Watch Your Terms
by neolibertarian
The FT is a fun paper to read, if only for the color, but I just found this article from 2005 that seems to have overlooked one important thing. I'll quote the first paragraph:Since 1974 US lawmakers have created about 20 separate tax breaks to encourage Americans to squirrel away more of their money. Yet over this time Americans have gone from saving about 10 per cent of their disposable income to saving less than 1 per cent.
A few paragraphs down, the article acknowledges that capital gains, which are NOT included in the savings rate statistic. This is unfortunate, since so many Americans put much of their savings into their home (mortgage payments) or the market (stocks, etc.). So on that fact alone, the fear-mongering tone of the headline and first paragraph is unwarranted.
The real problem is that the savings rate is calculated by figuring out how much of their disposable income Americans don't consume (savings = disposable income - consumption). Disposable income means after-tax income, so all pre-tax income that Americans save or put into tax-deferred retirement schemes like 401ks are excluded from the savings rate calculation. It's bad enough that the FINANCIAL Times didn't report very well on this aspect of the issue (the article gets credit for pointing out the rapid growth in American wealth, but loses credit for mentioning 401ks without pointing out their exclusions from the metric).
What's really unfortunate is that the metric looks so low in part BECAUSE of the tax breaks. This is not a case of intransigent, spendthrift Americans defying their government; this is a case of government deluding itself into seeing defeat in a triumph. The measurement ought to acknowledge all savings, including capital gains and pre-tax and tax-deferred plans.
Of course, it's the wealth that really matters to any savings rate. For individuals, savings is just one way of looking at one kind of wealth (predicted future wealth), and Americans are quite wealthy. For those seeking investors, which the article says are limited by Americans' and their spendthrift ways, it would be easier to get investment income if the taxes and rules governing capital gains and the stock market were less onerous.
This is just a call for intervention that makes the president look bad, so certain people like to bring it up and act like it's the worse thing ever.
I'll be making a general reference for economic myths and I'll include a savings rate section. I've already done most of the work, and I ran into the FT article in the process of reviewing it all. I'll finish the Myths review and post it to the blog and give it a page on the website, as well.
Hope That's In The Movie
by neolibertarian
I have a suggestion, taken from an old Michael Yon dispatch, for inclusion in the rumored Bruce Willis project about Deuce Four in Iraq:Deuce Four is an overwhelmingly aggressive and effective unit, and they believe the best defense is a dead enemy. They are constantly thinking up innovative, unique, and effective ways to kill or capture the enemy; proactive not reactive. They planned an operation with snipers, making it appear that an ISF vehicle had been attacked, complete with explosives and flash-bang grenades to simulate the IED. The simulated casualty evacuation of sand dummies completed the ruse.
The Deuce Four soldiers left quickly with the "casualties," "abandoning" the burning truck in the traffic circle. The enemy took the bait. Terrorists came out and started with the AK-rifle-monkey-pump, shooting into the truck, their own video crews capturing the moment of glory. That's when the American snipers opened fire and killed everybody with a weapon. Until now, only insiders knew about the AK-monkey-pumpers smack-down.
Certainly makes for a different image of the war's progress than I usually get from TV.
Wikipedia
by neolibertarian
If Wikipedia, the online wiki-based encyclopedia that allows anyone to contribute with articles or revisions, gets more popular then will it 'come under attack?' When Google got popular it became the target of google-bombing, various attempts to make certain sites have higher rankings (especially a variety of phrases that, when you click I'm Feeling Lucky, take you directly to the White House site).
Some organizations may start mildly-organized attempts to write articles about subjects they're related to, or self-promotional pages for people and places. Other groups might want to see some bias eliminated or injected, and go through articles to make the proper changes. The problem is not that incorrect or horribly biased information might persist (Wikipedia seems to have a pretty good system for dealing with that stuff, at least at current levels) but that prolonged or sustained activities along these lines might forces a great deal of pages to be locked. Locked pages prevent abuses by just anybody, but it also prevents additions and revisions - thus negating the wiki concept.
I don't think it will happen too often. I tend to think that generally people are pretty good and won't blatantly take advantage of a system. I mean, you could argue that people would just steal toilet paper from public restrooms rather than buy it themselves, but I don't see that happening (granted, toilet paper is fairly inexpensive). A surprising number of things in our lives exist and maintain themselves without guards or enforcement.
