A Second Hand Conjecture

Bryan Pick makes a great point on why the GOP should accept Obama’s limited Paygo

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That’s what’s claimed in this article in the IBD. This becomes pretty thuggish when you add to the fact that these banks were (allegedly) outright threatened to take the TARP funds in the first place. The reason for all of this is to make the process as opaque as possible. The political establishment’s efforts at transparency thus far have been just a show to get elected and/or score political points. It’s obvious neither Obama nor Bush believed in it, so why should we expect it with the TARP funds?

The idea as I understand it is to make sure no one knows which banks needed the money so as to not cause a run on that bank. But that means the market doesn’t know which banks are good either and so rather than reward good banks it just waits the whole thing out. Now of course the gov’t can’t accept repayments because that would make it obvious that those banks that can’t pay back the money aren’t doing as well as those that can. This is a pretty clear refusal to let the market work ostensibly because it’s “broken”.

Now all this wouldn’t be as bad if it wasn’t the gov’t involved. Why? Because the gov’t interests are politics. You have people involved and now running things that aren’t looking out for the best of the company, nor the market, but for their best interests which are being popular. Combine that with the ignorance of the system or market and you get stuff like Maxine Walters’ crazy and conspiratorial questions. Combine that with grift and you get Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. So now with the gov’t involved we start seeing wild political demands on these banks with the full force of a hypocritically righteous rage. Limits on wage rates, specially targeted, punitive 90% taxes that go back on contracts, outright extralegal public threats to intimidate.

This is why it’s dangerous to deal with the government because the government has captured that industry and won’t give it back while it can still play with it (i.e. ruin it).

(edit to fix some atrocious spelling)

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Over at Instapundit, Glenn has been keeping an eye on both the Tax Day Tea Party and the New Way Forward demonstrations.

Reading about what the left is doing, I have to think, that if the left thinks banks that are “to big to fail” should be broken up, then what about government programs like social security, medicare, and medicaid?

Surely, these are just as big, and they are to important to fail. Shouldn’t these also be broken up??

And once they’re done with the banks, and the auto industry, what are they going to find “to big to fail” then???

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…awards Michigan State 18 points.

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the Government we have in DC.

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Aggie congressman Joe Barton has introduced a bill to abolish the BCS regime and mandate the creation of a playoff system for college football. I quietly place all my hostilities to government intervention in sports into a shoebox for this vote and hope it passes. President-elect Obama has already declared himself opposed to the BCS.

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(NYT)

The New York Times has a fascinating little chart today, illustrating the primary sources of nuclear weapons proliferation over time. In looking at the diagram, one cannot escape the overall impression that until recently the West has been the main and long-enduring source for most of the world’s nuclear proliferation. Given our traditional focus on authoritarian rouge states when it comes to proliferation threats –and our obsession with Russia and the former Soviet republics as potential proliferating agents– this might prompt us to reexamine some basic assumptions about where the sources of danger lie in technology transfer.

When considered, it shouldn’t really be surprising that the West is or was the top proliferator. There are several factors we could readily identify which would have made getting nuclear secrets in a Western democracy far easier than within the USSR. Among them might be:

1. Unregulated communications make it easy to operate covert networks with little fear of detection.
2. Relatively open borders facilitate easy transportation of personnel and material.
3. Integrated trade alliances dedicated to industrial products make the shipment of advanced technology between countries relatively unremarkable.
4. A cosmopolitan scientific community which publishes and socializes in a consolidated cross-cultural milieu, in which technical information exchange between countries is also unremarkable.
5. An educational experience and civic culture that encourages individualism which can create rogue actors more easily.
6. A shared lingua franca among an international scientific elite that makes it easy for them to converse and exchange ideas one-to-one, without need of translation services.
7. Being the focal point for scientific and technology origination attracts attention from foreign intelligence services and black market operators.

Closed off and regimented societies prohibit or severely curtail most of these facilitating characteristics, and this fact might represent the disqualifying criteria that made a country like the USSR a virtual non-proliferator. Conditions more commonly associated with proliferation risk in policy debates such as malicious government, poverty and political repression, do not historically appear to be the primary risk points. Indeed, such characteristics might lead us to target the wrong societies for technology transfer such as Russia and North Korea.

