options, modifications, finishes, parts, etc. that you can buy for these things is beyond intimidating. The prices associate with all these options make the total vary wildly from the low hundreds to over a thousand dollars. I have a pretty good idea of what I want, but finding it used is daunting to say the least. I read a description for a gun for sale and I don't even recognize most of what they are describing! When I do, I'm usually still not sure if it's a good thing or just a preference thing or how much I should pay for it. My friends tell me the markups are horrible at retail stores - even on used guns - but at this point I just want to be able to see, point, buy. (With proper ID, background checks, etc. of course.) Preferably before Obama and the Democrats manage to ban all guns of the color black or whatever their new definition of assault weapons may be.

Then there's the fact that even if I do find a good one the next step is going to be learning the joys of working with an FFL licensed dealer. It's enough to make me just want to go out and buy some rifled slugs for Mossie.

The whole thing is depressing. Ever try to break into (for lack of a better word) a new hobby from scratch? It makes you feel old. Everybody else takes for granted stuff you don't even know how to ask about. I still remember the first time someone handed me a pistol and I had flashbacks in my head of Boy Scout lessons about how to always pass a knife to someone handle-first and I'm desperately thinking about the right way to grip this thing in accordance with proper safety and etiquette standards.

These are not the kinds of concerns that I feel someone who grew up around guns can ever remember having.

One thing I've learned for sure (other than how to hand someone a gun!) is that the only way to learn this stuff is by spending the time to figure it out. There's no shortcuts to learning, no way to get around just doing it.

Which doesn't make it a lot easier. At this rate the rifle is going to cost me more (in time and money) to get, and I'll probably have even more second thoughts than I did the G19.

Maybe if I just buy two...

Obama's Moderation: A Question of Capital

2008-11-06T23:00:00.002-05:00

A lot of my conservative friends are really, really disappointed about Obama. At first I felt incredibly depressed myself, but I've been growing increasingly optimistic. Part of the reason for this is that it's just really nice to see liberals waving American flags and feeling proud of their country. It warms my heart to see it. Partially Obama's narrative is really amazing. (Careful readers will observe that I'm distinguishing between Obama the human being and Obama the narrative.)

Some conservatives have allowed their disappointment to turn into whining. This is fine in private, but should not be acceptable in public. I listened to Glenn Beck castigate one of his callers today for refusing to call Barack Obama his president. Beck might lose some fans over t his, but he's taking a principled stand. If you believe in America, you have to believe that the American system is greater than any one candidate or election. I support Obama as my president not because I like him, but because he's our president. I support him because of the office he will soon hold. I also support him in honor of the earnest dedication his followers have put into this campaign.

But, to be honest, part of the reason I can take this stance is that I'm starting to hope that Obama the President will truly be more centrist than Obama the Person. The evidence is clear to me that Obama's personal ideology is essentially un-American - chiefly with regard to his stance on the US Constitution and socialism. I had believed that the rhetoric of the campaign season was merely designed to make him palatable to voters long enough to gain the White House. But now I'm starting to believe his actions as president may somewhat track his centrist rhetoric.

And the reason is a lack of capital.

The most obvious lack of capital is in the literal sense. The economy is not doing well, our deficit is high, and the future looks grim. All of this means that there simply isn't enough money for Obama's programs. Even when he reneges on his tax promises (which I fully expect) he's still not going to have the kind of money required to easily enact giant social and economic justice programs.

But the more important lack of capital is political capital. As my last post showed, Obama's margin of victory was not substantial. It was below average. And furthermore, the margin of victory actually overstates his political capital, since many of those who voted for him voted either for his centrist political rhetoric or without regard to politics as well. Speaking strictly in terms of policy - McCain almost certainly better represented the American people.

And it is this lack of capital that is going to hamper Obama. Not because it will render him unable to implement the policies, but because I believe Obama believes in the Obama narrative. I think he really wants to be the Messiah. The One. The great leader who will unify us all. And that means he is going to want to stay within the bounds of his political mandate in order to maintain his popularity and - thus - the unity of the nation.

On a more pragmatic level the man clearly wants a second term. He brought it up in his first speech after winning the election for crying out loud. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. I'd want 2 terms, too. But the consequence of that is that he's not going to want to upset his coalition by revealing his truly liberal leanings. He's a smart man, and he knows he doesn't reflect American values and politics.

These are my optimistic thoughts, anyway. Some of the things he said in the campaign were downright frightening, and the Democratic leadership is no less scary. From his Civilian National Security Force to their New New Deal, he and the Democratic legislative leadership (or perhaps Pelosi and Reid will take their own initiative) may very well try and jolt the country to the left, mistaking support for Obama's narrative with support for the progressive agenda. If it comes to that, I'm going to have to oppose Obama in every way a law-abiding American citizen can for the same reason I support him now: the good of our American form of government.

Historical Perspective on Obama's Victory

2008-11-05T22:14:00.002-05:00

I don’t need to tell anyone that Obama’s victory is a historic moment for American race relations. There are also numerous articles on the historic voter turnout that is expected for this election. This record turnout is – implicitly or explicitly – attributed to Obama’s influence. Then there are the standard questions of how much of a mandate the vote really has given to Obama.

This last question is especially important, because it will probably have a large impact on Obama’s governing style. Will we get Obama the radical, far-left socialist who supports infanticide, wants to ban all handguns and common hunting ammunition, and believes that fairness trumps the Constitution in his quest to redistribute the wealth? The Obama who voted with his own party (if you don’t count absences against him) 98% of the time? The Obama who has not authored a single piece of legislation that required him to work across the aisle at any political cost?

Or will we get the Obama who repudiates his own votes on abortion, claims to cherish the second amendment, lectured on Constitutional law, speaks of unity, bi-partisanshipt, and promises to be the president of even those who voted for McCain? Will we get the Obama who had Jeremiah Wright baptize his daughters, or the Obama who could not remember any anti-American rhetoric from Wright and repudiated him?

A lot of this depends, I believe, on how far Obama believes he can push the American people. This in turn depends on two things: the amount of legislative support he can count on from his own party and in the size of the mandate he acquires from his victory yesterday.

In terms of legal hurdles, it looks like the Democrats have failed to acquire a super-majority in the Senate. This means that the Republicans will be able to filibuster. So any sweeping political change would need to be bolstered by his mandate to rule. And since perception is reality Obama and his supporters need to inflate the perception of a mandate as much as possible.

But even among the bastion of Obama’s powerbase there are significant signs that he was voted for his image, rhetoric, and historical nature and not for his policies. Consider gay marriage. In California 70% of blacks voted in favor of the ban on gay marriage. In Florida 71% voted in favor of a ban. This represents a dramatic departure between the policies of Obama’s base and Obama’s policies. He may share the ethnicity with black Americans, but he is certainly culturally out of touch with them as a social liberal in contrast to the strong social conservative roots of the American black population.

So let’s take a step back and look at the wider picture. Just how historic is Obama’s victory? And how high was the voter turnout? Using a variety of informal sources on the web, I collated the Electoral College results of every American presidential campaign back to the first. I also collected the popular vote results of every American presidential campaign back to 1872. Finally, I gathered approximate voter turnout going back to 1824.

