All posts by Mike

'Culture'

300

I have not seen it yet, but am intrigued by Hanson’s review. I have, however, read Herodotus, who is immensely entertaining if you can get past the formal style. I was at La Silla when a massive snowstorm hit. There I was, trapped in a small room with nothing but The Histories to entertain me. I was alternating planning out a survey of a dwarf galaxy with reading about Greek city states. And then my altitude-affected dreams were about doing surveys of Greek city states.

Herodotus isn’t, of course, for everyone. But I have also read Gates of Fire, which is more approachable, historically accurate, a quick read and very very good. I heartily recommend it.

Politics, Science and Edumacation

On Cable

Chris has been bitching about his new cable carrier. I have read similar complaints on a number of blogs.

The thing is, there is very little choice when it comes to cable. It is not a “free market” in any sense that the followers of Adam Smith would recognize. The nation is divided into fiefdoms that are assigned to various companies. And the cost of cable has risen even as the cost of cell phone, home phones and long distance have plunged.

Why do I bring this up? Because public schools are the same way. Children have no choice, no competition but are assigned to the school they are nearest to. And our schools are spending twice per pupil what private schools are. But many of the people railing against cable company monopolies would lose it over the idea of introducing competition into the public school system.

So every time you turn on your cable and find the signal out, or the picture fuzzy; every time you look at a bill that read $150; think to yourself, “Inner city kids are getting in education what I’m getting in cable service.”

Politics, War on Terror

Reviewing Boortz, Part Duh

Having praised Boortz, I want to talk about my biggest point of disagreement – one that is coming more and more to the fore with the so-called conservatives.

You see, Neal blames the problems in Iraq on the Democrats. Yes, the Democrats.

Apparently, the negativism and lack of support has encouraged the Islamists to ramp up their guerilla war. While we thought they were building incendiary devices, they were really glued to CNN seeing if the war was popular here so that they knew whether or not to fight us. Never mind that they are primarily fighting each other right now.

My attitude toward this idea can probably discerned by my tone.

  • The Democrats did not authorize torture at Abu Ghraib. And they certainly never gloated about information obtained under coercion.
  • The Liberal Media did not decide that terror suspects, whether citizens and non-citizens, could be detained indefinitely, interrogated forcefully and never presented with evidence against them. Nor did they decide suspects could be sent to fricking Syria to be tortured.
  • Al Franken did not go into Iraq with 100,000 fewer troops than we needed. Michael Moore didn’t lower the recruitment standards to admit criminal, morons and drugs addicts. Rosie O’Donnel didn’t underfunded our soldiers. Yeah, yeah, Clinton cut military spending blah blah blah. Gee, you’d think having the GOP in power for six years might have changed that. Ronald Reagan, with a Democratic Congress, turned our military around in less time.
  • Tim Robbins didn’t devise this idea of stopping insurgents by driving them out of an area and then leaving them to take it back.
  • Ted Kennedy wasn’t the one who decided to deliberately piss off the rest of the world to score political points at home.
  • It wasn’t Nancy Pelosi who thought Donald Rumsfeld was the greatest Secretary of Defense in American history.
  • It wasn’t Daily Kos who decided to not establish law and order, to de-Bathify, to break up the Iraqi military and to let half a million tons of explosives go loose after the war.
  • And no one at Huffington Post tried to paper over intelligence failures by changing the rationale behind the war.

    • No, it was Bush who did all of these things.

    Has the dissent of the media and the Dems hurt our efforts in Iraq? It probably has (although I don’t recall the conservatives being terribly supportive when Clinton took us into Kosovo). But if you remember the early months of the war, both were highly supportive. Remember the imbeds and the positive reports they made? It was only after Iraq began to spin out of control that the criticism ramped up.

