Friendly Fire on Hot Topics

I win

2007-12-04T10:31:00.000-08:00

Re our wager on war with Iran: I win. Nothing will happen. Hooray.

The Spiritual By-Plays That Make Life Bearable

2007-10-24T08:12:00.000-07:00

Whilst browsing, I came across this passage from a book by Lin Yutang, My Country and My People. It is apparently very hard to find online. It contains the following reflection on Confucianism as compared to Christianity:

This realism and attached-to-the-earth quality of the Chinese ideal of life
has a basis in Confucianism, which, unlike Christianity, is of the earth,
earth-born. For Jesus was a romanticist, Confucius a realist; Jesus was a
mystic, Confucius a positivist; Jesus was a humanitarian, Confucius a humanist.
In these two personalities we see typified the contrast between Hebrew religion
and poetry and Chinese realism and common sense. Confucianism, strictly
speaking, was not a religion: it had certain feelings toward life and the
universe that bordered on the religious feeling, but it was not a religion.
There are such great souls in the world who cannot get interested in the life
hereafter or in the question of immortality, or in the world of spirits in
general. That type of philosophy could never satisfy the Germanic races, and
certainly not the Hebrews, but it satisfied the Chinese race—in general. We
shall see below how it really never quite satisfied even the Chinese, and how
that deficiency was made up for by a Taoist or Buddhist supernaturalism. But
this supernaturalism seems in China to be separated in general from the question
of the ideal of life: it represents rather the spiritual by-plays and outlets
that merely help to make life endurable.

My Money Part II

2007-10-16T14:50:00.000-07:00

As a follow-up on my earlier post I'd like to elaborate on these issues that give me a "gut" feeling bad things are coming. IMHO this will be true to the tune of apprx. 10%. Significantly:

"In Washington, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson also spoke about the housing collapse but took a hard line against policy that could send the wrong message to risk-takers. Paulson said he had "no interest in bailing out lenders or property speculators."

It is a classic upside-downside analysis and, as we just discussed, the upside is non-existent. As for targeting the best possible sector for a short-sell opportunity we have identified two: Financials and Technology.

With regard to the financials sector I came across this interesting analysis of the $100 billion bailout Superfund:

"The subprime borrower who can't pay his mortgage today won't be any better equipped to do so after this bailout. All that may be accomplished here is for lenders to delay the recognition of these losses"

This is in line with my reasoning. Simply put, the buck will stop somewhere (consumers) and when it does, the rest of the economy will follow. After all, we're at three bailouts (Fed rates cut, Fed market infusion and the aforementioned Superfund) in the last two months. How may more do we need to signal the precarious nature of the latest market recovery?? Then there's still all those nasty little issues like oil, gold, inflation, real estate '08 election ect.

The technology play is more a step back from the obvious financials play. The thinking here is that the sector has been a haven from the pain of the financial/manufacturing market. As a result, the sector has enjoyed a nice run, right? Well, this doesn't bear out necessarily. Check out this chart I designed that contains a comparison between financials (XLF) Tech (QQQQ, XLK) and the S&P.

They appear strongly correlated. So is the technology safe haven a figmant of my imagination. Not sure, a quick search of the performance of leading ETF's in the respective sectors shows financial ETF's under water across the board in the last 1 and 3 months, versus tech ETF logging strong gains across the board. What gives? It may be something obvious but I don't see a good explanation just yet. Do you? Will tech be hit when: the consumer market shows its hand later this holiday season and, when companies, due to the credit tightening and economic uncertainty do not finance long term projects or make significant capital investments?

More to come.

A House of Anatagonists

2007-10-16T13:15:00.000-07:00

First the Dem's rankle Turkey, now the Pacaderms piss-off China. What are these people thinking? Is EVERYONE in politics inept at foreign policy?

I must admit that I agree with the resolution...in principle. The evidence of genocide is solid and we must have some backbone to stand up against such behavior (as our hero, Clinton, did in the Balkans). The US has a tradition of forcefully (and selectively) opposing genocide. This remains one of our few legitimate points of moral leverage. It is the TIMING that makes no sense here. Where is the tact? The discipline? What is the harm in waiting another year to declare an hundred year old event genocide?

This Should Be Interesting...

2007-10-15T07:16:00.001-07:00

If I can, I'd like to see this debate.

Horrible

2007-10-12T10:43:00.000-07:00

I thought that "Night of the Living Homeless", a South Park episode in which a "homelessness expert" shoots himself over and over again with graphic gore, was funny. Until I read about that Wisconsin sheriff's deputy who shot his ex, 5 others, and himself. He apparently had to shoot himself in the head three times to get his brain. It's horrible.

I Thought We Would Have Friends Again

2007-10-12T07:48:00.000-07:00

I'd be interested in your impressions of this article about Turkey withdrawing its ambassador after the Democrats passed a resolution accusing them of a century-old genocide. I thought that the Democrats could be counted on to repair our relations with the world, but they went way out of their way to accuse a large, peaceful, prosperous, reasonably democratic and reliable Muslim country of genocide? If their concern is genocide, why on earth aren't they doing more about Sudan?

It seems to be an attempt to punish Turkey for helping, however half-heartedly, in Bush's war effort. This is insane. How can you account for this ridiculous waste of time which can only hurt the country's interests and, above all, its already-shattered image?

That Chart

2007-10-09T12:25:00.000-07:00

Matt - that's a really impressive graph of the Nasdaq that you posted. That looks technically very strong. Maybe you should just buy the triple-Q? The simplest answer is often the best (and also tends to have lower costs and better returns...)

Where to Put My Money?

2007-10-09T11:21:00.001-07:00

This is a laundry list of pros/cons and analysis meant to help me make a decision on where/how to invest my money. It's a work in progress. As time permits, I will flush it out and update it. I encourage you to participate in a parallel analysis.

Pros: Interest rates, technology, global growth prospect

Interest rates have been sliced by 50 basis points in an aggressive move by the Fed to keep the economy strong. This, taken at face value, is a good thing for the investing climate. Over the long haul, though, I think this is a bad deal. The Fed, by cutting rates, has done several things: positioned itself as an corporate booster as opposed to an inflation fighter. This is opposite the position Greenspan took. He used words (irrational exuberance) to control hot markets and gentle innuendo (and measured cuts) to bolster bad ones (the Fed has its eye on growing weakness in the --- sector). I think the Fed buckled to private interests here and did not look out for the long-term. By dumping money into the system and bailing out investors who were irresponsible, and now, by stabilizing the investing environment with a rate cut in the face of growing inflation, the Fed as effectively subsidized bad investing decisions and therefore endangered our long-term economic future. In other words, this temporary salve treats the symptoms of the credit malady, not the source.

Technology is strong. Initially, it looked like investors making a flight to an area of the market where credit issues would not loom as large, now it seems a sustained run driven by restlessness elsewhere in the market, and genuine strength in the sector.

Global growth looks comfortable. I was interested to see that the US now accounts for roughly 40% of the world's market cap. This means, among other things, that some relief from domestic turmoil may be sought overseas - where quasi-independence from US markets is possible.

Cons: Inflation, housing, consumer debt, China, irresponsible federal monetary policy, time lag on the market

Several of these issues are addressed in the Interest rate discussion above. Suffice it to say that the credit/inflation/domestic growth/consumer debt beast is a tangle too complicated for one such as myself to unwind. I do believe though, that the ultimate conclusion of this mess is a bad winter. The catalyst for a market plunge could very well be poor holiday shopping returns. I think this is quite possible as consumer default rates work their way through the system and finally show up at the doorstep of companies (that are still rolling thanks to shortsighted Fed policy and last year's great profits). When the buck finally stops, it will be the consumers who find it on their desk. This is my great fear: inflation is real, debt is real, and the base that supports the corporate apparatus gets hit from both sides and, oh yeah, those interest rates are too low to stop it. We need interest rate stability. Greenspan (trough no fault of his own) cut rates for too long too consistently and now we've raised and lowered them too frequently.

China's rising core costs of food and energy should export itself along with all those toys to the US in the form of higher prices. How significant is this trend?