Voter Turnout

Voter turnout numbers vary depending on whether votes are measured versus all those who are registered to vote, eligible to vote, or just of an age where they could vote. The simplest method is also the least accurate – the number of voting age population is compared to the number of voters. Using this method (and data from The American Presidency Project) the average turnout is 64.1% The max is 81.8% and the minimum is 48.9%. Obama’s turnout (projected based on 98% of precincts reporting) looks to be about 64.1%

It’s clear in the graph that voter turnout was a lot higher overall through most of the 19^th century. It fell precipitously in the first quarter of the 20^th century, and again in the last quarter of the 20^th century (the bottom of the crater is the 1996 campaign between Clinton and Dole). Overall the turnout of the 2008 election is completely average. But based on the 20^th century as a whole, it’s on the high side. And looking at just the last quarter century, it’s the very highest turnout to be found by a large margin. Overall we can say that turnout was high, but – even if we start measuring at the steep decline at the start of the 20^th century – it is not unprecedented. It is similar to turnout in the elections between 1952 and 1968.

Electoral College Margin of Victory

Because so many states are winner-take-all, the margin of victory in the Electoral College varies dramatically from a low of -5.75% (the 1824 election was settled by the House of Representatives) to a high of nearly 100% (the 1936 victory of Roosevelt over Landon was 97%, the 198e victory of Reagan over Mondale was 95%). The overall average margin of victory is 42%, and Obama’s comes in at 35%

Unlike the turnout results, there is no obvious and dramatic evidence that time is a significant factor in the results. There are blowouts and close calls scattered from the early 19^th century to the late 20^th century. In this context, Obama’s victory is not a close call, but also not even as strong as average.

Popular Vote Margin of Victory

In terms of establishing a mandate, the popular vote is actually more important than the Electoral College vote. These results tend to be a lot closer, ranging from a low of -3.00% to a high of 26.72% with an average of 9.54%. Obama’s victory is, by comparison, rather meager at just 6.23%.

So Obama’s victory is ranked #21 out of the 35 elections for which I was able to gather data. This isn’t low enough to have an actual negative mandate, as when Bush managed to win the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote to Gore, but it’s certainly not the kind of mandate that lives up to Obama’s grandiose rhetoric and lofty ambitions for changing the world.

Conclusion

Obama does have a mandate to lead. He won the popular vote, the Electoral College, and he brought out significant turnout. But it’s a stretch to count the high turnout as a credit to Obama since his margin of victory was so slim. This means that almost as many of the votes that Obama got out were coming out to vote against him. Similarly, the Electoral College results may like slanted heavily to Obama’s favor, but historically speaking they are not even up to the average margin of victory. And the popular vote is the same story – Obama won. But that’s about all you can say about it.

There’s one final detail to consider. Obama’s victory is historic because he’s black and this is America. Many of those who came out to support him were motivated by this sense of history rather than by support of his policies. On the other hand, many of those who voted against him were motivated by a fear for his policies. If we believe that the race factor was a net positive for Obama (and I do), then this means that if we subtract that from the mandate to see what supports exists for Obama’s policies – there is arguably no mandate left. Obama may have a mandate to be president, but it seems his mandate doesn’t cover his political objectives – just his presence in the White House.

If you combine the razor-thin, arguably non-existent mandate for Obama’s policies with the absurdly high expectations fueled by both Obama’s rhetoric (to “heal the world”) and the innate naïveté of his young supporters, it looks like a recipe for a disastrous presidency.

Michael Crichton Has Passed Away

2008-11-05T13:24:00.001-05:00

Famous author and creator of the hit show ER Michael Crichton has passed away. To some of you this may seem like primarily an entertainment story, but to me the ranks of earnest skepticism in this country have lost one of their most valuable voices.

Michael Crichton was one of the few prominent Americans willing to stand up and criticize the growing subversion of science to political dogma. In fact, he was the only one that I know of outside of already marginal voices like right-wing talk radio hosts. Through his novel State of Fear and numerous important essays and speeches Crichton doggedly refused to give in to scientific "consensus".

This spells bad news for our country and the institutions of science. Very few people in America have the training the will to criticize the juggernaut of science-as-religion as well as the ability to withstand the withering attacks such criticism inevitably draws from Hollywood and the left-leaning mainstream media.

Although I enjoyed many Crichton novels (and Jurassic Park really goes without saying), I'm going to miss his courageous stance for skepticism even more.

Official Site | Aliens Cause Global Warming | Environmentalism as Religion

The Obama Victory

2008-11-05T00:23:00.001-05:00

First of all I want to congratulate all the Obama supporters out there. I know how hard you all have worked, and how much you all believe in your candidate. I am deeply happy for the joy you all feel. It's a great moment for you. I wish I'd had a candidate in this election that I revered and admired as much as you all revere and admire Obama.

Secondly I want to take a minute to step back and consider the positive aspects of this election, and there are some very positive aspects. First of all, it is a great moment for this nation to have elected its first black president. Like Martin Luther King Jr., I'm a firm believer that it is the content of our character that matters, not the color of our skin. However, blacks have faced unprecedented oppression in this nation, and I am truly honored to be here to see the ascension of a black man to the highest office in the land. I believe that says something great about America as well as about the resilience of African American culture. Of course I'd rather have seen Alan Keyes take that step then Barack Obama, but it's a remarkable and laudable step in its own right.

I hope that this truly brings a new era in race relations in this country. Although it may not signify the end of all racism everywhere, I hope that it does illustrate the capacity for unity across racial lines.

I'm also excited to see the world's reaction. I'm not particularly of the belief that America should be trying to win a global popularity contest, but on the other hand I'd be a fool if I didn't realize that being liked and respected has significant and very real advantages for both American policy and - we hope - for important global initiatives.

And finally I just want to express my hope that Obama remains true to his consistent and eloquent promises to be a uniter and not a divider, to work with Republicans, and to be a centrist.

Congratulations, Obama supporters. This is your night. You've earned it. I hope you enjoy the celebration.

Want to See Great Depresion 2.0? Vote Obama

2008-11-04T13:57:00.001-05:00

The leading paragraph says it all:

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depressiondragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previouslythought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. (UCLA Newsroom)

The economists who conducted the study took a very positive view of the results:

"Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a greatmystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have alwaysworried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,"said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA's Department of Economics. "We foundthat a relapse isn't likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery withill-conceived stimulus policies."

Now this would be good news - it should be good news - because it means that we now know how to avoid another Great Depression. When times get tough - minimize government attempts to fix everything. Don't wade in with a New New Deal, right? That's the one thing that should be clear.

Too bad the American left would rather repeat history than learn from it: America Needs a New New Deal.

According to President Roosevelt, the New Deal had three fundamentalaims: relief, reform and reconstruction. On Wednesday night, PresidentBush described his far more expensive but far less inclusive spendingplan as merely a "rescue effort." Mr. Bush's proposal--to hand over$700 billion to Wall Street banks without any Congressional oversight,without any means to prevent conflicts of interest, or without anymeasures to help ordinary Americans--was disgraceful.

What we really need is a new New Deal: a systematic approach to the financial and economic problems of the United States.

Although it is amusing to watch the Nation attempt to castigate President Bush while simultaneously agreeing with him, it's depressing to see the country headed for the precipice again. The one thing FDR got right was the danger of fear. I don't know if it's the only thing we have to fear, but it's certainly the first thing we have to fear. Because American fear is leading us like cows to the slaughter (no, not like lambs). We're running right into the arms of Obama and the American socialists who are all set to make sure that the government saves us from ourselves.