But if the above list better reveals vulnerability points to proliferation, the country most likely to proliferate inadvertently or intentionally outside of the West would have to be China, with targets being her integrated East Asian and African alliance states. Increasingly China satisfies almost all of the requirements. Her massive communications architecture is becoming increasingly unmonitorable (even if the government tries), she is expanding her transportation links with the world at a rapid pace and making it easier to come and go, she has a large and increasingly cosmopolitan scientific community that is English speaking and mobile, she is a major commercial technology exporter and an origination point of primary scientific research.

Perhaps it should therefore not be surprising that the most recent proliferation vectors in the diagram above emanate from the PRC. Something to consider.

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In a Q&A session at the University of the Pacific in October, Dinesh D’Souza was asked about the moral dimensions of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. I don’t agree entirely with the causality he posits exists between irresponsible consumer behavior and irresponsible governance, but it’s an interesting take. Particularly in how he adapts certain complaints more commonly associated with the political left, to serve a conservative argument:

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When you think of the numerous problems routinely facing residents of Mexico City, things like an astronomical violent crime rate, standstill traffic, urban poverty, collapsing infrastructure, chronic water shortages, claustrophobia-inducing overcrowding and toxic pollution might come to mind. Even aircraft falling out the sky might reasonably have joined your list of hazards confronting the city’s densely concentrated population.

But it seems that leftist Mayor Marcelo Ebrard has very different ideas about the city’s problems. That’s because he just identified elderly sexuality as a pressing “quality of life” concern for residents, and has initiated a program to distribute impotence drugs to the city’s senior citizens free of charge.

Enjoy the irony if you don’t have to live there. It’s not every day that a government manages to confess its impotence by alleviating impotence.

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Sadly, Myrna Bushell, Bideford (UK) town councillor and stripper/phone sex business owner, is resigning her office due to a lack of respect from colleagues.

But in parting she also cited the time constraints necessary for local councilpeople, concluding that you either had to be wealthy or unemployed to have time and interest in the work. I consider that to be a profound political insight applicable to more than one level of government the world over.

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Synova wrote a little post that gets halfway to where I would come down on this perennial parlor game of  the John Galt general strike. Sy recognized that to be successful, such a revolt would realistically be a miserable experience for a society, resulting in bloodshed and economic ruin. But she does not depart from Rand in assuming that the eventual outcome would be desirable. I’d advise the ancient wisdom that if the means are clearly evil in a political project, one should become immediately skeptical of the alleged justice of the ends.

We should also be skeptical of the social assumption for Galt, that there is a definable and rigid division among men into a minority of Platonic creative guardians, and an empowered majority of proletarian oppressors and their craven political servants — and that these factions could have accurate self-recognition of their social roles. I would contend that anyone who thinks of the majority of the people as disposable abstracted parasites, under a constitutional order that explicitly derives its governing powers from the majority consent of the governed, is never selling you anything that’s going to arrive in a happy place.

(more…)

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Taking his cue from Us Magazine’s five free issue incentive to dissuade subscribers from canceling over their anti-Palin cover story, TennesseeFree proposes Obama should offer five free personalized social programs to every fleeing voter. I’d caution the electorate against any such offer. Even with a beneficiary of only one, don’t underestimate the government’s ability to still find a way of making you stand in an endless line to fill out triplicate forms.

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According to a new Rasmussen survey 62% of Americans believe encouraging economic growth is more important than reducing income inequality. 51% also say the federal government exerts too much control over our economy as it stands. It would be wise of the McCain campaign to emphasize which candidates value which most.

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A survey finds that public perspectives in Russia are turning sharply anti-Western in matters of international relations. But what’s particularly interesting about this, is that such sentiments have grown fastest and strongest in Russia’s most cosmopolitan and urban regions, whereas a pro-Western orientation remains strongest in the Urals and rural Far East of all places.

It’s conceivable that this may be a corollary to a new kind of state-controlled media saturation, which would be more pronounced in the cities. That is, a media environment where there remain multiple competitive outlets for news and information, but all of which increasingly convey a consonant nationalist, anti-Western and xenophobic message in accord with government policy, amplified through volume.