    You know, it’s funny how Bush is the Commander in Chief when it comes to war powers and bending the Constitution. But when it comes to responsibility, nothing is ever laid at his door. It’s the Democrats’ fault for objecting; it’s the media’s fault for portraying failure in Iraq; it’s the Iraqis’ fault for being sectarian; its the American people’s fault for being a bunch of wusses; it’s Hollywood’s fault; it’s Air America’s fault; it’s Andrew Sullivan’s fault. It’s someone’s, anyone‘s fault other than the one person whose job it is to take responsibility for our foreign policy.

    As I said before. Is Bush ever responsible for anything?

    Politics

    Reviewing Boortz – On Optimism

    I recently read Neal Boortz’s “Somebody’s Gotta Say It!” I was actually surprised by the book, which is lucid, thoughtful and entertaining. I expected a lot more diatribes and ranting and raving. I actually expected him to just cut and paste from his Daily Nealz Nuze. But instead Boortz lays out his quasi-Libertarian political philosophy and argues passionately and persuasivley in favor of it.

    One thing that jumped out at me was that Neal’s a lot more pessimistic than I am about this country. There is a tendency among conservatives and libertarians to romanticize the past, to imagine that all the dumb stupid things going on in our society are new. But that is not the case. We are making progress — slow, halting, stupid progress — but progress none the less.

    The ideals this nation and our Constitution have not been betrayed so much as many of them have never been fully realized. Our attempts to get those ideals realized is a perpetual struggle. But this country was in far worse shape in, for example, 1939, when FDR’s packed court was completely re-inventing the Constitution.

    I mean, just think of what has happened in my lifetime. The marginal tax rate has been cute from 70% to its current 36% (although the Dems are trying to raise it to 53). Communism has been defeated. Socialism discredited. Welfare reform has given new life to tens of millions. Tort reform is starting to take effect. Voucher programs are beginning to appear despite the best efforts of Big Education.

    And compare where America is now to where it was when my grandfathers were born in 1902. They grew up in a barely literate America; I’ve grown up when illiteracy is rare. They had famines; I’ve never heard of Americans starving to death. The typical lifespan is now into the late 70’s or 80’s and we can hope to be healthy for most of that. Disease is unheard of — fully 3/4 of us are taken out by accident or old age. I, a middle class person, can wake up the morning in Texas, read anything written around the world on my laptop, get on an airplane and go to bed in Australia. My wife and embryonic daughter have a very good chance of surviving the birth (knock on wood). Americans presently have more disposal income, more free time and more wealth than anyone could have imagined in 1902.

    Politically, lynchings are gone; segregation is gone; I can write whatever comes into my fool head on the internet. Up until recently, Presidents had lost their ability to read our mail, listen to our phones and throw us in prison for no reason. These rights had always existed in principle but only came into practice with mass media watchdogging. The world is more peaceful than it has ever been.

    Bill James once said that progress often comes in the appearance of its opposite. The near race-war we had in the 60’s was not the result of a resurgence of discrimination but by American refusing to put with it any more. The battles we are having over education, gun control, government spending and civil liberties are primarily the result of Americans taking back their freedom, not politicians taking it away.

    That’s my philosophical disagreement with Boortz. Like a lot of conservatives, including me on bad days, he sees only the bad. Government not living up the Constitition; massive spending orgies; a bankrupt future; creeping socialism. But I believe these are setbacks that can be fought. And part of it is books like Boortz’s that lay out the case for freedom.

    Politics, Science and Edumacation, War on Terror

    Linkorama

    Um, I’m observing. Which means 12-15 hours work days. So my interest in blogging has flagged a bit. I’ll post later this week my review of Neal Boortz’ book. But for now:

  • Rosie thinks WTC7 was brought down by Bush. You know, her blog post reads like something written by 12 year old.
  • Via Sullivan,a post on how the insurgecy works. It’s tragic.
  • The UN has finally stood up for women’s rights by condemning . . . Israel? By a 40-2 vote, they ignore the oppression going on everywhere in the world and single out Israel? This is joke, right? Yeah, we really need to give more power to the UN.
  • It’s nice to know the Dems are attaching $10 billion in pork to the Iraq spending bill. Remember, we didn’t elect Dems because we liked them. We elected them to give the Republicans a much-needed 2×4 to the head. Anyone who thinks the Republicans are the sole source of the “Culture of Corruption” wasn’t paying attention in 1994. Just a reminder here, here and here.
  • Some cold water gets thrown on the hybrids.