Even if it means a recap of the original Great Depression.

The Simplistic Notion of Private Property

2008-11-04T13:04:00.001-05:00

Seriously, I'm just aghast. The Democrats - led by Barack "Spread the Wealth Around" Obama are starting to boldly unfurl the banner of socialism. Here's Virginia's own Jim Moran adding his weight to the redistributionist cause:

YouTube

Jim Moran: That's the problem. We've been guided by a Republican administration that believes in this simplistic notion that those who have wealth are entitled to keep it, and they have an antipathy towards means of redistributing wealth.

For comparison -

John Adams: The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property isnot as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of lawand public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If"Thou shalt not covet," and "Thou shalt not steal," were notcommandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in everysociety, before it can be civilized or made free.

How many times must Democrats decry the ideals of the Constitution as something between quaint anachronisms and nefarious evils before America starts to get it? Liberals don't much like the Constitution, my fellow Americans. There's room for differing opinions about foreign and domestic policy within the framework of our nations legal and philosophical heritage, but this redistributionist cause is not even within that framework. It is inherently and emphatically opposed to American ideals.

A Country Boy Can Survive

2008-11-04T12:42:00.001-05:00

In case things don't go well today.

Then again, that's a great song even if they do go well!

Deeply Disturbing

2008-11-04T12:21:00.003-05:00

I'd like to dismiss the right-wing nutcases (e.g. Michael Savage) as just that: nutcases. These guys are convinced that Obama represent the dawning of American fascism. And while they do have some points (his creepy statements about a Civilian National Security Force, the cult-like worship of his adoring fans) I still hope that Obama is no farther to the left than our friends in Western Europe. Socialist? Sure. Fascist? No, no where near that bad.

But then I read articles like this one: Schumer on Fox: Fairness Doctrine ‘fair and balanced’. Sure - Schumer is not Obama. But the fear of the extreme-right-wing has always been that Obama is really just the standard-bearer for a fascist movement that would include Pelosi and Reid as ringleaders, along with most of the more left-leaning Democrats (like Schumer). While we're at it - Bush isn't exactly a friend of these guys either, and his domestic wire-tapping and such are seen as forerunners of the coming crackdown. Now at this point I have to kind of smile - because any conspiracy that has Pelosi, Reid, Obama, and Dick Cheney all hanging out and colluding to trick the American people is a bit too much of a stretch for me.

But I can't entirely dismiss the strains of fascism that are emerging from the current political climate. Two words on fascism:

Fascism is not a Disease of the Right

Fascism is usually linked to the right because fascism is rabidly nationalistic. And in that sense, fascism does tend to be a right-wing phenomena. But the heart of fascism is not necessarily right or left: it is simply the elevation of a charismatic leader to the head of an all-powerful state. There are, in fact, close ties between socialism and fascism as both are examples of collectivism: the subsuming of the individual to the collective. So any assumption that the Democratic party is somehow immune to fascism is naive and historically unfounded. There's that old saying that if you go far enough to the right you end up on the far left, and if you go far enough on the left you end up on the far right. Both extremes share the commonality of collectivism, which is the true antithesis of classical American individualism.

Fascism Always Starts Out as Populism

Everyone thinks of Nazi Germany when they think of fascism despite the fact that Mussolini actually invented the term in Italy. Furthermore, they think specifically of the brownshirts, Gestapo, etc. But the secret police breaking down doors in the middle of the night is not how fascism starts. Fascism starts with giant outdoor rallies where everyone comes to see a celebrity who has been elevated to superhuman status by popular adoration. Fascism ends up sinister, but it starts out festive.

So getting back to Schumer's comments... many on the right have raised the spectre of the "Fairness Doctrine". This is the innocent-sounding idea that all broadcasters would have to give equal time to opposing viewpoints. In practice, however, it's merely a slick way of eviscerating the conservative media.

Now the argument that Schumer makes about the Fairness Doctrine is particularly sinister:

The very same people who don’t want the Fairness Doctrine want the FCC [FederalCommunications Commission] to limit pornography on the air. I am for that… But you can’t say government hands off in one area to a commercial enterprise but you are allowed to intervene in another. That’s not consistent.

I would not be shocked to have someone from the left oppose the FCC and their decency laws. I am shocked to see someone from the left endorse the FCC specifically because then they could not only use the government to restrict speech based on decency - but based on political content.
So we've got the return of the Fairness Doctrine based on the reasoning that the government has as much right to regulate political speech as it does decency laws, we've got the creepy Civilian National Security Force that's supposed to be equally powerful and equally funded with the US military, we've got Obama wanting to spread the wealth around, we've got Obama lawyers threatening radio and TV broadcasters to try and intimidate them from airing negative ads, we've got Obama outright lying about his liberal record on abortion (even FactCheck.org couldn't cover for him), we've got Obama angling to ban concealed carry permits, handguns, and common rifle ammunition, we've got Obama lamenting the "restraints" of the US Constitution, and above all we've got the truly sickening displays of public obeisance for someone who is - at the end of the day - not a religious figure but a politician.

You add all this up and it gets really hard not to be at least a little bit nervous about how eerily close some of this looks to the origins of fascism.

The Long Line of Democracy

2008-11-04T05:52:00.000-05:00

I woke up at 5:30 am. I thought that would be early enough to avoid too much of a line. As I watched car after car turn off of Francistown I started to realize I had guessed wrong. But it wasn't until I actually entered the school that I realized I should have packed a lunch!

I thought the line was long when I voted in thr primary because it stretched out of the gym, down a couple of long halls, and then almost to the front doors.

That was nothing.

This line went right past the front doors and down at least another three or four halls to the very opposite end of the school.

When I arrived it had just reached the end of the hall and started to double back on itself. With all the new arrivals since I got here the line is going all the way back down this hall (towards the gym again). It goes around the corner again and out of sight.

And it just turned 6am.

Obama on Coal: We Will Bankrupt You

2008-11-03T12:09:00.003-05:00

Although it seems increasingly obvious that Obama is winning by being all things to all people - including contradictory things - for some reason Obama supporters don't seem to get it. Maybe this will help:

YouTube

So it seems Biden's comment (included in the audio above) wasn't the kind of gaffe where a candidate says something that's not true, it was the kind where a candidate says something that is true but that they aren't supposed to be saying out loud.

In case this seems like more "fear-mongering" (which apparently is a magical phrase that renders all criticism of Obama based on his own past words moot), the Ohio Coal Association seems to be taking it pretty seriously. They issued a press release today with the headline: Obama Remarks Make It Clear: Obama Ticket Not Supportive of Coal. That's funny to me, because some coal coalition has been running ads in Virginia for the past month or so about how coal is so great that both candidates support it. Guess they got caught up in the Great Con of 2008 as well. Anyway, here's some snippets from the press release:

Regardless of the timing or method of the release of these remarks, the message from the Democratic candidate for President could not be clearer: the Obama-Biden ticket spells disaster for America's coal industry and the tens of thousands of Americans who work in it.

These undisputed, audio-taped remarks, which include comments from Senator Obama like 'I haven't been some coal booster' and 'if they want to build [coal plants], they can, but it will bankrupt them' are extraordinarily misguided.