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A dissuasive argument against government healthcare actually.

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Sound recommendation I’d say:

“I should’ve asked a few more questions when Sarah joined the PTA. When my wife starts talking about reform, corruption and making government work for the American people, it’s best to just move out of the way.”
(Political Radar)

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Here at ASHC we get an enormous amount of traffic from people looking for Sarah Palin photographs. My friend Jason over on postpolitical says he’s experiencing the same phenomenon on his blog, and we took to calling it the hunt for “Palinporn.” Toward that, my favorite keyword from this hidden web image search also comes from Jas: “A MILF we can believe in.”

Of particular interest I’ve found, are those lovely pictures of casual Sarah in the Kuwati desert visiting Alaskan National Guard troops. So here is a gallery of all the pictures we have of that, culled from public-domain government websites, some of which appear to be no-longer publicly accessible.

(more…)

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American Daily

The single most important building block of any nation is her families. Destroy that and you can easily lay claim to a nation’s soul.

I agree. I think we have failed to maintain the nuclear family and lost the fundamental building block. Part of the reason so many folks are enticed by government support (socialism – and why the liberal left is making headway today)is that they don’t have strong family ties and are looking to replace that support structure with something.

Read the whole thing. I don’t agree with his last few paragraphs where he gets religious and I am not as pessimistic but I do believe that our families suffer at our own peril.

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Kim Jong Il as Colonel Sanders by Jonathan Barnbrook (photo: acb | The Null Device)

North Korea is already a formal necrocracy (government by the dead), given that Kim Il-sung –who has been dead since 1994– remains the titular head of state there. But according to Waseda University professor Toshimitsu Shigemura in Japan, Kim’s son and successor in power Kim Jong Il has been dead himself since 2003. Shigemura has a number of family contacts which might validate a rumor which has been circulating since a period of peculiar diplomatic activity which attended Kim the Younger’s alleged death.

According to Shigemura, the role of leader is being filled by a number of body-doubles in an elaborate international charade which would seem unlikely in any other country. However, such a ruse seems completely plausible in the hermit kingdom, in which even more ludicrous fantasies are routinely employed to justify government policy and loyalty (for instance the state maintains that the birds of the country sang praise in Korean, when Kim Jong Il was born).

Evidently Japanese intelligence was concerned enough that former Prime Minister Koizumi had held a summit with a body double in 2004, that they considered voice-printing Kim and the suspected double. Only the prospect of political embarrassment for Koizumi made them hold off. With Koizumi out of office, I wouldn’t mind them doing as much now to clarify the issue.

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The movement of “ethnic studies” curricula from colleges to public schools, is something that troubles many of us who have experienced such classes in modern times. Ethnic studies programs are often called “multiculturalist,” but since they tend to be monoethnic and extremely political rather than cultural, I prefer the term “ethnostatism.”

In defense of the migration, the claim is often made that improving student self-esteem by submerging them in intensely ideological and highly sectarian programs, benefits overall student academic performance. For opponents the claim is a non sequitur, similar to excusing the political dimension of education in a fascist country, by claiming the students there had good math scores. Ideological indoctrination isn’t validated as worthwhile, even if it did help students do trigonometry somehow.

(more…)

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A small Texas School district approved a plan to allow teachers to carry concealed handguns on school grounds last October and will see its first school year open later this month with that plan in effect. As far as I know, and as anyone in the article knows this is the first experiment of its kind and thus it will be interesting to see the result. However it will be a long term result no doubt, and we probably won’t hear much of this district again, which is a good thing.

The reasoning sited was,

“When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that’s when all of these shootings started. Why would you put it out there that a group of people can’t defend themselves? That’s like saying ’sic ‘em’ to a dog,” Thweatt said in Friday’s online edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

But I think I’ve found the real need for this measure.

The 110-student district is 150 miles northwest of Fort Worth on the eastern end of Wilbarger County, near the Oklahoma border.