I have a whole take on the real estate market, which I happen to know something about, and plenty more to come. I would also like to do a comparison of some basic investment vehicles as compared to an index or two and adjust these for risk. This should give us an idea about how to invest my money.

In Memory of Sam Caldwell

2007-10-02T10:21:00.001-07:00

On this day in 1937, Samuel Caldwell became the first American imprisoned for selling marijuana. His customer was also imprisoned. The judge who sentenced them called marijuana "far worse than morphine or cocaine," which is an interesting take. Things basically went downhill from there.

Two Sentences Proving I'm Right

2007-09-29T05:54:00.000-07:00

This is a fairly unremarkable Daniel Gross column, stating the usual argument that non-core inflation is important and our mechanisms for measuring core inflation are inadequate. But it's really worth reading for the following two sentences justifying everything I've been saying about the Fed recently:

There are sound macroeconomic reasons to believe higher inflation may be a fact of economic life, according to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who discusses the topic in his new memoir, The Age of Turbulence. (Apparently, the editors killed the original title: The Dotcom Bubble Wasn't My Fault. Nor Was the Housing Bubble.)

Sweet. (By the way, I know Gross doesn't write his headlines but he should have stepped in to block this one. It asks, "Why Won't the Government Admit Inflation is Rising?" Gross doesn't answer that question, though the answer is simple and instructive: Social Security is indexed to consumer inflation.)

Iranian Irony

2007-09-28T09:17:00.000-07:00

Wow. That's a headline. Thanks for setting that up.

Iran has been in the news lately, hasn't it? This is largely thanks to Ahmadinejad's talent for controversy, though it's a cheap laugh at this point as Ahmadinejad is a study in self-parody. He does legitimately represent some concernable issues - nuclear proliferation and human rights chief among them. Serious issues aside, every time I hear/see this guy it is an uncomfortable reminder of the current, reprehensible state of politics. Let me stir your memory: this guy speaks at the U.N. (along with, admittedly, Hugo Chavez who said "Bush is The Devil." Now this happens to be one point I agree with him on, despite my lack of religious dedication. Clearly Ahmadinejad isn't alone in his playa hatin')!! Nonetheless, the U.N. was formerly an association where matters of serious character were discussed. Of course George Bush speaks there too, so it's hard to wax philosophical about the degeneration of a formerly respected body...

Even More Good News

2007-09-27T10:28:00.000-07:00

While I agree with Matt's excellent point in this post that the ideology of radical Islamism will resist modernity for a very long time, there is more good news from the How-Dumb-Are-They Department. Iran has formally issued a booklet at the U.N. accusing Canada of human-rights violations. When I saw the headline in the Winnipeg Free Press I thought it must have been a complaint about the handful of Canadian troops assisting us in various sensitive places like Afghanistan. But no, incredibly it's actually a little 70-page book ("in the name of God," no less!) claiming that there's concern in the international community about Canada's treatment of its own citizens. In Canada.

Really, Li'l Squinty? I mean it reads like an Onion headline! Who can't possibly laugh out loud at "Iran attacks Canada's human rights record" ???

From the schoolyard to Presidential politics to international relations, the weakest of all possible positions is to be an object of ridicule. This is very good news for those opposed to Iran's tyrranical regime.

For God's Sake...

2007-09-26T12:29:00.001-07:00

Not real estate yet. That's my first thought about what sort of "contrarian strategy" you ought to pursue. Besides, how exactly would you get into the real estate game? REITs? If you were to purchase actual real estate it would probably be in California, still the most distorted market in the country. But the other markets remain distorted as well.

There are also some hints that in the major metropolitan areas, housing prices may remain depressed due to a reduction in the number of illegals seeking housing. There are anecdotes about Mexicans leaving certain predominantly immigrant communities to return home. But that's mostly a sideshow, I suspect: housing prices are likely to remain depressed for awhile due to other factors too.

The Credit Plague Spreads?

2007-09-26T11:10:00.001-07:00

I'm still not sure what to think about this. I'm not alone, it seems, with bulls and bears both arguing their position well: Mild, yet delayed, recession? Downturn? Steady Growth? Credit crunch contained? This article in The Paper of Record does a nice job of summarizing the trends and events that may or may not be contributing to an "economic downturn."

As you know, I have a significant amount of cash sitting on the sidelines sucking up a not paltry 4.25% in a money market account. Do I get back in? If so, how? Contrarian strategy seems to be one play to make. I can't wait, for instance, to get into the housing market in a year or so. Will there be a "flight to quality" as fears of recession loom? Perhaps a utility run as people seek stability and consistent returns. Maybe, just maybe, this is a matter of waiting it out, as our true (and just) long-term inclination suggests. Your thoughts?

Modernity = Homogeneity?

2007-09-25T10:04:00.000-07:00

If modernity is the great white-washing of societies (think mass-media) then I agree that Islam's zealots would be hard pressed to continue their fundamentalist and violent rhetoric forever. As the world looses languages and cultural idiosyncrasies to McDonald and Murdochization, the power of niche agendas seems to diminish. We think alike, talk alike, behave alike and obey a larger shared ideology (human rights, free trade) to a greater degree now than ever. This should put downward pressure on fanaticism. This, however, is a long-term trend and one that will not readily eradicate UBL's in our lifetime.

Islam: Power of the People?

2007-09-25T07:17:00.001-07:00

Matt - you write that the technology that enables the violence of Islamism will also serve to empower people's movements and destabilize governments. Surely. But much of Islamism's threat derives from the great zeal of its adherents and the terroristic violence they inflict. Surely the oppressive theocratic principles that animate Islamism cannot survive an environment of free association and communication, even if many governments in the world cannot either?

Thoughts on Modernity and Islam

2007-09-24T21:48:00.000-07:00

I mean to directly engage your idea that "the very force which has made Islamism a threat will also limit, contain, and ultimately suppress it. That force is modernity." Your thesis is well taken - to be a threat you must have some position of power. The Middle East having been emasculated for the past century; its appurtenant religious affiliation therefore equally underwhelming in efficacy, are substantive symptoms of your claim. Technology has proven the mechanism whereby Islamacists have overcome this lengthy impotency. But will it prove a inhibitor of its own progeny's strength?
I believe modernity (if you assign more facets than mere technology to this noun) engenders further violence, not an eventual defeat of it. This is possible because of a fracturing of power between governments (as monolithic entities) and people. Technology is the weapon (power) of the people, militaries are the weapon (power) of government. Militaries, as we have seen in this latest and most grand display in Iraq, are ill-suited to fight the new-age battles. The Chechen revolt being another suitable example. As the distance between the power of people and government grows (as the result of increasingly sophisticated technologies) a natural attempt to reconcile this gap will result in...friction, conflict. It's as if two magnets, now having been energized, are found to be of equal strength and opposing poles. The power of the government formerly omnipresent, now the power of the people maturing to the point where the two forces stand in virtual opposition, bound by mutual desire for omnipotence yet unable to neutralize the opposing force. Locked in eternal struggle for hegemony!

Another Hopeful Sign

2007-09-24T16:13:00.001-07:00

Last week I wrote that UBL's use of Azzam the American to craft his speech was a sign of weakness. Today Li'l Squinty spoke at Columbia and said:

“In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.” With the audience laughing derisively, he continued: “In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have this.”

This highlights something that encourages me. I believe - and I bet someone has formalized this thesis, and I'd love to read about it - that the very force which has made Islamism a threat will also limit, contain, and ultimately suppress it. That force is modernity. Islamism works because committed, driven individuals can use technology to coordinate and destroy, and spread the resulting propaganda. It depends on cell phones, text messages, satellite TV, the Internet, and YouTube. But the Islamists will learn that these are communication channels that cannot be controlled. Once you have your population receiving global Qaeda propaganda over the Web, you'll also have them discovering that there are, in fact, homosexuals in Iran.

Another version of that thesis: there will inevitably come a reckoning amongst the forces of anti-Americanism: a time when they discover that in they have more in conflict than in common. One such area is social conservatism; I bet a lot of Columbia students were a little surprised to discover that the Che-like champion of the anti-American cause, whom they were so excited to see, makes Jerry Falwell look like Barney Frank.