Still, it's interesting to at least consider the future of a resource I use virtually every day (I probably end up looking at as many as a few hundred entries in a given week). Wikipedia will probably be safe with the methods in place (locking, reversion, deletion, etc.), with the respect people tend to grant such ventures, and the fact that most of the people who would go to such lengths to make (correctable) attacks aren't the sort of people who realize how important encyclopedias are.
"Earth to America"
by neolibertarian
When I first saw the ads for Earth to America on TBS, I thought it seemed weird. It was billed as highly humorous, but every damned commercial mentioned Leonardo DiCaprio. And then the name was Earth to America, which seems not at all funny and mostly like a preachy lecture. Plus it was billed as celebrating the Earth. I suspected it would have a preachy environmental message based on that. Then I saw the latest commercial (Jack Black was in it, and quite funny) talking about global warming.
Just what you'd expect since the T in TBS stands for (Ted) Turner.
Well I'm glad that TBS has decided to join the scientific debate on 'climate change' with a bunch of people who lie, exaggerate and make faces for a living, and who on balance are probably far more former class clowns than former class nerds.
Michael Savage: Red Republican
by neolibertarian
Michael Savage, a radio host whose signature issues include steadfast opposition to cultural immigration and support for silencing and jailing civil libertarians, is what I'd like to call aa Red Republican. Even though he likes to make fun of "red diaper doper babies" this is far more a cultural or social insult than an economic one.
A month or two ago he argued that price controls (on gasoline) aren't socialist because Nixon used them. A week ago he said special prosecutor was a good guy, based in large part on his working-class background from Chicago. Savage had other positive points for Fitzgerald, but he kept using the working-class background as evidence of honesty and ethics.
Tonight he said that the Republican are going to become a minority party for 30 or 40 years if they don't get rid of the 'Rockefeller' country club wing of the party. He got on the subject because some Republicans were publicly defending the right of oil companies to make profits because of the free market. Savage, not giving a damn for the free market or anything else that's free, couldn't understand it and so assumed it must be about being super-rich.
But he's very socially conservative. In the same show tonight he was glad that some Republicans (I didn't catch any names) were trying to get rid of the provision that being born in this country makes you a citizen. Savage said we're insane and the only country that does this. Of course, as he noted, the citizenship from birth provision is in the 14th Amendment, and was meant to eliminate the two-tiered social system that allowed American citizens to buy, sell and kill American non-citizens. It's aalso a critical part of our assimilationist culture. There are third-generation Turks in Germany whose grand-parents came in on the guest-worker (gastarbeiter) program and they still don't have citizenship; being the German-born child to German-born parents is insufficient in German law (unless I'm dreadfully mistaken and they changed it). Assimilation is severely limited by provisions like this. Moreover, it perpetuates the idea that somehow your parents and grandparents lives should be important indictators about your own worth and characteristics - in the same way that Fitzgerald's parents and grand-parents being 'working class' made Savage see Fitzgerald differently.
Savage is not interested in assimilation. He's interested in "borders, language, culture," "borders, language, culture," "borders, language, culture." He's not a fan of the Arab/Muslim world, wants all Hispanic nationals to be thrown out of the country (or something to that effect; at least kept out in the future) and he admitted to sympathizing with islamists about why they hated our 'perverted, homosexualized culture.'
So, 'Red Republican.' He wants government with responsibilities and power over everything - goodbye First Amendment, goodbye Fourth Amendment, goodbye Fourteenth Amendment. He wants the government to manage and correct the economy, to coordinate and manipulate social life, and to wage unmerciful, morally-unlimited warfare. In other words, he goes in the opposite direction from myself on all the major political themes. About the only good thing I can say about him is that he was willing to talk about abortion (a lot of radio hosts don't discuss it in very much detail) and that since he's Jewish he doesn't engage in Israel-bashing or anti-Semitism that other Red Republicans might be prone to enjoying.
Press Spells Alito L-I-B-B-Y
by neolibertarian
The nomination of Alito will not diminish the press' obsession with Scooter Libby being indicted.
The Alito nomination is bad for them to cover. First of all, it replaces a contentious Miers, who split conservatives openly and viciously, with a nomination that most of the Republican coalition can get behind. The one draw for the press of Alito's nomination is that he's conservative. But the Supreme Court is larely beyond a lot of the press, its role as arbitrator, its language and traditions, and all of its complexities. That's why when they report about the Supreme Court, they tend to focus on abortion and affirmative action, rather than philosophies or even the judicial issues like privacy and equal protection.