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FROM: Dr Ben Bernanke
Central Bank of United States of America
01-658-555-1234

TO: CEO
Lagos, Nigeria

Dear Friend:

I have been requested by the regional members Federal Reserve of the USA to contact you for assistance in resolving a matter. The Federal Reserve of the USA has recently concluded a large number of contracts for credit derivative investment vehicles “CDIV” in the Wall Street region of the USA. The contracts have immediately produced moneys equaling US$40,000,000. The Federal Reserve of the USA is desirous of CDIV in other parts of the world, however, because of certain regulations of the USA Government, it is unable to move these funds to another region.

Your assistance is requested as a non-USA citizen to assist the Federal Reserve of the USA, and also the investment bank community of Wall Street USA, in moving these funds out of USA. If the funds can be transferred to your name, in your Nigerian account, then you can forward the funds as directed by the Federal Reserve of USA. In exchange for your accommodating services, the Federal Reserve of USA would agree to allow you to retain 10%, or Nigerian $4 million of this amount.

However, to be a legitimate transferee of these moneys according to USA law, you must presently be a depositor of at least $100,000 in a USA bank which is regulated by the Central Bank of USA.

If it will be possible for you to assist us, we would be most grateful. We suggest that you meet with us in person in New York, NY USA, and that during your visit I introduce you to the representatives of the Wall Street USA, as well as with certain officials of the Central Bank of USA.

Please call me at your earliest convenience at 18-555-1234. Time is of the essence in this matter; very quickly the USA Government will realize that the Central Bank is maintaining this amount on deposit, and attempt to levy certain depository taxes on it.

Yours truly,

The Esteemed Arch-Chairman

Credit: Barry Ritholtz

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It seems a sociopolitical threshold of some kind has been passed in Iraq, as the full range of separatist groups are now seeking power and legitimacy through representation in the central government, rather than in armed conflict.

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Chinese architectural designer Ai Weiwei, who conceived the now famous “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium design for the Beijing games, will not attend the opening ceremonies in protest against Chinese dictatorship. He has some powerful words of explanation in the Guardian today:

We must bid farewell to autocracy. Whatever shape it takes, whatever justification it gives, authoritarian government always ends up trampling on equality, denying justice and stealing happiness and laughter from the people.
(Guardian)

A bold and tremendously important gesture. Read the entire piece here.

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(photo: 2 Dogs)

Modern China has a curious capacity to make otherwise very sensible capitalists instantly forget every experience they’ve ever had with government central planning. The Western businessman on a trip to Shanghai looks up and sees all those gleaming skyscrapers going up on the Yangtze, and he thinks massive state planning must be different somehow in the People’s Republic. It isn’t.

(more…)

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The National Women’s Committee of the Yemeni government is finally calling for an end to child brides. Their proposal is to reset the minimum marriage age at 18. The official legal age for marriage is 15 in Yemen, but loopholes have allowed girls as young as 10 to wed.

While in Saudi Arabia, a religious policeman has come under investigation for marrying two wives too many.

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(photo: companyink)

After writing about the Ronpaulist fear mongering of Jordan Page, and then reading Lance’s splendid post on the latest contheorist pandering of Glenn Greenwald, a common insight has reoccurred to me: the absurd amount of cognitive dissonance conditional to political paranoia.

This is something Christopher Hitchens explored quite adeptly last year at the “Four Horsemen” chat with his three fellow atheist luminaries, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris (video, skip to 8:17). In a response to a point by Dennett, Hitchens argues that the stress of cognitive dissonance is the inevitable state deriving from belief in political unreality, and furthermore, that this condition exists and persists on purely survival grounds (seems true in miniature too).

I’d add that it’s the compartmentalism that political paranoia necessitates in an open society that is the most conspicuous betrayal of its essential cynicism. Something especially apparent when you run into it face to face.
(more…)

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Colombian flower farms (photo: Mike Freedman-Schnapp)

Colombia’s flower farm workers have for some time been benefiting mightily from industrial support communities, which practice heavy nongovernmental social investment in workforce collectives. Many of the workers in these communities outside Bogota and Medellin are essentially resettled refugees from the war in the countryside. The community support in the form of daycare, retraining, and counseling have rescued many workers lives.