Right Message, Wrong Messenger

2007-09-24T10:48:00.000-07:00

Lots of talk in the 'sphere about the new book John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." Their thesis is that pro-Israel lobbies such as AIPAC have harmed U.S. interests by forcing the government to take inappropriate positions towards Israel, the Arabs, and the Palestinians. It's clear to me that this thesis is both factually wrong and borderline anti-Semitic (the most obvious reason being that all ethnic groups - and, in fact, all groups of every kind, including commercial ones - lobby vigorously and effectively about every conceivable topic, and it's how America works; and yes I know Walt and Mearshimer acknowledge that, but it's a hand-wave rather than a real response).

There are lots of competent people - political scientists, pundits, lobbyists, foreign-relation experts - qualified and ready to make that distinction. The New York Times unfortunately picked Leslie Gelb instead, and his op-ed is astoundingly audacious. He makes lots of good points against Mearsheimer/Walt, but ruins it all when he hypothesizes that they must have written the book due to "their vitriol about the Iraq war — about being so right while others were so wrong". He says they "should feel very proud, indeed, for their foresight in opposing the Iraq war. Their writings were more on target than anyone’s, and they are justifiably mystified about how the United States could have been so stupid and self-destructive."

Really, Leslie? Didn't you criss-cross the country trying to sell that very war? Didn't you say (via an old Joe Klein Time article, h/t Atrios):

"I have never seen such unanimity on any foreign policy issue," says Leslie H.
Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who made a speaking tour of
mostly business audiences in the Midwest and on the West Coast in December.
"They want a smoking gun. It doesn't make a difference when I point out that we
have a smoking forest, that it's clear Saddam has these weapons and doesn't want
to disarm."

Mearsheimer/Walt need to be attacked, but not by someone who was active in pushing the war and now tries to associate with the anti-war crowd. (p.s. What's up with that quote? Who says "smoking forest" when they mean "a really big smoking gun?")

Hitchens Endorses Gore

2007-09-24T09:48:00.000-07:00

Christopher Hitchens, the quintessential and leading "leftist hawk" on Iraq, has vaguely endorsed Al Gore for President. Clearly this has no practical significance. Anyone who would have voted for Hillary or Barack in the primaries will not be persuaded to vote for Al instead as the result of an article by a figure deeply loathed by most of the left as a traitor.

However it might have significance for Hitchens fans such as myself. It might indicate a uniquely Hitchensesque attempt to reduce or qualify his support for the ongoing Iraq war. Had you told me last week that Hitchens would endorse (however weakly) a politician who had been against the war from the beginning, I would have thought you ignorant. Now I'm shocked. I think it's possible that in noting positively that Gore "was once a stern advocate of the removal of Saddam Hussein" [e.a.] Hitchens is gently and subtly positioning himself to be described the same way someday.

Venezuela Time Change

2007-09-21T13:29:00.000-07:00

News junkies know that out of the blue, Hugo Chavez declared that Venezuela would shift its clocks backwards 30 minutes this week. The announcement was made in a radio address. Most people don't care, but at Bloomberg it's relevant because we receive feeds of oil trading activity from Venezuela and there's been a lot of interest in how they're going to be timestamped.

Since we've been watching so carefully, we're probably the first to notice that it isn't going to happen according to schedule, without explanation. This may be very interesting. It may be a very oblique indication that Chavez has so completely lost his mind that his own government is interfering with him. Given that the man survived a coup only 5 years ago, that would be relevant. Or it could just be a sign that Venezuela is becoming an unpredictable rogue state like the PDRK.

Forbes 400: Wait, What?

2007-09-20T18:32:00.000-07:00

The combined wealth of the 400 richest Americans is $1.54 trillion.

The Apocalypse

2007-09-19T07:53:00.000-07:00

Famous signs:

This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria. --Bill Murray as Dr. Peter Venckman

The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. --Isaiah 11:6

A lioness in central Kenya has baffled wildlife experts by adopting a baby oryx, a kind of small antelope normally preyed upon by big cats. --BBC News

Check out the pic. Of course the story ends when a lion eats the little thing. But maybe that makes it even more a sign of the end of days.

What a Disappointment

2007-09-18T14:06:00.000-07:00

Bernanke panders to the Jim Cramer investors - you know, the ones who are passionate about laissez-faire capitalism until their bonuses are at stake, at which point they start screaming for welfare - by cutting the target rate a surprising half-point. Maybe he was locked into cutting by the CW, which held that he would - Bernanke believes in an open and predictable Fed so he might have felt he needed to cut since people expected him to. But instead of a quarter-point, which would have mostly been a nice gesture, he cut a half-point, which starts to raise questions about whether he cares more about his job or his cocktail-party friends. His job is to fight inflation, not to start panicking when the market has a measly 4% haircut. Another disgrace and disappointment from a RINO administration.

Mirror Neurons: Not Relevant Yet

2007-09-17T14:13:00.001-07:00

From Slate, an article by Alison Gopnik on how the term "mirror neuron," used to describe the activities of particular cells observed in Rhesus monkeys, is mostly bunk when applied to humans. Excellent and fascinating read, particularly because Scientific American has been taken in by the "mirror neuron myth" repeatedly. Also compare the Wikipedia page (particularly notice that it inappropriately conflates "mirror regions" with "mirror neurons"). Important moral: when Wikipedia is wrong, it is often wrong in ways that are simultaneously important and hard to detect.

A Detailed Explanation of How Sh*t Happens

2007-09-14T07:45:00.000-07:00

Barry Ritholtz over at The Big Picture posts an Onion-style humor article about crazy Wall Street debt instruments, and how they get sold. Check it out if you're interested in financial stuff - very funny. A teaser:

"He said to me, 'what's wrong with you, its quadruple A rated, just buy it, what
are you a pussy?' He also said it was going into 'an index', although he didn't
say which one, but I felt that I had to buy it. And that was good enough for me,
bro'."

UBL's Idea Man: Azzam the American

2007-09-10T04:51:00.000-07:00

This is what passes for an American, apparently, in the mind of al Qaeda:

The Telegraph reports that U.S. intelligence has singled out Adam Gadahn (the only American formally charged with treason in connection with the GWoT) as the speechwriter for UBL's latest video. That's why it reads like the script for a campus rally or an Edwards campaign appearance rather than an Islamist diatribe. This is, again, good news. If you need the douchie pictured above to come up with ideas for you, you are not a credible threat - period. There are many other credible Islamist threats, but the release of this hokey jokey video may mark the point where we may stop worrying about UBL himself.

Everyone Must Read This

2007-09-08T05:48:00.001-07:00

I agree word-for-word with every single thought in this article by Fred Kaplan. It is an extremely well-argued piece on the worst single failure of this president, the most galling single indictment of him - his total, baffling failure to enforce his own personal order regarding the disbanding of the Iraqi army. This was a particularly awful failure because it did not involve any difficult decision, any complicated issue, any substantive facts: having already made a crucial presidential decision, when it was publicly reversed he took no action. This is objectively incompetent.

New UBL Video: What Year Is It?

2007-09-07T13:59:00.000-07:00

Osama, as has been widely reported, has a new video. Over at Hot Air, Allahpundit has a transcript. A particularly relevant line:

This is why I tell you: as you liberated yourselves before from the slavery of monks, kings, and feudalism, you should liberate yourselves from the deception, shackles, and attrition of the capitalist system.

OK, what year is it again and what enemy are we facing here? Is UBL honestly appealing to, um, Socialism and Enlightenment?? This is actually encouraging news. First, socialism lost. Repeatedly. Nothing could make me happier than Osama hitching himself to that wagon. The spectacle of an Islamist reminding the West that it threw off the chains of theocracy is also encouraging. Both of these appeals reflect a shocking and heartening stupidity on the part of Osama: he claims to be on the side of Socialism, which lost; and he claims to be on the side of "freedom from monks," which was indeed the winning side; but he isn't on that side, but on the side of the mullahs. It's nice to be reminded by the architect of the Islamist war that civilized nations have a habit of shaking off the dominance of monks and mullahs.

With all the griping we do about the stupidity and apparent insanity (that is, detachment from reality) of our own leaders, it's nice to get a hint sometimes that maybe the other side's leaders are even more afflicted. (See also this Slate piece about laughably bad modern Russian propaganda).