    Through a study by CNW Marketing called “Dust to Dust,” the total combined energy is taken from all the electrical, fuel, transportation, materials (metal, plastic, etc) and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime of a vehicle. The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles – the expected lifespan of the Hybrid.

    The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more fiscal $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected lifetime of 300,000 miles. That means the Hummer will last three times longer than a Prius and use less combined energy doing it.

    So, if you are really an environmentalist – ditch the Prius. Instead, buy one of the most economical cars available – a Toyota Scion xB. The Scion only costs a paltry $0.48 per mile to put on the road. If you are still obsessed over gas mileage – buy a Chevy Aveo and fix that lead foot.

    One of the problems with the drive for energy efficiency is that it is being driven by politics not science. And it’s leading to bad ideas like ethanol. I would point out, however, that the Prius is one of the first hybrids. Naturally, future iterations will be cleaner. And that nightmare nickel factory he describes may not be the norm and certaintly makes batteries for a lot more than cars.

    • Politics, Socialism

    Just Remember

    As you watch the VA hospital scandal unfold, remember that we can all expect to get such wonderful care once we get socialized medicine.

    And allow me to head off the “it’s Bush” response at the pass. This problem has been known for some time. In recent years, when, say, Hillary Clinton, would lionize the VA system, people in the know would have their jaws hit the floor. The friendly people who work there masked a system that was corrupt.

    Bush had made it far worse by starting a war and not providing for the tens of thousands of veterans now flooding the system. But the rotten core was always there. They just don’t have the money to paper over it any more.

    News

    Askimet

    1 Comment

    I just installed Askimet, which should help filter any spam posts (it’s already killed 22 in the last few hours). I don’t know how these guys are getting past the registration requirement but they are. If any of you two or three people who are reading this register and start posting comments, let me know if any are blocked as spam.

    Politics, Taxes and Spending

    How Bad?

    Is Bush’s record when he makes conservatives pine fo Clinton.

    If Clinton and Bush were graded solely on the basis of fiscal policy, one could argue that their tax and spending records offset each other. But there are other important issues, and Clinton clearly wins the tiebreaker.

    Take trade, for example. At best, Bush has a mixed record. The Central American Free Trade Agreement is a step in the right direction, but his steel tariffs and agricultural subsidies are examples of anti-trade initiatives. Clinton policy was unambiguously pro-trade, however, largely because of the approval and implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade that also launched the World Trade Organization.

    Clinton gets a better grade on regulatory policy, as well. Bush signed into law the prohibitively expensive Sarbanes-Oxley law, as well as a market-distorting energy bill. The Clinton years, by contrast, saw the burden of regulation reduced on numerous sectors of the economy, including agriculture, financial services and telecommunications.

    Clinton also beats Bush on federalism. He signed a welfare reform legislation that ended an entitlement program and reduced the central government’s power and authority. On education, Bush went the other direction. His No Child Left Behind Act increased federal control over an area that properly belongs under the purview of state and local governments.

    A net impact of other policy choices — especially if appointments to the courts and regulatory agencies are added to the equation — would reduce Clinton’s score. Yet a more comprehensive analysis would also include the long-term negative impact of Bush’s new prescription drug entitlement, which single-handedly saddled taxpayers with trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities.

    Sigh. I miss gridlock.