It's evident that this campaign has been pandering in states like Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Indiana and Pennsylvania to attempt to generate votes from coal supporters, while keeping his true agenda hidden from the state's voters.

Well, it took you long enough, but I'm glad you caught on at last. (It doesn't hurt that this is a story out of Ohio, either.) Now if only the rest of the country would start to subject Obama to some real scrutiny in the next 24 hours we could see some sanity come back to this election.

Also - if any of you have friends or family in any of those coal states (Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Indiana, and Pennsylvania) you should pass this long. Especially Ohio, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, of course. Pass it along quickly!

Obama on National Defense: Inside Out

2008-11-03T10:26:00.002-05:00

Back towards the end of September a friend sent me a link to an extremely troubling story. The details were rather vague, however, and with all the other issues on my plate I didn't pay it enough heed. The story starts with an article at ArmyTimes.com announcing:

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys. Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.

Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

...this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.

Shortly after this news broke there was a spate of articles like this one: Is Posse Comitatus Dead? in which Army spokesperson Col. Michael Botnar attempts to downplay the scary implications of having active-duty US troops assigned to US soil. In particular, the concern is that US troops would be deployed in the event of "civil unrest" - in other words - as a tool for government repression. The story didn't get a lot of traction because the mainstream media doesn't go in for things that sound too conspiratorial. In addition, Col. Botnar's explanation makes at least some sense:

The primary purpose of this force is to provide help to people in need in the aftermath of a WMD-like event in the homeland. It’s something that figures very prominently in the national planning scenarios under the National Response Framework, and that’s how DoD provides support in the homeland to civil authority. This capability is tailored technical life-saving support and then further logistic support for that very specific scenario. So, we designed it for that purpose.

This doesn't put all my fears to rest, but at least the Army is presenting it's case. Unfortunately the media did not do its job (probably too busy chasing OForce 1 around) and so this isn't getting any serious public scrutiny. The situation isn't helped by the fact that most Americans probably have never heard of the Posse Comitatus Act:

The statute generally prohibits federal military personnel and units of the National Guard under federal authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress.

In short: it's yet another in America's historically conservative limitation on federal powers. Although not dating back to the Founders (the law was passed in 1878) it's a reflection of the principles of restrained Federal authority over the states. It may very well be that the threat of WMD - and the requirement for a technically proficient and immediately available set of responders - is sufficient grounds to revisit this act. But it should be revisited. Not circumvented.

The ACLU is demanding more information, and AmericanProgress.org has a good article that explains a lot of the controversy (or the reasons there should be controversy) but other than that the entire issue has slipped under the radar leading up to tomorrow's elections. Beyond the libertarian fringes of the Internet, it has gone unnoticed.

But that might be changing:

YouTube

So now Obama is calling for a quasi-military "Civilian National Security Force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded [as the US military]". If the deployment of 650 troops to US soil is grounds for serious misgiving and concern - what on earth are we to make of this? To get some perspective, the US military has over 1.4 million active duty personnel, another 800,000 on reserve, and an annual budget of over 1/2 a trillion dollars. That's just over 4% of national GDP. So economically Obama is calling for what - a hiring spree of one or two million Americans, another 500 billion in spending? In the middle of a financial crisis? Or is he just going to cut the US military strength in half and use the savings to create this domestic army? Apparently not, since in the same speech he called for augmenting the army by 65,000 and the Marines by 27,000. (I can hear some people cheering already, as that sounds like 1 million new jobs. All I have to say to that is that the best way to create a Great Depression is to start acting like we're already in one.)

Then there are the more serious questions: is Obama seriously talking about putting 1 million paramilitary forces on the streets of the United States? How exactly are we supposed to read "just as powerful" if not to include serious armaments? And why would they need $500 billion dollars if they're not buying some serious hardware? Predictably the right-wing has gone bananas: AmericanThinker.com, CaptainsJournal.com, 2AForum.com, etc.

A lot of those folks are already referring to the proposed CNSF as Obama's "brownshirts" or even a new "Gestapo". Personally I don't think that kind of inflammatory rhetoric is helpful. Sure, call the first realistic African American presidential candidate a Nazi. Thataway to win friends and influence people, folks. On the other hand, I'm anticipating a really touch-feely interpretation from the Obama camp and I'm not willing to buy it.

AmeriCorps? Already mentioned in the same speech. Obama wants to increase to 250,000 strong. Clearly separate from, or at least subordinate to, the CNSF plans. EnergyCorps? Once again - already distinct. Even if you add all these up you still can't explain to me how this is a "security" force as opposed to a volunteer force without engaging in the wishful-thinking semantics of saying "but volunteers are a force for American security!" or some such.

For what it's worth - I don't believe Obama is talking about a police force. I don't think he's talking about armed brownshirts. It doesn't fit with the rest of his rhetoric. I think the AmericanThinker's analysis is much closer to the truth:

Senator Obama aims to tap into the already active volunteerism of millions of Americans and recruit them to become cogs in a gigantic government machine grinding out his social re-engineering agenda. It's Orwellian-like, with a novice social activist's mentality at the helm...

It seems clear that he meant to say, in effect, that the security of the nation is as dependent on its unarmed community service providers as it is on its armed military personnel. Even the nomenclature "corps," as in Peace Corps, carries a martial connotation as does the name, Salvation Army. His point: national security begins with civilians. It's a message like the one America's home front heard throughout World War II. Except in his case, he means to marshal volunteers for social service and economic equality while saving the environment.

So somewhere between the right-wing hysteria over the imminent arrival of the goose-steppers and the left-wing blind devotion in their benevolent savior is the truth: Obama seems to be whipping out plans for another 1/2 a trillion of spending (AmericanThinker graciously cuts it to under $400 billion), and then funneling that spending into social and economic justice efforts. Translation: into "non-profits" that are friendly to Obama's social and economic agenda.

This is the culmination of the Great Con of 2008. Once Obama gets into power he will do the same thing he has done every step of the way so far. He will use the power that he has been given to reward those who helped him get there on a grand scale. He will unapolegetically raise taxes on Americans - reneging on his promise to lower them using the poor economy as his excuse - and then funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into controversial progressive causes like ACORN (voter fraud for the win, right?). He will do this both to serve his own agenda as well as for the pragmatic reason of shoring up his power base. His intention is to set aside the Constitution and inflate the power and scope of the federal government to make America better. And since America is better when Obama and his buddies are in charge, of course making America better will involve enriching his allies at the expense of tax-paying Americans, the majority of whom do not even agree with his radical ideology.

There's the pay-off to the Great Con, folks. That's the punchline. Even if you don't buy into a clear and present danger to Possee Comitatus in the form of a pro-Obama SS (and I don't), at the very least we've got him flaunting his promise to lower taxes, promising record levels of new spending, and openly telegraphing his plans to turn our government into a big piggybank for his pet causes.

I'm not sure how much of this damage can be undone, and I'm not sure how much trauma it would cause to society to undo it.

The End of Journalism

2008-11-03T09:26:00.002-05:00

Victor Davis Hanson's piece on that National Review Online The End of Journalism is yet another indictment of the mainstream media over their shift from a sort of passive "we'll try to be unbiased, but we all know journalists are Democrats" stance to an outright declaration of allegiance to Obama. "we're the PR wing of the Obama campaign". Michael Malone has another excellent story Media's Presidential Bias and Decline up at ABC news.