One example that sticks with me is the Bush v. Gore case in late 2000. The reporters had been covering the case with much excitement (naturally) and when the decision was handed out, they quickly learned that the Supreme Court wasn't going to just say 'Gore' or 'Bush.' The first report was that Gore won, because a reporter (or maybe intern) read the decision incorrectly. That sort of judicial illiteracy persis to this day. There are a lot of judicial-beat reporters who can discuss the Supreme Court with a great deal of experience and erudition, but I don't think that's true at all when it comes down to the general political-beat reporters.
The Libby indictment, however, has tons of stuff to talk about. The press loves a good scandal, of course. That motivates more than anything else. They also love flashbacks to the late 60s and early 70s - that's what makes every military move Vietnam, every Republican Nixon and every reporter Woodward and/or Bernstein. So indicting a White House aide makes them salivate to get bigger fish like Rove, Cheney and eventually Bush. They want to unravel a scandal that will destroy Bush's presidency and discredit the war in Iraq. They are obsessed with the story, it dominates every installment on Hardball, even though there's usually not a lot of new stuff to report, and NBC's David Gregory has been biting the Press Secretary's head off for months over it.
Of course, the Plamegate/Leakgate scandal is never going to discredit the war in Iraq as its currently formulated. Supposedly this was about discrediting Joe Wilson over uranium from Niger, but Joe Wilson was factually incorrect; the Iraqis were trying to get uranium from Niger, as British intelligence has been arguing for years. Now there's some allegations that Judith Plame was just a mouthpiece for Administration arguments about WMDs in Iraq, but before the war everybody agreed that Saddam had weapons - Clinton officials, Democratic primary contenders, the French, the Germans, the British, the UN, everybody. The press generally wants to forget this and go on discrediting the 'quagmire' in Iraq as 'another Vietnam.'
So we're going to hear a lot more about Scooter Libby, see a lot more shots of Karl Rove on TV, and hear reporters fantasizing about indicting Cheney and dragging Bush to testify in court - even as surprising little happens to justify near-continuous coverage of the subject.
The Truman Show
by neolibertarian
Aside from its entertainment value and the surprising performance from Jim Carrey, I really like the Truman Show. I like the messages it sends.
1) Human life is ultimately uncontrollable, answerable to no power on Earth. Despite all the machinations exerted upon Truman to make him get the selected friends and family, job, house and so forth, he still wants a girl (Sylvia) who's not even supposed to have speaking parts. The show's creator brags that Truman is real and experiences genuine emotions, but these emotions were not coerced into existence by the show; the good things about Truman, his thirst for adventure, his love for Sylvia, his unflappable human decency, are things that the creators didn't produce, and either try to stamp out or exploit. Truman, of course, wins out in the end.
You cannot dictate to human beings. That is by far the overriding message. There are others, too, of course.
2) Objective truth is critical to the human experience. The show creators try to explain away all the incidents and so forth, and to kidnap and then erase unwanted elements, but the truth does not die. They try to lie in order to create a perfect world. Truman knows it isn't true, he knows it's all somehow off, that the world doesn't quite make sense. Not only that, but he has an invincible drive to discover the real truth.
The movie is a powerful rejection of subjectivism. Even though the island in the show is the only world Truman has known since birth, he still possesses the capability to tell that the world is wrong; objective truth trumps all. Even though the world they create is beautiful, clean prosperous, safe and easy, truth wins through. The various flaws and mistakes in the Truman Show (the faked things the actors do) represent the inconsistencies and contradictions of an untrue, subjective world crumbling down. Truth will not be denied.
3) The whole movie is an excellent allegory for 1984-style totalitarian government. In fact it's almost impossible to understand the movie without this perspective. The concept of a place under 100% surveillance, with secret agents everywhere, is obvious. But what's slightly less obvious, yet more important, is the way every mistake, every lie, every half-truth, is covered by propaganda and yet more lies. When something goes wrong, they have to come up with an excuse; the excuse, however plausible or implausible, is then sent out through the media - usually some prominently-displayed newspaper headline very conspicuously read in Truman's line of sight. This of course intersects neatly with the bit about objective truth, as well as humans being in the end independent and uncontrollable.
The creators really are soulless and inhuman in their treatment of Truman. They manipulate him, make him do things he doesn't want or doesn't like, and ry to bend him to their will. They try to scare him away from adventure, badmouth anything beyond their control, manufacture a fake version of the world to play into their plans, and shame and guilt him into complacency or resignation. More or less just like dictatorships do.