But they’re in trouble, as the Colombia Free Trade Agreement with the US –which congress is holding up on grounds of Colombian worker rights– can have profound implications if unsigned. The effects:

“If tariff exemptions are canceled on account of not signing the Free Trade Agreement, we would immediately be leveraged between six and seven percent to enter the U.S. market,” said flower consultant Felipe Arango.

“We’d disappear.”
(Reuters)

But there is an alternative view on that. As Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown might put it, Colombian flower workers need to understand that in order to avoid “shortchanging” them, their jobs and communities have to be destroyed:

“For the sake of both of our nations, the United States should not sign a trade deal with Columbia that shortchanges workers, that rewards polluters, and that gives businesses the same power as sovereign governments. And we should absolutely not sign a trade deal that forgives treachery toward labor leaders,”
(Teamsters)

I can only recoil from that argument, given the suffering it would induce as policy, and echo Fausta:

The USA needs to show its support of this progress, and must approve the free trade agreement with Colombia. As Ambassador Shapiro said, it’s good for Colombia, good for the US, and good for our national security.
(Fausta’s Blog)

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The Los Angeles City Council has banned the construction of fast food restaurants in low income areas. Perhaps I’ve lost the ability to be shocked by the abuses of paternalistic government, because my immediate reaction was “figures.”

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Cross-posted from Registan.net, your one-stop shop for news and analysis of going on in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Thirteen months ago, I noted the problems caused by the U.S. State Department having dramatically different divisions than the military COCOMs.

The DoD considers Pakistan part of the Central Command, or CENTCOM (which includes the Middle East and Central Asia), but places India in the Pacific Command, PACOM. Meanwhile, the State Department places all of Central Asia in the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, while neighboring areas like the Middle East are a part of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. How Africa policy is divided up is even more chaotic.

The end result is a confusing, bureaucratic mess, in which multiple and otherwise fairly independent military commands have to coordinate with multiple State Department bureaus to execute the President’s foreign policy goals, whatever they may be. (There is a side issue to this, which is that nearly 93% of the U.S.’s foreign policy budget is military and only 7% is diplomatic and aid, but that’s a larger post not entirely appropriate to this space.)

In that post I was lamenting the problem of considering Pakistan outside of its relationship with India, since Pakistan filters almost all of its foreign policy through the formulation of India as its primary threat.

It seems I’m not alone: Mountain Runner, an excellent blog about public diplomacy, linked to this paper on the ways the DOS needs to change to better adapt to the modern operating environment.

In order to increase American diplomatic power and improve interagency coordination, it is critical to create a diplomatic post on par with the military’s theater combatant commander, providing leadership and oversight, and coordination of regional diplomatic efforts with emphasis on crisis response, stability operations, and “soft power” projection. Placing some diplomatic expertise in the combatant commands, as is being done with USAFRICOM, appears to further the notion that the regional military commander is the “most influential USG representative” and in a “position of preeminence.” DOS must make bold moves to reorganize and revitalize its ability to project diplomatic power and lead the U.S. government’s interagency efforts overseas.

And so on. It’s a damned fine idea. Meanwhile, the State Department is gently reminding us that al Qaeda remains a threat to world security. Pity they can’t field any useful teams of agents to the region most likely to harbor future al Qaeda operatives.

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There’s editorial sensationalism, and then there’s Keith Olbermann. Consider Mr. Olbermann on Bush recently: “If you believe in the seamless mutuality of government and big business, come out and say it! There is a dictionary definition, one word that describes that toxic blend. You’re a fascist! Get them to print you a T-shirt with fascist on it! What else is this but fascism?” Plutocracy, would perhaps be a better term for what he’s after. Or to be both frank and cynical about it, he just described government of almost every kind. Fascism worthy of the name would propose the seamless mutuality of nationalism and socialism, in the service of dictatorship. Collusion between big business and the state is generally incidental. And wherever it occurs, the role for business is entirely subordinate not reciprocal, as Keith would have you believe. Power is not for sharing under fascism. For too many people unfortunately, the word has taken on a entirely personal definition, meaning “that of which I disapprove.”