Hanson's NRO piece is an excellent description of the media bias itself, along with providing a good list of reasons not to vote for Obama. Malone's piece is actually more interesting to me, however, both because it's from a mainstream press (one last gasp of liberty from a drowning medium?) and because it focuses more on the causes behind the media bias rather than merely castigating journalists.

In particular Malone cites economic pressures on traditional media (which has never really come to terms with the Internet) and the resulting bitterness in mainstream editors (not journalists) that leads them to have both a vested interest in an Obama presidency and simultaneously a new level of recklessness with respect to the credibility of their own industry.

Although I'm obviously still hoping for a McCain victory - and still advocating people to give Obama some real scrutiny - I'm also genuinely concerned about the death of media credibility. Even when I thought the media was biased 10 years ago I believed it still represented a sort of uniform cultural touch point. I considered it center-left, but still central. The charge of media bias was related to the nuance of articles. Did the writer use "pro-choice" instead of "pro-abortion", but then "anti-abortion" or "anti-choice" instead of "pro-life"? The facts, however, were trustworthy.

But ever since Rathergate, and growing with the incredible audacity of the media in completely flaunting their professional obligation to dig deep into Obama's rhetoric, policies, and past media bias is no longer a question of nuance or even spin. Instead it is the facts themselves that are in doubt. And if the facts reported by the media have fallen under a cloud of suspicion, then the very foundation of journalism is crumbling.

In the short run this means center-right America is about to elect a far-left president as a rubber-stamp to a far-left Congress and House, but in the longer run it means that the common ground of American political discourse is dissolving.

As a conservative - and a I wouldn't call myself center-right - I am not happy to see the impending demise of the mainstream media establishment. The cost in the long run will be an increasingly divided and fractured society where political discourse is largely composed of in-groups merely preaching to their own. The result will be not only heightened discord when these incompatible world-views conflict, but an increase in zealotry and radicalism as socio-political factions splinter off into their own little universes, subsisting on a steady diet of pre-screened facts guaranteed to reinforce their world views and feed perpetual outrage.

I've already seen a lot of this on Facebook, where I noticed that many circles of friends seem to become increasingly mono-political. The conservatives gather round and lament the fading glory of a lost Constitution, while the liberals gather round and spit vitriol at anyone who dares slander their Messiah.

Even though I have a vested interest in one side of this debate versus the other, I can't help but feel that the entire discussion itself is more valuable than any temporary gains by either side. And it is with a sense of deep foreboding that I watch the implosion of my long-term punching bag the mainstream media. They fulfilled a critical role in helping keep the disparate sides of American talking. They were - for better or worse - the center.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

- Yeats, "The Second Coming"

In Defense of Conservatism: Part 1 What does it mean to be a conservative?

2008-10-31T16:51:00.002-04:00

Between the rise of Obama, the unpopularity of Bush as the figurehead of the Republican party, and the wrongly attributed cause of deregulation for the meltdown of the markets many Americans seem to think that the dominance of conservatism is coming to an end.
It’s time to splash some cold water on this myth. For starters: America is a conservative country.

In a long article for Newsweek, John Meacham quotes a Newsweek poll that finds conservatives still outnumber liberals in this country by a 2:1 margin - 40 percent to 20 percent. Then there is the famous Battleground Poll. This poll, which has been asking the same questions of Americans for over a decade, released their most recent results in August. Question D3 on that poll reads: “When thinking about politics and government, do you consider yourself to be...” and the answers are: “Very conservative, somewhat conservative, moderate, somewhat liberal, very liberal, unsure/refuse to answer”. 60% of Americans responded as either very or somewhat conservative (20% and 40% respectively) while only 36% of Americans responded as either somewhat or very liberal (25% and 9%, respectively). Note that this leaves only 5% for moderate or unsure/refused, and in fact only 2% of respondents chose the neutral position of “moderate”. These results have been stable for the past 13 years that the Battleground Poll has been running. (Summary from American Thinker)

So what does it mean to be a conservative? The word itself has many connotations, but it simply denotes an attitude geared towards preservation and protection. So the question becomes: preservation and protection of what? The answer is that the Constitution and our nations founding documents conservatives are not merely clever works of political architecture, but that in these documents the Founding Fathers have codified principles which are timeless and universal. It is both the documents and the principles contained therein which it is our duty – as individual citizens and as a government – to conserve.

Whether the opposing view is labeled “liberalism” or “progressivism” is inconsequential. Questions of semantics aside, the counterpoint to conservatism is the idea that our nation needs change more than it needs conservation of what we already have.

Sometimes the terms “conservative” and “liberal” are broken down onto more than one axis. The most common example of this is to distinguish social conservatism/liberalism from fiscal conservatism/liberalism. And while there is some validity to such analysis, the fundamental debate is not about social issues or dollars but about the nature of government. Social liberals – from civil rights to abortion rights – favor expanded powers for the federal government. So do fiscal liberals. Social conservatives and fiscal conservatives, on the other hand, favor maintaining traditional restrictions on federal government.

The central character in the drama of change vs. preservation is America’s core legal document: the Constitution. Both ends of the political spectrum proclaim allegiance to the bedrock of our legal system, but in very different ways. The conservatives have a vested interest in honoring the Constitution according to the original intent of those who framed it since the heart of conservatism is to maintain not merely the form but the original substance of the document. Liberals, by contrast, face a more difficult proposition since they must simultaneously maintain the image of adherence to a centuries-old document while at the same time wresting meaning from it that is at times directly contradictory to the plain meaning of those who wrote the document.

To be specific: a central tenet of liberalism is the idealistic notion that we can use government powers proactively to make life better for everyday Americans. A simple example of this is wealth redistribution or “spreading the wealth around”. There is apparent basis for this strategy in the General Welfare Clause of the Constitution. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1 – as a whole – is known as the Taxing and Spending Clause. The text reads:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

The key phrase is: “general Welfare of the United States”. Judging from the text in isolation, one could easily surmise that this is ample justification for proactively redistributing wealth from those who have more than they need to those who lack. In fact, if one wants maximum flexibility in interpreting written text it is always best to look at small snippets of the target text: the shorter the better. But the Constitution did not spring to life ex nhilo and the Founders left specific comments regarding their own understanding of the document they left to us. Here is a small sampling relevant to wealth redistribution and the General Welfare Clause:

“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”-Benjamin Franklin

“To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Milligan, April 6, 1816

“A wise and frugal government … shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”-Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

“Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.”-Thomas Jefferson

“The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If ‘Thou shalt not covet’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal’ were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free.”-John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, 1787

“With respect to the two words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.”
-James Madison in a letter to James Robertson

“…[T]he government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”-James Madison

These quotes illustrate – with prescient specificity – that it was not the intention of the Founders to allow the General Welfare Clause to act as a backdoor by which federal legislative powers could circumvent the limits placed on them to grow unchecked over the walls and barriers laid down in the Constitution.

This in turn reveals the fact that – all pretexts to the contrary – modern American liberalism sees the Constitution as an empty vessel. They accept the form of the document, but deny it its historical substance. They wrestle the words of the document into shapes that directly contradict the intention of the people who wrote the document in the first place.