    'Culture', News, Politics, Taxes and Spending

    Sob Sisters

    Read this article which seems to blame the eeeevill mortgage companies for the current round of foreclosures. Of course, without these experimental loans, these people wouldn’t have been able to buy a house at all. And a significant percentage are weathering the storm and becoming home-owners. By my math, that’s good. But we must have a sob-story about the 20% who are being fore-closed on not the 80% who got a home they’d never have been able to purchase just five years ago.

    Notice also the irresponsibility of the home-owner they talk to:

    He cannot afford his mortgage payment, which jumped to $1,300 a month from about $1,000 after his loan reset to a higher interest rate last summer. A divorce and the loss of his county government clerical job, which paid $14.80 an hour, have also hurt.

    In 2004, Mr. Shields took out a popular hybrid mortgage that carried a fixed interest rate for two years before becoming an adjustable-rate loan for the remaining 28 years. In August, his loan’s interest rate rose from 6.6 percent to 8.1 percent, and to 9.6 percent now. “I love the house,” said Mr. Shields, 47, who now works in a custodial job with the Chicago school district that pays $10.40 an hour. “I put a lot of money in the house — a deck and a new garage — and they are just going to take the house.”

    Bought a house too big for his income; got a divorce; invested money he didn’t have in improving the house; lost his job. How is this the fault of an “over-extended loan market”?

    And I would point out that these two-year adjustable rate mortgages are designed to allow someone with bad credit to get their, um, financial house in order and refinance. Most people who buy the 1 or 2 year ARM’s do precisely this. But we have to hear about the ones who don’t.

    But what got me was the NYT just can’t, just can’t write this article without getting into some good old liberal wealth hatred:

    The mortgage interest deduction, the biggest single subsidy to homeowners, will cost the federal budget about $80 billion this year, according to the administration’s projections. Deductions for state and local property taxes will cost $15.5 billion. Allowing homeowners to pocket tax-free much of the profit from selling their homes is expected to cost $37 billion more. Altogether, this amounts to almost 5 percent of the federal government’s total tax revenue, and almost three times HUD’s entire $42 billion budget. Now even some in Washington are questioning the soundness of pushing homeownership so broadly.

    I can’t even begin with the stupidity here. Deductions do not cost the government shit — they return money to the owner. It’s only right to deduct property taxes (which are smaller than pork spending) as we shouldn’t be taxed twice — we deduct income taxes, don’t we? And deducting the profit from selling a home (only after two years of residency, BTW)? Well, how else do you expect people in a mobile society to not get jobbed when they sell? If I have to sell my home in the near future because Sue and I change jobs, a full tax plus agent commission would wipe out any profits. I might even lose money on the deal.

    But the NYT apparently believes only irresponsible people should get tax breaks.

    And the government’s efforts to promote homeownership are far from an unqualified success. From 2000 to 2005, homeownership rates increased significantly only among households in the top two-fifths of the income distribution, those earning more than $46,883, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

    Gee, it’s almost like the responsible choices that give you wealth also make you buy a house.

    Homeownership declined for families in the bottom two-fifths of the income scale. In the lowest fifth — where families make less than $20,180 — homeownership was only 42.4 percent in 2005, which was 3 percentage points less than it was 25 years earlier and 26 percentage points below the national average.

    Whoa! Irresponsible choices can both make you poor and prevent you from owning a home? Say it ain’t so! And, of course, this has nothing to do with excessive property taxes, the disaster or urban renewal, property forfeiture, imminent domain abuses or Chapter 8 subsidies.

    No, nothing at all.

    I actually do agree with one point here. It’s not the government’s business to encourage people to buy homes. And we are seeing the Law of Unintended Consequences rear its ugly head once more. George Bush has been a big driver behind this ownership society business because he is, at heart, a leftist who believes government can make people better.

    And I would glady trade in my home mortgage interest and tax deductions for a Fair Tax. But I don’t think that’s what the NYT intends.