A Little Counterintuitive to Me

2007-09-07T10:26:00.001-07:00

Via Citigroup's Tobias Levkovich, citing the BLS's Consumer Expenditure Survey, h/t Daniel Gross at Slate: the top 20% of Americans by income exhibit greater consumer spending per year, on average, than those in the bottom three quintiles (the bottom 60%) combined. I know we've heard about the increasingly top-heavy distribution of income repeatedly (there's an interesting interactive graph that both illustrates and moderates this phenomenon). But I hadn't realized to what extent that translated into consumer expenditures. I think that the enormity of Walmart, through which 9% of all such money flows, made me believe that most consumer spending was driven by Americans with "ordinary" incomes.

Anyway, this statistic was very interesting to me, but I don't want to comment right now on its significance one way or another.

Pretty Surprising

2007-09-06T07:36:00.000-07:00

I wrote earlier in the week that gerrymandering (e.g., in California) is a huge problem and we'll need federal action to fix it. Well, I'm still quite sure that's right, but it looks like Ahnold has finally (somehow, impossibly) pulled together a coalition of politicians willing to shoot themselves in the foot in the name of principle! This is a good development. Looks like Pelosi, who has been a phenomenal disappointment (FISA expansion? Farm Bill? Great steaming heaps of time wasted on "sense of Congress" resolutions?) will, unsuprisingly, try to get in the way.

Larry Craig

2007-09-05T09:22:00.000-07:00

I have to count myself among those who are saying, in the wake of the Larry Craig scandal, "how is that a crime??" First, let me clear some fluff out of the way: Craig needs to get the hell out of office for multiple independent reasons. Chiefly, in my mind, though it hasn't gotten a lot of play in the 'sphere, is the reason the gov't used to give for monitoring its agents and officers: risk of blackmail. (This was back when there were a few shreds of competence scattered around the federal government). All it takes is one 'anonymous' partner to notice that the head frantically bobbing around his crotch is a U.S. Senator and you've got a powerful legislator literally by the balls. Other reasons include reliability: the man pled guilty and then pretended he was railroaded into it; (really? a Senator doesn't understand a citizen's rights?) and it turns out that he deliberately set himself up to back out of resigning, too! He's also a raging hypocrite etc.

But if he wasn't Larry Craig, but, say, Harry Craigson, local barber, could freedom-minded people really be comfortable with this arrest? Read the report! I don't really want to dig into the details, though I certainly will if anyone doesn't follow my reasoning. But basically Craig put out a few mild feelers to see if the officer was interested in a random encounter (in a bathroom known for such things); the officer responded with appropriate signals; and then as an only-marginally-bolder move, Craig moved his fingertips back and forth under the stall. Arrest! Misdemeanor disorderly conduct! I am not comfortable with that. Far too statist and totalitarian. There was absolutely nothing wrong with what Craig was doing per se, anymore than making eyes and suggestive poses in a bar to proposition someone is disorderly. (Note that such advances are often unwelcome, but we don't arrest people for making them unless they don't back off after being told.) Are we really such a nanny state now that we can't even expect adults to tell very mildly assertive perverts to back off??!

As a very interesting historical comparison, consider how the Navy sought out secret bottoms in its ranks around the 1920s. This is fascinating (via Aaron Belkin at WaPo, h/t Ramesh Ponnuru at the Corner):

In 1919 the Navy hired "decoys" to frequent the lobby of the YMCA in Newport, R.I. Orchestrated by officers at the local Naval Training Station, the cleanup campaign sought to eliminate gay men from the ranks. Following an introduction, decoys would accompany their suspects to a hotel room and then have sex. At least three dozen sailors and civilians were arrested, and many ended up in jail. According to conventions of the day, if men confined themselves to masculine behaviors and sex roles, they could engage in sex with other men without inviting accusations of being gay. Because perversion was seen primarily as a function of effeminate mannerisms and passive sexual tastes, government decoys could have sex with gay men with impunity as long as they assumed the active position during those encounters. Or so the Navy assumed.
When the 1919 sting operation ensnared a local minister, the Episcopal Church fought back, and what had been a local operation became a national scandal that almost ended the burgeoning political career of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was then assistant secretary of the Navy.

There were a couple reasons I wanted to post that: one, I think it's just fascinating; and two, I think it's another reminder that to convict someone of a sexual offense we usually require going pretty damn far down the road towards sex. Also compare how prostitute stings work - you need to negotiate and agree to a price for a specific sexual service before a crime is comitted.

We Need an Amendment

2007-09-04T09:19:00.000-07:00

Nick Gillespie (editor-in-chief of Reason, a libertarian-to-left 'zine) has written a review of Matt Bai's new book "The Argument". Bai covers national politics for The New York Times Magazine. Reader(s) of this blog who trust me can take my word for it that these two are leftist thinkers of the highest regard and pedigree; but the snippets of their resumes I described above should seal the deal for those who don't.

Everyone knows that there's a groundswell in the Democratic party, a "netroots"-organized (though not equivalently "-funded") push to move the party back to its progressive roots. Gillespie assumes this as CW, though Bai does go through the trouble of exhaustively documenting the phenomenon. This is universally seen as a good thing, democratic in the positive small-'d' sense of the word. But Churchill was right and so Bai probes, with extensive reporting, the issue of whether the Democrats should become more "progressive." Bai notes that the intellectual heavy-lifting that formed the foundation of the original Progressive movement is nowhere in evidence today. Instead, the 'roots appear to believe that a political philosophy arising from the Industrial Revolution and refined during Vietnam and the Cold War can guide us well today. Bai points out that it can't, and that instead of crafting a true new philosophy for the modern Left, the 'roots have decided that no ideas since the Great Society were worth having and the only issue is which tactics and strategies should be used to elect politicians who put a 'D' after their name.

The result? Well. Gillespie highlights the farm bill passed by the current Congress. It has absolutely no intellectual justification at all. Democrats used to pass such stuff under standard Progressive justifications of supporting the common man, the farmer, the man of the soil, laboring the earth to feed and strengthen America. Then the Republicans came to power and passed the same bills, unabashedly to consolidate their political power in farm states and buy votes. Now the Democrats are back in power, and we know that:

Farmers are prospering due to high crop prices
Very few American workers are farmers, and practically none are working "family farms"
Farming is environmentally harmful; and though alternatives are on the horizon, farm subsidies suppress those alternatives
Farm subsidies are regressive, transferring wealth to the very rich

So the Democrats pass a bigger farm bill. What to make of this? Gillespie and Bai conclude (based, worry not, on lots of other evidence too) that the Democratic Party has about as much intellectual coherence as...well, as the Republican Party.

Bai has lots of juicy anecdotes, which serve to reinforce the growing belief among voters that the 'roots have an unpleasant flavor of elitism to them. (This is extremely dangerous for the Democrats, not because the elite rich are bad - I happen to think they've got a lot of good things to say - but because the Democrats open themselves to easy, demoralizing charges of hypocrisy because much of their agenda is based on the presumption that the rich are out to harm you. Republicans have always been the party of the rich, but what happens to this country when large numbers of voters realize the Democrats are too?) For example, Bai reports from a Hollywood party where "the host, the billionaire Lynda Resnick, declared from the top of her Sunset Boulevard mansion’s spiral staircase, 'We are so tired of being disenfranchised!'"

The conclusion? Actually there is a very practical conclusion. This country is very clearly in need of a powerful third party to f*k things up - not by winning outright, of course, as that's impossible, but by getting enough seats in Congress that no majority caucus exists to pass an organizing resolution and we get some quasi-parlimentary politics operating. The fact that that is also impossible given current laws should scare the s*t out of everyone. So the practical conclusion is: we must liberalize our election laws. Currently there are two major obstacles to fixing this country: and they are NOT "Democrats and Republicans," as we must not blame our problems on the inevitable presence in the political system of corruption and rent-seeking. The real obstacles are those which prevent the people from fixing things themselves; and those two obstacles are gerrymandering and ballot access laws.