Further, although the Truman Show starts out as an attempt to entertain people with a new form of reality TV, it eventually degrades into a continuous effort to simply keep the system (the lie, the Truman Show) moving at all. Again, just like dictatorships often start out with all sorts of ideals and goals, land reform being the most common, and then degrade into little more than organized oppression that was started to maintain the goals but now seems to exist solely for its own sake.
It's justice that in the end the creators are 'toppled' by Truman, brought down by crashing weight of their lies, by Truman's unendable questing nature, and by the absurdity and cruelty of their premise for existing.
4) The movie is also somewhat metaphorical in the relation of an individual to society. Truman's society is both unprepared for and horrified by his uniqueness and unpredictability. This element is one of the weaker ones, but I do believe it's meant to be there, as when Truman shouts out "Imagine that, I'm being spontaneous!" He's an individual, and when he acts out in a spontaneous or unqiue manner, society (meaning the show) doesn't know how to act.
In this element, Truman represents the human desire for spontaneity, flexibility, self-expression and self-control.
5) Sylvia is the unification of most of the elements of the show. She tells him that the world he knows is a lie, so she represents truth. Her 'father' tells Truman that she's moving to Fiji, so she represents the greatest motivation for adventure. She naturally also represents love, one of the highest states of human goodness.
6) But I think my favorite element, and I love all these elements, is the way Truman is just a good guy. He's not perfect, but he's kind, decent, polite, genuine, and innocent. Even though he grew up being toyed with, coerced, manipulated and controlled, and is surrounded by people who feed him nothing but lies and damned lies, he's a good person.
At the same time, other people in the show are evil. They're not evil for torturing animals, butchering families or raping children. They're evil for the way they can constantly lie, manipulate and control Truman without a hint of guilt or feeling for him. He is not a person to them. At best, he's a sickly child or a beloved pet. But he is not a real person to them. They are all the more evil for not being traditionally evil. Without being violent psychopaths or corrupt tyrants, they still proceed to assist in the theft of a man's free will. He is a pseduo-slave and they are all his willing slave-masters. They're evil for not being truthful.
Truman is a metaphor for humanity's goodness, our fundamnetal disposition being toward good. But the rest of the people in the show are selfish and controlling (no cast members in the Show ever show genuine emotion for Truman, but they do show emotions for themselves) and they represent the unfortunate truth that all too often people, even in enormous numbers, can be complicit or active in acts of grave inhumanity. [edit: there are a few exceptions, like Sylvia, but also two of the creators in the last scene who plead with the head guy to save Truman from drowning; that can also be cast as another complexity of human nature, when ostensibly bad people show an underlying good side]
I love the movie for what it says about life, about the world, about human independence, about truth, about goodness, and of course because in the end the best parts of life win out over the worst.
National Health Care And Shared Burdens
by neolibertarian
As I've argued many times in many places, making health insurance a shared cost gives other people an interest in your life. If you have a lot of sexual encounters, your risk of sexual diseases goes up; if you smoke or drink, then your risk of certain other heart and liver ailments increases; if you're fat or eat a high-cholesterol diet, you have certain other risks to your body.
Now if you're allowed to choose between insurers and coverage plans, you choose your own burdens. If you're a non-smoking, non-drinking, vitamin-popping, celibate vegan then you can take a plan that doesn't make you pay for expected costs from people with habits associated with health ailments. By the same token, people with dietary or social desires considered risky can take the financial burdens of those risks as they come.
But if the government takes the burden of insuring everyone (not even just the indigent or elderly) upon itself then our personal habits and risks become community business. If our neighbors and countrymen have to pay for our lung cancer, our stomach stapling, our antibiotics and our liver replacements, they have an interest in the risks we choose to undertake.
With an insurance company, they charge you more for a risky lifestyle - smoking, fat, risky activities in general can make your rates go up. But if the government, out of some socially-guided desire to 'help,' takes on the responsibility of providing health insurance, they won't be nearly so happy to charge us for what we cost. The government doesn't even allow insurance companies free reign to charge us what we cost. If the socialist-minded folks got to create a program of their own, they're probably going to do it from tax revenue and not from premiums charged to us. That way they can claim it's 'free' just because we pay for it indirectly rather than directly.