The fact that the Founders anticipated these very attacks further solidifies the importance of reading the Constitution through the strict lens of original intent, for the Constitution was written precisely to withstand the kinds of changes that have been taking place in the centuries since this government began. As such, the only honest alternatives are to either accept the Constitution along with its originally intended meaning or to dismiss it altogether. The myth of adhering to the Constitution as a living document is pure sophistry, for one can not meaningfully adhere to any principle, philosophy or text unless it possess meaning of its own independent from the vagaries of future interpretation. Either the Constitution means what it was intended to mean by those who wrote it, or we may as well stop pretending it means anything at all.

None of this should be construed as an argument for the perfection of the Constitution. If the Founders had believed the Constitution which they signed to be perfect, they would not have included specific means whereby the document can be modified. Conservatism is not necessarily opposed to all change, but it is firmly and doggedly opposed to change that attempts to circumvent or corrupt the original meaning of the Constitution rather than build upon or modify the document according to core principles of limited government.

By its nature, modern liberalism attempts to do just that. It is not merely change, but exactly the kind of change the Founders were most concerned with preventing. It is the inexorable growth of government power and the corresponding decline in liberty.

“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”-Thomas Jefferson, letter to E. Carrington, May 27, 1788

“There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”-James Madison, speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 16, 1788

Of course many – perhaps nearly all – American liberals do not consciously wish to discard the Constitution. But whether or not that is the intention, it is certainly the necessary consequence of the general liberal program of using the federal government to address problems it was never intended to address. To achieve these goals they must necessarily bestow to the federal government authority strictly denied to it according to the original intent of the Constitution. Whether they attempt to modify the Constitution to change its intent (which for the most part they have not done), or whether they attempt to separate the meaning from the text and substitute fabricated meaning of their own (the favored tactic) the end result is the same: the de facto loss of the American Constitution.

The 95% Lie

2008-10-31T09:05:00.003-04:00

Conservative radio host Neal Boortz has a long post: To the Undecided Voter. It's his closing argument, if you will, against Barack Obama. It's a long read, but very worth wading through. There's one part in particular that absolutely needs to be highlighted - the lie behind Obama's 95% figure. Obama says he wants to tax the wealthy to bring fairness to our society. (I'll leave a discussion of socialism aside for now, save to ask America - would we be seriously considering voting for Obama if he was head of the Socialist party and not the Democratic party? Because he could be.) The Republicans have responded that taxing those who make more then $250,000 a year would hurt small businesses who would in turn pass those costs on to their workers by either freezing raises, reducing paychecks/benefits, freezing hiring, laying off workers, or even just folding up and going home.

Obama's response is a clever deception. He says that 95% of American small business make less than $250,000 a year. This fact is true. But irrelevant. We're not worried about how many small businesses will be impacted, we're worried about how many small business employees will be impacted.

Here Boortz references an October 21st article from the Wall Street Journal: Socking it to Small Businesses. Here are some facts from that article:

1. 85% of small businesses are taxed as personal income (and so would potentially be hit by Obama's tax hikes)
2. Any of these businesses that brings in as little as $165,000 can face the stiff tax rate of 33%, which Obama wants to increase to 36%.
3. Small businesses that manage to make it all the way to the $250,000 level would be an additional tax surcharge bringing their rate to nearly 45%. (Big business corporations pay 35%.)
4. While 95% of small businesses won't be hit, it is the successful small-to-medium sized businesses that create most of the jobs in America. These guys will be hit. Of the income taxes filed in the bracket over $250,000, about 75% are from successful small-medium sized businesses.

So, just to be clear, the host of tiny businesses out there (most of which only last about 4 years, and have very few employees) will all escape Obama's wrath. Good for them. But the successful small and medium sized businesses that actually create jobs will not:

According to a Gallup survey conducted for the National Federation of Independent Business last December and January, only 10% of all businesses that hire between one and nine employees would pay the Obama tax. But 19.5% of employers with 10 to 19 employees would be socked by the tax. And 50% of businesses with 20 to 249 workers would pay the tax. The Obama plan is an incentive to hire fewer workers.

This is a perfect example of the folly of Obama's socialist vision for America, and the deceitful way he is willing to peddle it off to Americans. In the name of fairness, Obama is going to raise taxes on precisely that portion of the American economy most sensitive to taxes and where the majority of jobs and new job growth come from (70% of jobs are for small business, 80% of job growth is from small businesses). In a foolish and un-American attempt to spread the wealth around, Obama is going to make sure there is less wealth for everyone. He's shooting the goose that lays the golden eggs, and he's trying to convince the American people that he's just a Robin Hood out to steal from the evil, greedy, rich. Some Robin Hood: for every guy making a $300,000 salary, Obama is going to be smacking down three small businesses that provide jobs to American workers.

The rest of Boortz's article is well worth reading, but a very bare minimum please explain to your family, friends, neighbors, etc what Obama's tax plans really mean for America. They mean less job growth, slower wage growth, and fewer of the successful independent enterprises that make America prosperous.

For the record: this is a simple way to turn a financial crisis into a real Great Depression. Nothing that has happened to us so far will have the kind of long term debilitating effect on everyday Americans that Obama's compounding of the problem will bring.

Hope and Faith

2008-10-29T13:44:00.004-04:00

I stumbled on this website quite by accident. I was looking up a quote and had no idea what I was getting into when I clicked the link. The site is called Is Barack Obama the Messiah?. The site never actually explains itself. But from what I can tell, the site is trying to take this silly premise, and not prove it, but merely show that without context (or maybe even with), were an alien to visit the earth, he may think that BHO is a diety of the Democratic Party.

Below are some quotes I've taken from the sidebar:

"This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."
-- Barack Obama

"Does it not feel as if some special hand is guiding Obama on his journey, I mean, as he has said, the utter improbability of it all?"
-- Daily Kos

"Not just an ordinary human being but indeed an Advanced Soul"
-- Commentator @ Chicago Sun Times

"I'll do whatever he says to do. I'll collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear."
-- Halle Berry

"I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often. No, seriously. It's a dramatic event."
-- Chris Matthews
(See video here at Eyeblast)

"We're here to evolve to a higher plane . . . he is an evolved leader . . . [he] has an ear for eloquence and a Tongue dipped in the Unvarnished Truth."
-- Oprah Winfrey

The blog itself is full of quotes from famous and regular people alike that would give you the sense that, indeed, BHO is a god, or even a God. I must admit, that as a religious person, and definitely as someone who did not know she was about to read this kind of stuff, I felt extremely uncomfortable. I thought to myself "I wonder why Obama invokes worship of this magnitude" and then immediately closed the site, posted it a few places online (I thought people should know about it...), and tried to forget about it (...even though I didn't want to remember it).

I thought about the site again today as I was thinking about Obama's message of hope. I thought "will hope heal our economy?", "will hope bring the troops home?", "will hope fight terrorism?", "will hope create more jobs?" And then I thought, "no, all those things take some kind of action." I then it dawned on me, "hope" is Obama's non-religious version of faith. He's asking us to believe in him. Now, obviously, hope has a different connotation than faith. Obama can say things like "we need to have hope for America" or "we need to have hope for change", he doesn't even need to ask us directly to have faith in him. (Quite sneaky, I might add.)