Gerrymandering and ballot access laws; there is a patchwork of state laws regulating these things that has gotten to the point where we need federal constitutional action. I think a very apt analogy is the Articles of Confederation which governed the area of the 13 colonies from independence in 1783 until the new Constitution was ratified in 1790. The Confederation government could not collect revenue directly. The states were expected to collect taxes and make contributions, which sounds ridiculous but really isn't; the U.N. operates that way, for example, and seems to limp along all right. And in fact they did provide a decent amount of revenue; it was just realized that the system was unworkable and could not possibly expand to govern the growing country. We're at the same point now with regard to election law. Each of the 50 states has ceded to each of the other states the power to govern how the national representatives with power over all of us are selected. In California and Texas, for example, which send enough delegates to Congress literally to decide the course of the nation, gerrymandering and ballot signature requirements mean that it is a legal and statistical impossibility for a new party to field a candidate. My point is that this affects us all very profoundly - if California wants to rig its own legislature (as it has), let it do so, but why on earth does a tiny handful of classic smoke-filled-room politicians sitting in Sacremento get to govern this nation?

Elections for federal office should be under federal control - soup to nuts!! That means above all the lines of Congressional districts; but it also means ballot access requirements for federal office; the selection, purchase, and operation of voting machines; voter ID requirements; etc. This will require a Constitutional amendment, but I think that aside from the Bill of Rights that was basically a part of the original Constitution, no amendment other than the 14th[1] was ever so urgently needed. How would this work, exactly? I envision that the Bureau of the Census would be given authority, overseen by an independent nonpartisan panel (such things actually exist - look at the widespread respect for the Federal Reserve and the GAO), to draw the district lines (this detail wouldn't be in the amendment, which would just give the power to Congress, but there would probably quickly be a permanent law establishing the real mechanism). Envision a world without gerrymandering! This would be real, legitimate, nonpartisan, democratic reform.

[1](extra-credit assignment: wrap your head around the fact that right up into the modern era there have been serious states-rights arguments against the very passage of the 14th amendment, blissfully pretending that the little armed insurgency down Dixie way somehow had no effect on any the rights of the states busily engaged in slaughtering the duly commisioned Army of the United States)

After a long absence...

2007-09-04T09:16:00.000-07:00

I hope the reader(s) of this blog will forgive me my long absence. In the last few months I have changed:

My city and state of residence
My job
My marital status

These items have distracted me greatly, but throughout I've felt guilty about not posting to this blog. It's not like history stopped happening - although it certainly did slow down, as it always does in mid-to-late summer. I hope to keep a closer eye on it going forward.

Kirk Cameron - Evangelical

2007-05-11T13:50:00.000-07:00

Here's a hilarious excerpt from a Slate piece that discusses the awesome tragedy that is evangelical christianity - through the lens of Kirk Cameron!

"In Cameron's introductory remarks at the debate—which can be seen at something like its full and numbing length at abcnews.go.com—he coolly claimed that "the existence of God can be proven 100 percent, absolutely without the use of faith." First, I grew excited at this promise, then began to wonder why no theologian, philosopher, or sitcom star in recorded history had done it before—Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, Tina Yothers, whoever—and realized I was in for a letdown. Comfort's cadences were not even those of a preacher but of an infomercial host, and the God Squad had but three arguments on behalf of the big guy: All things have makers; the human conscience is evidence of a higher moral power; if you read the Gospel, then Christ will be revealed to you. For reasons too stupid to type, this was not an airtight case, and the atheists made quick work of it in tones of juvenile sarcasm."

Skating Vid

2007-04-22T23:27:00.000-07:00

Neither him nor I will soon recover from that fall!

It's YouTube's Fault

2007-04-20T14:46:00.000-07:00

Over at The Corner, Peter Suderman makes a good point: the VT shootings appear to be at least in part a product of the era of Internet self-glorification; in short, the age of YouTube. Perhaps they are a reaction to the fact we've gotten 90% of the way to Andy Warhol's prediction but not entirely: everyone can have his 15 minutes of fame but he needs to do something radical to achieve it. That may involve skating off a roof or killing a bunch of people. Same idea...

The Laws Didn't Help Here

2007-04-18T18:20:00.000-07:00

Matt -

I'm actually very surprised that you're taking a position in alignment with the gun control advocates. I think you're being logically inconsistent. With respect to drug control laws, you recognize that it's impossible to affect in even the slightest degree the availability of drugs via criminal enforcement; and so the right thing to do is to accept that reality and work towards prevention, treatment, etc.

You need to break out of the leftist box for a second and realize that gun control laws are the same. You are not ever going to affect the availability of guns. People sometimes ludicrously point to Britain as an example; Britain is a little bitty island. What's the evidence? Well, it's illegal, for example, for a felon to possess a gun; and yet felons seem to get guns in great numbers.

Here's much more direct evidence: it's illegal for students to have guns at VT. And yet... well obviously. So given that you can't affect the availability of guns, what do you do? You make the legal ones available and tightly regulated (again, as we should be doing with guns).

And Matt, it's certainly a fact that if students who were so inclined were carrying for self-defense, this wouldn't have happened. The lunatic truly was able to dispatching 32 people with little bitty handguns because the sheep he was slaughtering didn't have even the most basic ability to fight back.

Rutgers Hos, British Pansies, and God

2007-04-15T12:57:00.000-07:00

Matt -

You say, wisely, with regard to the Rutgers "women's" basketball team:

I'm always amazed at how somebody you don't know, who is in many regards reckless and salacious on purpose, could hurt your feelings? How fucking sensitive must you be? How week is your self esteem?

Indeed. Allow me to tie that into the despicable, pathetic behavior of the captured British "sailors." Why do I put "women" and "sailors" in sarcasm-quotes? Because as you point out, only a little child cares so much about what someone - who, by the way, she's never met who's paid to be offensive - says about her that she goes on national television to talk about how hurt she's feeling. And likewise, what the fuck has happened to the pride of the British Navy? The legendary British Navy that projected British power and hegemony around the world? One of the sailors revealed that he was terrified because a guard flicked his neck with his thumb. So the whole stinking crew got so scared that they sucked dick for the mullahs on world television and disgraced themselves. WTF are they teaching these people? WTF happened to discipline?

John McCain was imprisioned in a Vietnamese prison camp for over 5 years and tortured. Not once in those long years of suffering did he defame his country 1/10th as much as these British sailors. And to tie it back to the disgraceful Rutgers team - have some goddamn backbone and act like an adult! The entire world does not, in fact, revolve around your feelings nor anyone else's.

Which, in fact, leads me to another point. 90% of Americans believe in God. Why? Well obviously everyone comes to that decision in their own way, and many don't come to it at all, really, instead just carrying on as they've been taught; but often when I ask people why, they say they're afraid of there being nothing after death. I've always found this a bizarre reason to believe in anything, but maybe the Rutgers/British Navy displays have a common connection with this belief. If you think that your feelings are all-important, then your desperate desire for an afterlife may, in your mind, somehow prove the very existence of that afterlife. A generation taught to believe that they deserve everything their hearts desire may extend that thinking even unto the Infinite.

All About the Definition

2007-04-15T12:27:00.000-07:00

I absolutely agree with Slate's analysis, Matt. Here's another good one, although written in an unpleasantly partisan tone. (As a wise man said once, just because a Republican believes something doesn't mean it isn't true).

Reasonable people can disagree on how healthy the economy is right now, but as soon as you hear someone saying that some economic statistic is worse that it's been since the Great Depression, you've gotta assume something is terribly wrong - not with the economy, but with this guy's "statistic." In this case, we're using an early-20th-century definition of "savings" and assuming it means the same thing it did a hundred years ago.

It doesn't, of course. There's many reasons why it doesn't, but a useful one on which to focus is the issue of 401(k) accounts. There's over 3 trillion dollars invested in such accounts and they don't count as savings. Huh?

Moreover, I also agree with the other conclusion of the Slate article, which is that "savings" as defined in the saving rate is for dumbasses or very old people or a combination. Why on earth would you put your long-term money in a bank? The rates are ridiculous and the tax implications are grim. There has famously been no 30-year period ever when stocks did not outperform other asset classes. And these days it's easier than ever. There's these fantastic retirement mutual funds that have a target date and automatically adjust themselves into less-risky classes as the date arrives; there's index ETFs which give excellent diversification and very low costs; and of course there's employer matching which means that if you're preferentially "saving" instead of 401(k)-ing, you're giving away free money.