And since they can't charge us what we cost, the health insurance program will be under enormous pressure from health advocates, busy-bodies and socialists to legislate away our choices before the risks translate into higher health costs to the government. Certain foods, tobacco, alcohol and so forth will be more heavily taxed, regulated into smaller portions or even banned outright. The busybodies already want this sort of thing to happen. The health advocates want a message sent and would be fairly compliant and helpful in getting consumer choices limited. The socialists in part because socialists are largely busybodies anyway, but especially if they want to present a lower bill at budget time to preempt libertarian objections to continuing it.
It's definitely happening already. Watching Aaron Brown on CNN there was a piece I saw with a factsheet on the screen. It was presented to show how tons and tons of Americans are disgusting fatasses (accompanied by the usual neckdown shots to remind us that being unattractive is even worse than alleged health risks), how it causes an unending list of ailments, and to top it off it had a big price tag over $100 billion that these lardbags cost in health ailments. Most egregiously the report declared that we're all carrying the burden in higher premiums and so forth.
It's incredibly furstrating to deal with the hypocrisy and vanity of the subject without the busybody overtones. After all, some of the same personal-choice advocates who think you should be allowed to have sex or be gay at your preroagtive jump at the chance to look down on being overweight. And even after all the problems and societal 'awareness' about eating disorders, it's far easier to find social concerns about being fat than being skinny. It's especially ironic that health advocates in the media focus on being overweight as a health problem when being underweight is far more dangerous and deadlier.
We need to go the other direction to allow personal choice - even if it means people will be of a body shape you find displeasing, or smoke cigarettes in your line of sight, or otherwisemake personal choices you disapprove of.
We need to deregulate insurance, especially health insurance, and allow companies to set plans and premijms and so forth differently. Health insurance should be allowed to not cover weight-related ailments, so that some people can get plans unrelated to fat (or skinny) people problems. Prices should be allowed to float so that the reverse is true, and people can bear the burden of the risks they take on. The process will never be exact, since its meant to spread the risks among a larger pool, but at least we can allow freedom to choose insurance.
The analogy that keeps popping up in my head is of a large party going to eat dinner at a restaurant. If the patrons get different meals at different prices then the people who ate less will complain at having to pay more. But it's not hard at all to just get separate checks or to add up the different entrees from one check. If for some reason it were impossible to get separate checks, there would be pressure for everybody to get the same cost of food and drink. Imagine that the financial stakes were increased dramatically and throw the social biases and prejudices that exist against smokers, fat people, etc.
Yet another example of how individualism is individualism, whether economic or social.
'Plamegate' and Iraq
by neolibertarian
The most under-reported part of this over-reported story is that Joe Wilson was in fact incorrect. As I understand it, the scandal was that the White House was trying to undermine Joe Wilson because he criticized the case for war. Specifically, Wilson said that iraq didn't try to buy nuclear material from Niger.
But the problem is that Iraq DID try to buy nuclear material from niger in the late 90s. British Intelligence has maintained this whole time that Saddam sought nuclear material in Niger, even as the US pro-war people have been ignoring or denying it.
You'd never know from watching most of the coverage of the Plamegate scandal that the case for the war in Iraq, insofar as it was based on Iraq seeking nuclear materials from Africa, was perfectly correct!
Michael Moore Redux
by neolibertarian
I had a couple additional comments on Michael Moore that have been rattling around in my head.
First of all, it's ridiculous to assert - as in his American History cartoon for one undefended dependent clause in one sentence of Bowling for Columbine - that slavery is what made America the richest country in the world.
If anything slavery was economically detrimental for 95% of the non-slaves living in the South. It kept the Southern economy agrarian and feudalistic far longer than might otherwise have happened, by making plantation-style farming more profitable. It perpetuated this backwards economy while the West and North were growing and expanding and industrializing. It stunted Southern growth by skewing the economy; making feudalism profitable delayed the inevitability of capitalist expansion and industrialization. Slavery also cost a lot of Southerners jobs that would've otherwise gone to them - the claim that had the most resonance with otherwise pro-slavery minds.
We like to focus on the moral cause around free soil and abolitionism because today everybody accepts that slavery was a great moral evil. But back when slavery was the subject of much debate and conflict, economic arguments were often more important than anything else. Slavery was cast, by free soil and abolition advocates, as an economic curse upon any land it touched. It would corrupt and destroy an economy, drive out competition and ambition, and leave the non-slave population generally reduced to poverty, ignorance and sloth. This was one of the main characterizations of the South and Southerners by Yankees, and the general image persists to this day (think "trailer trash" and "redneck").