Just imagine for a second, if I were to say "I heard Romney speak, and I felt this thrill going up my leg." Or if a born-again were to say "Does it not feel as if some special hand is guiding Bush on his journey?" Or if a Catholic were to say "Jindal is an evolved leader, he has an ear for eloquence and a Tongue dipped in Unvarnished Truth." We'd all be labeled religious nut-jobs. But Obama has taken the religion out of faith and worship, and replaced it with hope and, well, hero-worship (come on, English language, you're letting me down on this one). Can anyone really deny the sermon-like quality of Obama's speeches? Should we call his closing argument Sermon on the Canton Memorial Civic Center?

Think for a moment, if the Republican party or its ticket were to claim that people were worshiping Obama, even without including anything inflammatory like "idol of the Democratic party" or even "anti-Christ". I don't think that would be a positive course of action. So they did the next best thing - they called him a celebrity. This makes perfect sense even without considering the shoulders rubbed with Obama's and the fact that women will jump in front of his car as though he's Paul McCartney in 1964 (that doesn't really happen, I just made that up). Celebrities are often worshiped, so it was a great analogy, if not the truth.

The last thing I'd like to add is Biblical. If Obama has replaced faith with hope, then let's ask ourselves again, "will hope save us from the ills of our country?" I know that a lot of Christians ignore this verse or have some fuzzy interpretation of it, but as James tells us in chapter 2:

Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.

So what does hope without action give us? Where is Obama's call for people to take responsibility (other than a slight nod to the word with no specifics) and action (besides voting, sorry VoteOrDie, voting will not find you a job, give you a raise, or buy you a house) along with hoping for a positive outcome? Does Obama truly believe that he will solve people's problems without any action required from them (a miracle-worker now?)? (Or does Obama think that when Joe the Plumber - yes I used the phrase Joe the Plumber - asks Obama why all his hope didn't buy him a plumbing company, that the answer "you didn't take personal responsibility" will actually satisfy Joe after listening to his promises?)

I am seriously not trying to convince anyone who to vote for, this is just some musing on a current social phenomenon. So I'm also not interested in who you think people should vote for or why. But I am curious about a few things:

Have you ever found yourself doing something that could be construed as worshipping Obama? If so, what was it?

Are you uncomfortable by worship-like reactions to Obama?

Why do you think people respond to Obama in this way?

Do you think Paris should choose Obama as her new BFF?

— contributed by Super Ro

ACORN Shenanigans Hit Home (Literally: MY Home)

2008-10-28T20:50:00.007-04:00

So you'll never guess what I found in my mailbox when I came home from work today:

Never heard of the "Civic Participation Center"? Me neither. But I have heard of ACORN. So right off the bat I'm not extremely pleased that they are contacting me at all. Here's the contents of the letter:

I realize the text may be a little hard to read since I scanned it as an image. Here's a plaintext version with my comments interspersed: __________________________________________________

Dear Nathaniel:

Thanks so much for talking to a caller from the Civic Participation Center (never heard of them, never spoken to anyone from that organization, nor to any strange and unidentified individuals), a nonpartisan (that's a joke, right?) project of the nonprofit ACORN, and pledging that you will vote on November 4th. (Oh I'll vote, but I've never spoken to you about it.) We're writing to ask you to keep that commitment because this election is so historic and important. (I doubt you'd want me to keep that commitment if you knew who I was voting for.)

We want to remind you that you are part of the Voter Intention Study (once again - this is all news to me) -- a study that looks at how often voter are able to keep their pledge to vote. (What pledge, again?) As we said, after the election, we will look at state voter records to see who voted. Our study will not identify individual voters but will show overall statistics.

Most of all, to help you keep your commitment (again with this pledge, commitment thingy I never made to anyone), we want to offer the following helpful information about voting:

In Virginia, polls are open from 6am to 7pm. (If you're in line before the polls close, you can still vote.)
If you need to know where to vote, you can call 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683), or visit http://www.866ourvote.org/ to find the location of your polling place.
Voters in Virginia must meet certain conditions to be eligible for early voting. To determine your eligibility, contact your local elections official. To find your local board of elections, please visit http://www.voterparticipationcenter.org/.

Congratulations on the role you will play in helping American break new records for voting in 2008 -- and on proving that people keep their pledges to vote! (WHAT PLEDGE?!)

Thanks once more for being the kind of good citizen who keeps our democracy strong by voting this Tuesday, November 4th!

Sincerely,

Director, Civic Participation Center

P.S. Whether or not you vote is a matter of public record, but if you would like to opt out of this study, you may email us at info@civicparticipationcenter.org and type this number in the subject line: 240998490.
__________________________________________________

I don't want to overreact to this. It's not as though I've just found that someone is using my personal information to register to vote. But I do want to know where they got this idea that I was contacted to sign up for this study. I have not been contacted by anyone in regards to any pledge or any study. So why am I on their list?

It's not a mass mailing list, as far as I can tell. My wife didn't get one. Anyone else that live in VA receive one out there?

And what is this Civic Participation Center? The website civicparticipationcenter.org just redirects to a spam/ad site. There's The Center for Civic Participation, but I'm not sure if that's the same thing or not. I'm thinking it is not, since according to the contact portion of that website, it's formal title is "Center for Civic Participation" (not Civic Participation Center) and it's located out of Detroit. Not Little Rock. Googling for "civic participation center" (with quotes) doesn't seem to return anything useful.

I headed over to ACORN.org (where I was amused by their "Fight Back" campaign to try and deflect attention from the ongoing federal investigations into voter fraud and the fact that they lied about how many voters they'd registered). I searched for "civic participation center" and got - no documents. That's a bit odd, don't you think? The mailing says that the "Civic Participation Center" is "A Project of ACORN", and yet nothing about it shows up on ACORN's web site. At least, not in a search. Nor could I find anything in their Voter Engagement Campaign section. (I guess that's what they call registering dead folks and Disney characters to vote these days. Engagement.)

So what's my guess? Well I hope that there's no one trying to use my info to register, and I don't think there is. I noticed that the most promising location for this Civic Participation Center would be the "Tracking Success" section of their Voter Engagement Campaign. But that's one of those cute "Under Construction" pages. So my guess - and it's just a guess - is that ACORN is feeling the heat and attempting to prove it's relevance by showing how many of the people it claimed to have registered (already down to just over 400,000 from earlier claims of over 1.3 million) actually go out and register. One easy way to make that number look better? Grab the info from a bunch of people you had nothing to do with and pretend that you registered them. That still leaves open the question of where they got my info and why they chose me. I have no idea what kind of public records are available about registered voters (I've been registered since I moved to this house back in 2005) and I suppose they could have just picked me out randomly.

I called the McCain campaign to see if they knew anything about it, but I'm nobody so I just got to leave a message on their "General Comment" line. Someone will probably delete sometime in 2010.

So - anyone out there in Virgina (or elsewhere) get a similar letter? Know anything about this project? I really am curious. What shenanigans are these guys up to?

An Experiment in Wealth Redistribution

2008-10-27T14:03:00.001-04:00

I got this story from a poster on a right-wing forum I lurk at. It's so priceless, I feel I have to spread the word. Here's the entire post:

The other night my wife and I went out to dinner and I passed one of the homeless guys near the restaurant, with a sign that read "Vote Obama, I need the money."

Once in the restaurant I noticed my waitress had on a "Obama 08" button.