Is Negative Savings a Positive Decision?

2007-04-13T21:45:00.000-07:00

What do you make of Slate's analysis?

Imus - Man, Martyr, Idiot

2007-04-13T17:55:00.000-07:00

So Don Imus is sacked. I have to admit I listened to him but little and cared less. Why, then, do I bother to write?

Just the other week Newt Gingrich lampooned Hispanics as speaking "the language of the Ghetto" - a comment that is profoundly worse than calling the Rutgers NCAA Women's Basketball team "nappy headed ho's."

Imus insulted a dozen black women. Gingrich insulted a whole race. Imus is, by definition (shock jock), supposed to offend. Gingrich is supposed to govern with wisdom and empathy. Imus is a disc jockey. Gingrich is one of the most powerful Republicans on the planet, a potential Presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House. Imus was sacked because he represents corporations of modest intelligence and integrity. Gingrich, as a Republican, is held to no standard and is expected to have no integrity. He did, after all, try to impeach Clinton for lying about his BJ, in the meantime he was cheating on his own wife.

I'm always amazed at how somebody you don't know, who is in many regards reckless and salacious on purpose, could hurt your feelings? How fucking sensitive must you be? How week is your self esteem? Why even dignify him with a face-sucking meeting at the Governor's House? What do you care?

I don't even want to go into the obvious racial overtones here. Blacks can rail against Whites in the most offensive language possible but when Whites say "you people"...watch out!

Can't Control for Systemic Failure

2007-04-12T13:58:00.000-07:00

You can control for a systemic error - i.e., if you know that "while cell-only voters were more supportive of John Kerry than voters overall," you can do the math to adjust a landline poll correctly.

But I certainly don't have your confidence about correcting for systemic failure. The landline poll is the pollster's principal means - other than exit polling, see below - of getting data. But a failure of landline polling - which I don't think has happened yet but will very soon - means that the pollsters won' t have the necessary numbers about relative biases among the cell-phone crowd to correct their data. Not only that, but as I said earlier it's not just about cell-phone only users. It's about people like me who routinely hang up on all pollsters, too.

And exit polling is very troubled in other ways. The reason is that people walk out of a polling booth in very different moods. Working voters are impatient, frustrated at the old volunteers who assisted them, and need to get back to work. It's the old, or college students, who'll have the time to approach the exit pollsters. And moreover they'll approach CERTAIN exit pollsters - it's been shown that college men will approach attractive young female exit pollsters in predicatably huge numbers while they'll blow past the earnest middle-aged collectors from a different agency. Those two pollsters will generally be asking different questions etc etc etc.

Bottom line being that polling has become a huge part of our governing process, and maybe it shouldn't be. It doesn't need to be at all; we have highly accurate polls every two years and we have mechanisms for people to lobby and contact their representatives. Why not ban public polling? I mean seriously? 1st-amendment concerns? HA! If people cared about the first amendment they'd have never allowed the monstrous McCain-Feingold law to be passed.

Polling

2007-04-12T08:42:00.000-07:00

Your concerns are well-founded. Major demographic shifts are accompanied by underlying psychographic nuance, unfortunately the implications of these nuances as they pertain to polling are vague. It does seem that certain types of political polling skew Democrat, perhaps because Democrats are capable of articulating a position and are therefore eager to do so, IMHO. But seriously, there does seem to be considerable literature available at libraries on these matters. and it is a matter of considerable debate after the massive exit polling lapses appurtenant to the 2004 election scandal.

I do think you should be careful about rationalizing the behavior of the general public on your own behalf - for instance while 20% of our demographic uses cell phones as a primary point of contact (like you ad I), the pollsters are very capable of controlling for it: "While cell-only voters were more supportive ofJohn Kerry than voters overall, they were similar to other voterswithin their own age cohort. Because of this, preelection telephonesurveys that weighted their data appropriately by age were notsignificantly biased by the absence of the cell-only voters."

Then again, this doesn't help account for the massive polling lapse of '04, does it? Maybe there result is that our confidence intervals keep narrowing and the margin of error keeps climbing?

Bleg: Polls Statistically Justifiable?

2007-04-12T08:25:00.000-07:00

I have a bleg for a good article on whether cell phones and aggressive telemarketing and the culture of generation X+ (X, Y, etc) together will make polls statistically useless.

Here's my premise. Whenever I get a call on my house phone, and I hear the words "I'm calling from National Research Associates" or whatever, I hang up. I know I can't make them stop calling since it's not a sales pitch, so there's no point in even complaining. I just hang up.

Behind the scenes, that removes me from the poll's sample. If that pollster called 100 people that day, and 50 of them hung up on him, and 30 of them told him that they like Obama, for example, then for the purposes of their calculations 60% of people like Obama. The problem is that if people who like Obama are less likely to hang up then you can't conclude that at all!

So here's the factors involved. Many people my age don't even have land lines. Others, like me, have them for 911 and making local / 1-800 calls, and generally don't ever receive legitimate calls on them. Even among people who have and use land lines, they're inured to sales calls and push polls. And even if they aren't specifically upset at telemarketing, it's so NOT Gen-X to tell a phone pollster how you're feeling.

This article has a little bit on the cell-phone angle but I think it goes deeper than that. Given that politicians generally, and your beloved Dems especially, follow polls like they were God's received Word, won't this distort the governing of our country? Possibly catastrophically? Crappy decrepit old people already run politics; what happens when not only are they disproportionately voting and contributing, but also disproportionately just answering a landline phone???

This is an official formal bleg for a good article about that.

Do Not Click This Button

2007-04-10T08:12:00.001-07:00

Don't follow this link

Bush's Baselessness

2007-04-10T06:43:00.000-07:00

Matt -

You missed the point of what I was saying about a "baseless drive to war." My impression was that you and Rony were arguing that's what was going to happen again, as it did in Iraq; and I was arguing it wasn't. So you're right - if there's an actual provocation, and war happens, then clearly that's not in the realm of what I was advocating.

Am I arguing that there will be no war absent an Iranian provocation before 2009? Yes.

Do Sex Offenders Have A Place In Church?

2007-04-09T23:04:00.000-07:00

Funny. Statistically speaking, the clergy is more likely to be sex offenders than the general public...Perhaps this debate is misdirected?

Our Wager on War With Iran - Part II

2007-04-09T22:07:00.000-07:00

Elaborately argued. Your points detailing war scenarios are well laid out but a bit obvious, as you admit in your "positions" section. Your principal contention that "Bush [is] going to perform another no-holds-barred predetermined baseless drive to war: fabricating and distorting evidence, pounding doubters into submission, manipulating Powell (even easier now that it's Rice), etc." is, I think, an exaggeration of the issue. You might agree with this since you go on to say that the drivers of war are clear, NOT "baseless fabrications." How can war conditions be clear yet the case for war be comprised of hearsay? I would argue that the numerous Iranian diplomatic forays into Iraq supporting Sadr and his militia make for a very easy war argument in and of themselves, especially compared to the Iraq abomination.

On the other hand, I find your argument for Iranian containment to that if the USSR during the Cold War extremely compelling. We must play the passive and thoughtful protagonist to the compulsive antagonist of the Iranian administration. Perhaps that does lead us to a prolonged stand-off. I would argue that a principal difference is that the international community (for what it's worth) did not exist to thwart the Soviet Union as it does Iran today. We couldn't say "stop enriching/stop installing nuclear infrastructure etc.)"

I think the administration has learned a thing or two since its most recent debacles in the Middle East. It will proceed cautiously and, as much as Cheney is doubling over with the desire to blow the hell out of the Iranians, it is the tremendous reality of world affairs that will keep him drooling like a Mastiff instead.

So:

The timing is within the end of this administration.
The protagonist is us or anyone of our allies
The prize is a hefty dinner

You have until February 1st 2009...

By the way, stop sourcing bizarre Israeli sympathizing publications for evidence. Forgiven this time as your last name is Schumann."