It was the slave-free North and West that were really booming beginning in the early to mid-1800s, not the South. And the South didn't really start taking off until the 1950s - the same time that commercially available air-conditioning facilitated mass migration of Northerners to the balmy South (the migration also laid the pre-conditions for moving the South into a Republican stronghold).
Sorry Moore, but slavery if anything made this country worse-off economically. It was a tremendous obstacle to economic growth in addition to being the great moral evil of the 19th century.
The other thing that was pissing me off is how all his movies HAVE to have references Flint and the blue-collar, hard-working, working-class, honest-living, simple-hearted, good-natured, and non-rich people living there. In Bowling for Columbine he uses different parts of Michigan to illustrate the points he wants to make. In Roger and Me the movie itself is about the closing of GM manufacturing in Flint, and the same subject comes back in his movie The Big One. In Fahrenheit 9/11, he manages to somehow make the war in Iraq really about families in Flint who have sons that join the army and are shocked to find that there's sometimes fighting involved in the military.
I have to wonder if maybe Moore's bumbling, fumbling, mishandled populism and nativism is a precursor to a more general populism on the left. After all, a lot of Democrats in 2004 got nativist about free trade and outsourcing, xenophobic about reconstructing Iraq, and nationalist when discussing the war on terror. Of course it's hardly credible since we're talking about the same people who generally love the UN, think France was right, and many of whom wondered loudly in December, 2004 about fleeing to Canada. It's obviously an incompetent attempt to out-flagwave the GOP (since Democrats think the Republicans are a bunch of idiotic flagwavers, rather than the only party with a coherent and credible foreign policy philosophy) but it's disturbing nonetheless.
And I can't finish this post without once again just pointing out that Michael Moore has always had a lot of trouble with facts and the truth whenever it might even indirectly complicate his telling a nice left-wing drama.
Chromium 6 and Erin Brockovich
by neolibertarian
After seeing the near-constant ads for the TNT airing of Erin Brockovich, I eventually looked up the real person on Wikipedia. The entry is fairly thin, but it has a related link to a debunking of the basis of the lawsuit against Pacific Gas and Electric, which ended in a settlement of $333 million ($2 mil going to Brockovich for what I understand was rounding up plaintiffs). The editorial ran in the Wall Street Journal, but it's reprinted on the author's website, including Brockovich's reply and the author's rebuttal.
What's interesting is the assertion by Michael Fumento, the author (and I think poorly refuted by Brockovich and the attorney who responded to Fumento) that ingesting chromium-6, the toxic chemical PG&E put in the groundwater, is not shown to be carcinogenic when ingested, only when inhaled. An interesting sidenote is Fumento's assertion that the same is true of plutonium and asbestos - carcionogenic when inhaled, effectively harmless when ingested. But the fact that chromium-6 is only evidentially linked to inhalation-based cancers (e.g. lungs) means that when the movie and lawsuit asserted that breast and prostate cancer were caused by PG&E they seemingly were wrong.
It's interesting that so many people like to take down the Big Guys (or in the case of Martha Stewart, the Big Bitch as she's almost invariably called) the factsget the fast and loose treatment. People are willing to believe that all sorts of chemicals are dangerous even in the absence of convincing evidence, and willing to condemn Martha Stewart even in the face of little constitutional standing.
It paints a dramatic picture to have an non-educated mother (the undisputed underdog) who isn't a lawyer (everybody hates lawyers) taking on a huge company (other people being rich = bad) with a team of lawyers(again, everybody hates lawyers) who are polluting. Never mind that the power company did far more to improve the health of the people in California by powering hospitals, and that our lifestyle of movies, television and light bulbs is made possible by energy production. Mever mind that the scientific evidence for proving chromium-6 isn't even a single cited study, but rather an irrelevant emotional trip about how cancer is bad.
Yes, cancer is bad, and yes a lot of people hate big companies, but those two facts don't prove causation or liability. I'm sure the movie is entertaining, but unfortunately it's just casting the modern version of a witch hunt in a positive, heroic, populist light.
Drezner Denied Tenure
by neolibertarian
The University of Chicago has denied Daniel Drezner tenure. (tip to VC) Drezner's blog is one of the more educated and intelligent places on the Internet.