When the bill came, I decided not to tip the waitress and explained to her that while she had given me exceptional service, the button she was wearing made me feel she obviously believes in Senator Obama's plan to redistribute the wealth.

I told her I was going to redistribute her tip to someone who I deemed was in more need -- the homeless guy outside.

She stood there in disbelief then angrily stormed away.

I went outside, gave the homeless guy $5 and told him to thank the waitress inside, as I had decided he could use the money more.

The homeless guy looked at me in disbelief but seemed grateful.

As I got my car, I realized this rather unscientific Redistribution Experiment had left the homeless guy quite happy for the money he did not earn, but the waitress was pretty angry that I gave away the money she did earn.

Well, I guess this redistribution of wealth thing is going to take a while to catch on,... at least with thsoe doing the actual work.

Like I said - priceless.

Liberals on Palin, Joe: From Nasty to Crazy

2008-10-24T11:42:00.002-04:00

Ruben Navarrette Jr has a CNN commentary up called Liberals let loose on Palin and Joe the Plumber. He makes some especially good points when it comes to the Democrats favorite pinata: Joe Wurzelbacher:

Tell that to Joe Wurzelbacher, the Ohio resident who got his 15 minutes -- and 40 lashes -- because he dared question Obama about his tax plan. Obama insists that the plan would raise taxes only on those Americans earning more than $250,000 per year. It was then Obama made his clumsy "spread the wealth" comment.

What was Joe thinking: that we live in a democracy where everyday Americans who pay the salaries of elected officials can dare question their policies? That just isn't done.

To prove it, the elites who run the Democratic Party -- along with their surrogates in the media and organized labor -- went after the plumber.

We now know that Samuel Joe Wurzelbacher owes back taxes, doesn't have a plumbing license (he told the Associated Press he doesn't need one because he works for someone else's company), and may not be registered to vote.

Commenting on a CNN.com story, one condescending reader wrote that Joe the Plumber should pipe down and "get back in my bathroom and unclog the toilet."

Even Biden and Obama got in a few licks. Biden quipped to Jay Leno that Democrats wanted to take care of "Joe-the-real-plumber-with-a-license," and Obama sarcastically asked supporters, "how many plumbers do you know making $250,000 a year?" The implication being that Joe the Plumber isn't who he pretends to be.

Nothing inspires confidence that the Obama/Biden ticket cares about the everyman like seeing their machine tear one of them apart. Joes owes about $1,200 - $1,300 in back taxes and was unaware (before the dirt-muckers got to mucking) that he was in arears. He's worked out a payment plan with the IRS and - in a display of some real class - thanked his critics for bringing the issue to his attention.

Then there's Palin:

The latest media template is that the vice presidential nominee is a drag on the GOP ticket. Pundits detect a backlash, not just among Democrats who love to hate Sarah Palin but also among women, independents and seniors. They cite polls showing Palin with an unfavorable rating of 50 percent.

So what? We're in the post-Clinton, post-Bush era of polarization where any politician with a pulse -- Sorry, Joe Biden -- will be loved by half the country and hated by the other half.

It's surreal. Before McCain put Palin on the ticket, he was getting 200 people at campaign rallies, and now, when he appears when Palin, he gets 20,000. Yes, definitely a drag.

These are all good points, but I'm afraid I've got to add an even more ludicrious attack a friend of mine drew my attention to when he posted it on his Facebook account.

Here's the charge (from the JedReport): Palin has said she doesn't know iif abortion clinic bombers are terrorists. Apparently this is "the single most incredible thing I've heard any candidate say this entire general election campaign". This is, of course, only true if Palin was in any way whatsoever expressing lenience for these murderers. Which she was not.

YouTube

Terrorism is not code for "crimes that are really, really bad". It is not a measure of the degree of evil of an act. It is a measure of the motivations behind an act. Killing someone for their money, or becuse you really hate them, or for the sheer pleasure of hurting; these are all heinous and evil acts but they are not terrorism. Terrorism is "the systematic use of terror especially a a means of coercion". So if an abortion clinic bomber blows up a clinic in the hopes of bringing about terror to the general populace in order to change abortion laws he's a terrorist. But if an abortion clinic bomber blows up a clinic because he thinks he will stop that specific clinic from killing, or for revenge, it is not terrorism. It's a twisted idea of vigilante violence.

But the real issue is not whether or not we view abortion clinic bombing as terrorism. It's a debatable issue. Palin didn't say it wasn't. She simply said "I don't know". Which is a completely reasonable thing to say.

No, the real issue is that hypocritical liberals want to use the very right-wing fear-mongering tactics they've claimed to despise and try to turn her comment into an expression of sympathy with terrorism and/or murder. This is a hypocritical and dishonest ploy.

It's convenient that Obama doesn't have to level such charges himself, of course. The media does a pretty good job of handling his dirty work.

Orson Scott Card - A Very Irate Democrat

2008-10-22T15:37:00.002-04:00

Although this version doesn't have the editor's note, most versions of the story do include a note claiming that Card is a Democrat. I suppose this is possible in theory, but he sure doesn't sound like a very happy one. In any case, this is yet another in a long litany of attacks on the mainstream media for what many see as overwhelming bias in favor of Democrats in general and Obama in particular. During the 2008 election we've seen the media's attitude towards the Democrats go from congenially friendly (like the way Biden is apparently immune to scandal, but not really thought very highly of either) to downright partisanship. According to Card (and I think his charge is correct in essence) the media is not an observer anymore. The media, acting en masse, is campaigning for Obama.

Now Orson Scott Card is a bit of an extremist. He's rich and successful and - unlike Steven King (who seems desperate to please the liberal establishment in his own columns) - he doesn't care about decorum, mainstream, or how he comes across. So keep that in mind as you read it. But please read it.

I'm thinking that this has got to be what McCain is saving his pennies for. I expect a blitz of ads and publicity stunts to start about a week before the election (the day Obama gets back from Hawaii) connecting Obama to the mortgage meltdown both personally and philospohically.

But is it too late? People already formed their impression of the mortgage crisis: it was due to Republican deregulation. The fact that it was actually due to Democratic meddling in the market in favor of socialist policies may be true, but I doubt it's possible to change most American's minds at this point. Luckily, he only has to convince a fairly small proportion of the population.

Incidentally, Card links to a Thomas Sowell column (really, I'm supposed to believe he's a Democrat who happesn to read Townhall.com?). Thomas Sowell, along with Walter Williams, are my two favorite columnists. The article is called Do Facts Matter? and it's another must-read.

Right now, the polls indicate that a whole lot of the people are being fooled a whole lot of the time.

The current financial bailout crisis has propelled Barack Obama back into a substantial lead over John McCain-- which is astonishing in view of which man and which party has had the most to do with bringing on this crisis.

It raises the question: Do facts matter? Or is Obama's rhetoric and the media's spin enough to make facts irrelevant?

It looks like Sowell agrees with my view of this election. It's without doubt the greatest con the cuontry has ever seen. It's one thing for Obama to win on the merits. I would be a lot happier to be on the losing side because the majority of Americans see the issues differently than I do. But that's now why Obama is winning. He's not winning because the American people agree with what he really thinks and does. He's wining because he's fooled enough of the American people into believing Obama thinks and acts in ways that he does not think and does not act.

And it's really hard for me to be happy losing that way.