Letter vs. Spirit of Our Bet

2007-04-09T11:56:00.000-07:00

My memory on the wager regarding war with Iran is hazy. Key details that have evaded me are:

Timing
Identity of technical aggressor (but see below)
Stakes ;-)

But I do remember that the spirit of the thing was that Rony was claiming, "Bush is going after Iran next," i.e., Iran's gonna get the Iraq treatment. The notion that we're going to play Chamberlain (or, how many times worse, Turney) to Ahmedinijad and be passive in the face of any insult is obviously ludicrous. My impression was that we were debating whether Bush was going to perform another no-holds-barred predetermined baseless drive to war: fabricating and distorting evidence, pounding doubters into submission, manipulating Powell (even easier now that it's Rice), etc.

So let's be more precise about my position. What will happen if Iran seizes any American personnel as it seized the British sailors? War. What will happen if any Iranian missile, conventional or otherwise, explodes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or the Gulf? War. What will happen if a dispute along the Iran/Iraq border gets hot? War.

That's obvious and always has been; so let's explore the more interesting scenarios. What will happen if Iran becomes an officially declared nuclear weapons power? Hmm. Note that it's already an officially declared nuclear power; and yet the drums of war beat not. The fact is that I think that this administration, and this country, have had realpolitik beaten into them with a blunt instrument in the Centcom theater. For decades on end, we tolerated an "evil empire" in Russia with a huge nuclear stockpile, and fought them by containment. For the entirety of this decade, we have done the same with a far more evil empire in North Korea, despite the relative puniness of their capability. The Chinese have a handful of devices, too.

So let's outline two possible outcomes if Iran gets a nuke or is really truly on the verge.

We get a strong, explicit authorization of force from the Security Council along with at least a fig-leaf's-worth of military allies. Probability? Non-zero but certainly very low. I think that Bush certainly, and the next President almost certainly, will take the opportunity to wipe Lil' Squinty off the map.
We don't. We get some wussy little resolution, again (remember how the Council couldn't even "condemn" the seizure of the British sailors??). What will happen? I'll wager a top-shelf drink - no, that's boring, a top-shelf bottle - that we'll go into containment mode and there will be no hot shooting war.

Our Wager on War With Iran

2007-04-09T09:53:00.001-07:00

Had that idiot Bush not gone into Iraq we might be able to deal with Iran who actually IS dangerous and growing more so. Coming on the heels of that insulting British catastrophe, it looks more dangerou than ever!

That said, I would like to reiterate Rony and I's position that we will blow the hell out of these guys, even if it falls to another administration to do it. A nuclear Iran is incomprehensible on so may levels. I will continue to track the progress on this front for my eventual vindication, at which point you will owe me dinner and wine at a location of my choosing.

Pot & Potted Pot - The Electricty Leakage Must Have Been Terrrible!

2007-04-09T08:46:00.000-07:00

Well, Dave, we've certainly been busy!

I found the British study to be underwhelming too. Consider this from a 1968 report from the Advisory Committee on Drug Dependence: "we think that the dangers of its [marijuana's] use as commonly accepted in the past and the risk of progression to opiates have been overstated, and that the existing criminal sanctions intended to curb its use are unjustifiably severe." I'm sure with little effort I could turn up equally old and salient assessments for other scourges on the Lancet list. Thank god for the Dutch!

I'm afraid I stand in opposition to you on Sydney's decision to "go dark." I feel that no matter how "overstated" the goal is the cause justifies any amount of alarmism. Elecricity leakage is a serious issue simply because, in the aggregate it amounts to considerable. A huge amount of waste? No, not relatively speaking, but:

"The average U.S. home has about 50 watts of standby. This corresponds to 5% of the home's total electric bill.
There are over 100 million homes in the U.S., so standby consumes roughly 5GW. After accounting for transmission and distribution losses and generation reserves, standby is responsible for about 8 GW. This corresponds to the output of 8 large power plants. The true consumption is probably closer to twice this number because the commercial and industrial sectors also have equal amounts of equipment with standby."

Besides, the US is far more guilty than Sydney when it comes to to governments imposing energy saving measures - just think of the new Daylight savings legislation, one of who's main justifications is the conservation of energy...

On a final note, the story of the Encinitas guy is AWESOME! The thing that strikes me is how industrious he must be to build such a complex. Obviously he could not have had too much help because of the illicit (non-permitted) nature of his project (no construction company installed that elevator. Why didn't he use stairs?) and, as a result, must have profound technical and carpentry skills to pull off such a massive project. This guy should be working for a construction company, not rotting in jail. Then again, if he wanted to work for a construction company he probably wouldn't have decided to erect a house with a hidden elevator to harvest pot in massive underground chambers. Cool! By the way, did you catch the fact that Andrews and his accomplices pleaded not guilty!

Incredible Underground Grow Tunnel

2007-04-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

A San Diego (sort-of) area man builds a vast underground weed-growing facility under his log cabin. The money graf:

Authorities said the 34-year-old Encinitas man purchased 39 acres in Santa Ysabel, near Julian, and built a two-story luxury log cabin and detached garage without permits. According to court records, he built an elevator, concealed in a walk-in closet in the garage, which descends about 10 feet below ground and connects to a tunnel that is 65 feet long and 4 feet wide.
The tunnel leads to two rooms measuring 20-by-20 feet, with 8-and 12-foot ceilings. Both rooms were outfitted with irrigation, lighting, electrical and ventilation systems and steel I-beams to reinforce the roof.

No One Stands Up Against Stupidity

2007-03-31T15:54:00.000-07:00

Sydney "goes dark" to draw attention to global warming. Read the story - the whole idiotic thing. If you don't feel the rage rising in you, clustering in a little knot of fury between your sholders, then you need a serious, urgent cynicism booster. (For a good one, check out Audiobuffer channeling Gordon Gekko).

First, a quick review of how ludicrous this is. The goal is to promote a campaign to have people turn out lights, computer monitors, etc. when not in use. The Sydney gov't claims it "could" cut Sydney's electricity use by 5% annually. Anyone familiar with gov't studies knows that number is probably greatly inflated. Besides, do people really respond to government ad campaigns? How much have we spent on the anti-weed ads?

Suppose it does cut Sydney's electricity use by that amount. Will it matter? Of course not - carbon is a global concern and China looks like it increases its usage by that amount every few minutes.

But there's a more fundamental problem. Opposition to global warming centers on stupid little tricks like this that cut down energy use - the idea being that the way to address global warming is to oppose energy use. That's a position guaranteed to fail. In most of the world, increased energy use is directly correlated to increased happiness. People getting TVs who didn't have them; people getting air conditioners who didn't have them; people farming with tractors instead of mules. Etc etc. That's where carbon's coming from, going forward; and how on earth do people think they're going to get in the way of the increasing spread of basic modern comforts?

The way we're going to solve global warming isn't by positioning ourselves against the things that make people happy. It's by doing what we've done best for the last millenium - inventing our way out of the problem. Geoengineering, baby. Check it out.

Shocked, Shocked

2007-03-24T02:54:00.000-07:00

Is this really such a surprise?

I Stand Corrected

2007-03-23T18:20:00.000-07:00

You've certainly proven your point about T.V. in general being more pornographic, almost across-the-board, than it was in the past, Matt. Re-reading my post, and yours, I can't imagine what I was thinking. Maybe it was a perverse version of "remember the good old days."

I especially like the Monica quote. You could have pulled up the bit about the cigar, though. Even pornier.

The big news item today is Congress' Iraq supplemental bill that sets a date certain, though it should be the rush to toss Gonzales overboard. Despite all of his very many flaws, Bush is right when he calls the House's measure a bit of political theatre. Everyone involved knows that no similar bill will pass the Senate; and even in that extremely unlikely event it would be vetoed. Faced with the prospect of having the Army run out of money for operations, or passing the bill Bush asked for in the first place, the Democrats, neurotic about being Swift-Boated again, will cave and provide the money.