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photo: Michael Buck

The sole finalist for the new president of the University of Colorado system, is a Republican oil executive with only a bachelor’s degree. You can imagine where this is going:

Campus observers have fiercely protested the selection, which has yet to be approved by regents. A “Boycott Benson” Web site questions the selection process and criticizes his background as a conservative Republican activist. The student government has voiced complaints, and a campus portrait of Benson was defaced with graffiti that said, “I’ve given CU enough $ for an individual right-wing nut like me to be CU’s president.”
(Newsday)

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photo: Chris Dunn

The Moderate Voice takes a good and short look at McCain’s politics and notices a compelling absence of social conservative moral lectures, as well as a preference for stressing the characteristics of conservatism that Americans find most appealing: limited government and national security. Jennifer Rubin might add that McCain’s emphasis on pragmatic realism in international affairs, is also the only acceptable antidote to a politics of ambiguous hope from Obama. McCain’s secular politics and taste for moderate political compromise represented vulnerabilities in the nomination fight, but they can become powerful electoral assets in the general election, if he can use them.

(HT: Donklephant)

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And by eventually, they mean decades down the road.

This is a perfect example of government getting in the way of the innovation we need to dig ourselves out of our fossil fuel dependency.

http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1362/1/

If you want to build a wind farm in Minnesota right now, you’re in for a nasty surprise. A 612-year nasty surprise in fact.

The Midwest Independent Transmission System (MISO), the organization in charge of the power lines, has to approve every new project that will connect to existing power lines. And MISO is only used to dealing with coal-plant-sized projects. Thus, the current regulations say that they must dedicate 2 years of their time to every project that will connect to the grid.

Not only that, but they’re only allowed to process one application at a time.

This worked fine back when they were approving coal plants. Two years was plenty of time, and there weren’t enough giant fossil fuel plants to fill their docket.

But a system that worked fine for fossil fuel has completely broken down in the face of distributed wind energy. People filing an application with MISO to build a medium- to large-scale wind project (of which there are currently over three hundred) have a heck of a wait in front of them.

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Hat tip: Tyler.

Chris Blattman has a conjecture, possibly high wages in Africa are holding back growth:

One thing that has always struck me in the African countries I have worked is that the real wages (i.e. wages adjusted for the cost of living) of African formal sector workers seem to be incredibly high, at least compared to that of workers in China or India. Given that firms in China and India seem to be more productive than their African counterparts, it creates a double disadvantage for African workers, and raises the question of why the situation continues. Why don’t manufacturing wages fall in Africa, stimulating more jobs for more people at wages still higher than those available in agriculture or informal business?

Why, when I run a survey in rural Uganda, do youth with the same education and experience expect a wage three to four times higher than the youth I worked with in India? I don’t begrudge anyone anywhere a living wage. It’s the relative differential that puzzles me, and that could be keeping Africa from doing business globally.

There are probably lots of plausible reasons. Perhaps we ought to consider (and get data on) the informal sector in Africa, which could be larger and have more moderate wages than the formal sector ones. It may be that all my notions and data about African wages are erroneous.

Another possibility, however, is that the largest employers of skilled workers in most African countries are international NGOs and the local government. They are competing, in many cases, for the same pool of skilled and semi-skilled workers as the manufacturers and service sector firms. Neither the government or NGOs, moreover, seem to set wages according to the local market or local conditions, and it requires little imagination to wonder whether they set their wages higher than the market would normally do.

Bonus, Tyler has now introduced me to Chris’ great blog, which I haven’t read before. Given my and Lee’s interest in the Dark Continent, I am putting it on the blogroll.

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Mitt Romney appears to be calling for a government directed solution to the American automotive indutry’s woes. Marc Ambinder uses the occasion to point out that save Thompson, interventionist government seems to be a consistent theme for all the GOP candidates. How did this come to pass anyway?

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Japan runs the world’s second largest economy with 17 cabinet ministers. Ghana, one of the world’s poorest, currently has 70. Why? Ben Ofosu-Appiah examines the question and argues the need for the dramatic downsizing of African governments. Shakara then offers an interesting counterpoint.

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