    Politics

    Plame

    I’m just curious. Now that Valerie Plame has testified that she was indeed a covert agent; that the Vanity Fair “spread” (one picture) was after she’d been outed; that she was NOC and could have been arrested had she been overseas at the time; that her former contacts were endangered by the revelation; that her neighbors “knew she was a CIA agent” only *after* Novak’s article … will the Bush defenders, especially Boortz, stop saying she wasn’t really a covert agent?

    Don’t bet on it.

    Science and Edumacation

    Rockets

    Happy Goddard Day. I love this:

    As for the press — especially The New York Times, which had been very hard on Goddard and openly mocked his belief of reaching the moon in a 1920 editorial — it eventually came around. On July 17, 1969, the day after Apollo 11 left for the moon, the Times got around to running this belated retraction:

    “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.”

    Based on this, I think we can expect the Times to acknowledge that Reagan’s tax cuts were a good thing, oh, about 2031.

    Politics, War on Terror

    Fisking WND

    God, I hate to defend Rosie O’Donnell. An easy way to find my stance on an issue is the opposite of whatever she’s saying. But the Right’s best source of yellow journalism has this article..

    O’Donnell echoed the sentiments of Palestinian terrorist Abu Jihad, who told WND today, “I am sure the Americans tortured Mohammad and forced him to say these untrue things. Isn’t it strange it took three years since his arrest for the supposed confession?”

    I like the comparison. Now O’Donnell is a terrorist. But let me ask you something. Would what O’Donnell and Jihad are saying have any credibility, any at all, if we had not water-boarded KSM?

    Those are the real fruits of torture. The loss of credibility.

    I want you to imagine the following scenario. KSM is captured and taken to Gitmo. The facility has been regularly inspected by the Red Cross. Gitmo detainees are presented with charges within six months of their arrival and allowed access to lawyers. They are brought to trial within a year. At KSM’s trial, he confesses to 9/11 and other acts of terror. Would anyone doubt this? Would there be any question? Would Abu Jihad or Rosie or anyone have anything credible to say against it? No. No. And nothing credible, at least. It would be seen as a triumph of American justice.

    That’s what we’ve lost by water-boarding.

    Civil Liberties, Culture War, Politics

    Die Hippies!

    The US government would rather you die screaming in pain than smoke pot. Interesting note:

    What becomes abundantly clear from Baum’s reporting: Everything, everything about the prohibition of marijuana is and has always been political. It basically boils down to Richard Nixon needing a wedge issue and a hammer with which to beat the dirty hippie anti-war protesters over the head. With just a bit of research, even hardened drug warriors in Nixon’s own administration in the late 1960s and early 1970s quickly realized marijuana was basically harmless.

    From that, we have descended to a point where the government has determined it’s better that sick, crippled, suffering people (a) die, and (b) die in pain, than to give those dirty hippies the smallest of victories, even 35 years later.

    I have another take on this. I think we are seeing the witch-trial mentality.

    Huh? Bear with me.

    The people who tortured, burnt, drowned and hanged witches in the last millenium always justified it by saying they were saving the witch’s soul. Yeah, they were going to die in pain and terror. But that was a small price to pay for the eternal salvation of having the demons driven from them.

    (Whether they actually thought this, or just used it justify/rationalize a process that, not coincidentally, gave them the condemended witch’s property, is another issue.)

    I see this in the drug warriors and the teetotalers — especially when it comes to denying Angel Reich marijuana or Richard Paey percocet. Yes, they will die in pain. But their souls will be saved because their minds won’t be cloud by those filthy drugs. Well, that and the pathological need to enforce the letter of the law beyond any boundaries of common sense.

    I can’t find the link here, but when the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous was dying, he asked for a drink. He was denied. That is, a man who was quite understandably scared of what was happening to him was denied even a modicum of comfort. Because it would save his soul.

    Hogwash. One of the most scared duties of a human being is to comfort the dying. It is something we will all need at some point. And if that comfort involves a drink, a pill or a joint, so be it.

    Especially if that drink, pill or joint might keep them around for just a little bit longer.