On the other hand, Gonzales is legitimately interesting news for two reasons. One, it shows that an endorsement by Bush means nothing at all. The Republicans at every level of the party have abandoned him despite a relatively strong show of support from Bush. Two, it illustrates the overall management sloppiness of this administration, which I think is, in the end, even more harmful to the country than their actual ideology. Bush has infected the career bureaucrats with whom he came to Washington with his own incompetence and passivity. As a result, even routine political punishment morphs into a legitimate scandal. It's unreal. We've been watching the federal government slowly fall apart since, if you want to put a specific date on it, Jay Garner showed up in Iraq and the infighting between Defense and State got brutal. By the time Katrina made it obvious to the average American, the disfunction of the administration was already horrifyingly clear in Washington.

To bring it back to my first post - that's why people will gravitate away from Senators in the upcoming presidential election. They're desperate not for someone to give good speeches but for someone to run the government. I've heard comparisons to Dukakis' failed campaign on that issue; but Dukakis was running after 8 years of government that was, compared to this administration, blissfully well-run. I think the Democrats need to field one of their many excellent Governors if they want to have a chance.

Restrained T.V.?

2007-03-22T08:43:00.000-07:00

The statement that T.V. is less pornographic depends on which channel you're watching. Clearly you're not talking about Jerry Springer, The Howard Stern Show, Southpark. Oh, what about that Monica Lewinsky episode, covered in oh so creepy detail by the likes of CNN:

"According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President kissed. She unbuttoned her jacket; either she unhooked her bra or he lifted her bra up; and he touched her breasts with his hands and mouth...He stimulated me manually in the genital area."
-Kenn Starr Report, 1995

It's all in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?

Clearly these images, and some in the above listed shows are at least as "pornographic" as a Playboy centerfold, or what you get in your hotel room for $9.99. The dividing line is that many of the shows will present their pornographic moments outside a larger context of sex - a breast here, a matter of factly uttered "vagina" there. Or, even more cleverly, networks leave it up to the imagination by merely providing a scenario and simulating it. You figure out the rest. Besides, the Spice Network, Hot Network and others are all television, but maybe you don't have the Dish Network?

Record $$ on Wall Street

2007-03-21T08:49:00.000-07:00

Morgan Stanley's report steals the thunder from Merrill and its Street bed buddies for a short time and I can't help but wonder what nefarious schemes have contributed to this latest round of plus-sized profits. The pattern of obscene profits followed by equally obscene tales of corporate abuse is well documented thus far. Kellogg Brown & Root and the war contractors, Exxon and the oil oligopoly, Enron and the energy bandits - the list goes on. Behind every season of windfall profits lay the machinations of the smart (or just plain greedy) money.

The latest in this pitiful white collar collusion: Countrywide and its sub-prime pals. I saw first hand the reckless abandon with which stated income loans (where American business sensibility takes a back seat to those who are markedly dishonest with their credit) were lobbed to unqualified investors. After all, if brokers are motivated by commission and are not held accountable for structuring bad deals, then why care if you put some poor sucker in the whole with a no-money down, negative amortization loan? The banks, after all, are the ones approving the deals.

Watch as the M&A money that bloated the big investment houses this year turns out to be in bad faith as deals go sour over the course of the next year or two.

Newsflash: Rosie O'Donnell is a nutjob

2007-03-20T14:16:00.000-07:00

I'm reluctant to post this because:

I support the gay-rights agenda that Rosie tirelessly advocates
I share her loathing of the Donald
It's always a little dangerous to give a forum to nutjobs

However, I was so blown away by this barely coherent post on her blog/online store that I had to draw attention to it. She theorizes that WTC 7 - the smaller building that collapsed after being pelted by the debris and shock from the Twin Towers collapsing - was deliberately blown up to concel various financial, SEC-type investigations. As is usual with this kind of insane ranting, she doesn't really think through the planning she's suggesting happened. Does she believe that in the chaos of that Tuesday morning that some companies under SEC investigation figured, "ah-ha, we can blow up that adjacent building and make it look like part of the catastrophe? Quick, find a team of arsonists and demolition experts and pay off the NYFD??"

Does she think the whole attack was cover for bringing down WTC 7?

I'm really sick of the whole 9/11 conspiracy thing. I think it delegitimizes the left and draws attention away from real concerns. We're trying to deal with an insane stupid criminal incompetent president and his insane stupid criminal incompetent administration; we're trying to fix what we've done in the Middle East; we're trying to restore some health to the American body politic. What can it possibly benefit those efforts to give any credence to these fringe conspiracy theorists?

Porn in "family-friendly" news

2007-03-20T13:34:00.000-07:00

I'd love to know the back-story to this. Did the unnamed station employee think he was doing some kind of Running Man "wake-up-the-masses" thing? I'd also love to know just how "hard" the supposedly hard-core porn was. Despite the growing saturation of long super-hard-core Internet video porn - and the concommittant hardening of ordinary retail porn - mainstream TV has actually become more prurient over the last 30 years. What precisely, I wonder, do the station managers consider "hard-core porn?"

Urban Legend or Not?

2007-03-20T09:34:00.000-07:00

Mickey Kaus comments on a research piece by David Markland about the "urban legend" that L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Scam of Scientology, was Satanic. Markland claims that the urban myth is debunked. But, as Kaus points out, Markland really concludes that Hubbard wasn't Satanic in the same way that Cheney didn't leak Valerie Plame's ID - literally true, but he was certainly involved at the margins! So too, apparently, was the co-founder of NASA's JPL at Cal Tech - I've worked with software originating out of that lab so that was a particularly interesting tidbit.

Switch to WP

2007-03-16T14:05:00.000-07:00

Characterizing Newsweek as a tabloid is probably excessive. In truth it doesn't approach the depths of rumor and celebrity gossip that our real tabloids do; and of course we don't even have tabloids in the authentic British sense. In any case, a subscription to Newsweek is worth it for at least one reason - trends that appear on its cover are almost always at their peak.

And that should bother you, because that would imply Rudy's at his peak, and that would be bad for the country. After all, what is it about Rudy that bothers you so much? The fact that the media go after the more juicy details of his personal life? The last prominent public-servant-executive who got that treatment proved to be a great president who we all miss very much. The only other fact you cite from the Newsweek article - his "broken-windows" approach to cleaning up Manhattan - produced results that last to this day. Actual results coming from a political leader would be a refreshing change.

If you're so desperate to drop Newsweek as your news source, consider the Washington Post. It has distinguished itself from the other "paper of record", the Grey Lady, by doing, you know, actual journalism. The Post most recently broke the Walter Reed story. It's also the home of Bob Woodward who can be relied on for informed and objective reporting on the blasted wasteland that is the federal bureaucracy.

I Hate Newsweek

2007-03-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

Good to have you on board, Dave!

A swell of relief washed over me as I read my latest solicitation from Newsweek - my subscription has finally run out! None too soon (I got a free subscription in college and kept renewing). The "magazine" is a hideous impostor - a tabloid masquerading as mainstream "news." Why do I mention this, my dear Schumann? I felt an odd sense of appreciation for one late Newsweek article on an individual dear to your Republican heart: Rudy G.

It seems all too fitting that the Tabloid-News should opt to cover him as he is in many ways a tabloid-perfect figure, sprung fully formed onto the already crowded political stage. Notice how NW's article paid lip service to Rudy's "broken window" policies and then headed for the lower, more salacious (and therefore more entertaining) territory of Rudy's remarkable split from his previous wife.

On a side note, I noticed that Gingrich climbed into Dr. Phil's immaculate pedestal to admit his own marital infidelity - while he was agitating for Clinton's impeachment - and be declared fit for the presidency.

I would like to point out, finally, that as your Republican administration continues to rack up the most hideous pedigree since U.S. Grant (latest on the laundry list: Federal prosecutors being fired for not bowing knee to Gonzalez's hackery and the F.B.I. using your Patriot act to eavesdrop on you). Buyer beware, Dave.

So why not vote republican again? How many times do you need to be ripped off by the same store before you stop buying from them?

Thou shalt not?

2007-03-14T15:51:00.000-07:00

My buddy Matt's chosen an interesting handle. I'm swamped with these ridiculous night shifts but I hope to dig into why he's picked the famous Decalogue catchphrase for his name.

It Begins

2007-03-13T14:53:00.000-07:00

Straight up. Get in here and get rolling!