IFC Kicked Out By Pataki
by neolibertarian
The World Trade Center Memorial is back to step one, after Pataki kicked out the IFC. Tons of people complained, including friends and family of 9/11 victims. The argument is simple: the International Freedom Center was going to discuss an important subject, but ultimately the site itself should be dedicated simply to mourning and remembrance, and a 'discussion of freedom' seems a little bit like a ploy to blame the US or to say that 9/11 was one of the tamer attacks on freedom. That's just not acceptable.
And it appears that the IFC people may have actually been attempting just that, since they've decided to cancel the project despite all the efforts put into it. They could've simply found somewhere else to do it, but if it wasn't distracting attention from the graves of the murdered I guess they aren't interested.
This means that questionable and arguably disrepectedful memorial designs have now been changed in both Manhattan and Pennsylvania due largely to Internet opposition. We should be glad that we live in a country where public opinion is relevant on matters like these.
Wealth and Enlistment
by neolibertarian
Although it's commonly reported or insinuated that the poor bear a disproportionate burden of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq (by people from Charlie Rangel to Michael Moore, who compared it to 1984-caliber totalitarianism). A stunningly illustrative graph analyzed at Tapscott's Copy Desk (tip to CQ) shows that actually the top two quintiles (in terms of average income for their home zip codes) contribute the most to military recruitment, and between 2003 and 1999 the percentage coming from the bottom quintile dropped.
An interesting graphic, since it shows that the richest zip codes send the most troops (in addition to paying the most taxes). If we're talking about spreading out the burden of who fights or who pays for the fighting then we'd have to be talking about making poorer people enlist more and pay more.
"Climate" And "Carbon" Are Different Words
by neolibertarian
Science time, people. In today's lesson, Joel Makower at Huffington Post learns that there's a major difference between "carbon-neutral" and "climate-neutral."
It's obvious that Joel Mankower, whose bio credits him as "a well-respected voice on business, the environment, and the bottom line" and "a writer and advisor on corporate sustainability practices," plays a little loose with his terms. Perhaps for rhetorical variety, he uses the terms "climate-neutral," "CO2-free," and "carbon-neutral" interchangeably. Obviously these are political jargon and not scientific terms. A CO2-free environment would be impossible there since human bodies naturally exhale it.
Carbon-neutral is a term, mostly political and social in nature, describing a person, place or group that does not add (or subtract) carbon from the local or global environment. Of course, that's an awfully high bar that involves not only a total lack of carbon pollution from a factory, but also from using cars or other devices that expel carbon. But the relevant sense - the sense where it's used to impede developing economies - is eliminating industrial carbon pollution. Never mind that animals release greater amounts of more powerful greenhouse gases like methane into the air, of course, because carbon is chosen less for its effects and more for its producers (industry).
Climate-neutral, though, is an even more social term that's probably unable to be measured. Even a total elimination of carbon pollution from factories and from cars wouldn't make us climate-neutral. Why? Because of the urban heat island effect.
Urbanization causes heat, because of how cement and other building materials absorb and retain heat and the way that buildings (especially tall ones) retain heat near the planet's surface. Even if there weren't any cars or people, a large city would be at least a few degrees warmer due to roads, parking lots, buildings, skyscrapers and so forth.
Land use is probably the greatest way humans can affect the temperature of the Earth unintentionally. Its effect is local, but still quite measurable. Urban areas have the greatest increase due to land use, and the areas directly around them get residual changes (such as measurably longer growing seasons in the heat 'shadow' next to a city). Semi-urban and suburban areas have less of an increase, because they have fewer skyscrapers, but all that asphalt still absorbs and retains a lot of heat. Even simple agricultural land is warmer because trees (natural shade) are removed and replaced with crops that provide far less cover from the sun. Uncultivated 'wilderness' is the coolest, having the least land use.
So Volvo's factories being 'carbon-neutral,' as in the linked Mankower post, are a world away from being 'climate-neutral.' In point of fact, they AREN'T carbon-neutral (unless employees, distributors and service/repair personnel travel there in non-carbon-fueled vehicles), but even if they were, the parking lot and building are contributing a lot of heat to the area, and are blocking the way for some nice, cool, shady trees to be planted.
I'd add that the heat island effect is not only demonstrated (unlike the theory that carbon emissions are going to warm the atmosphere and eventually the surface) but it's far more relevant to climate than carbons.
Firefly & Serenity
by neolibertarian
I had heard from various blogs that the show Firefly had a lot of libertarian themes. Until today, when they seem to be showing an all-day marathon type deal, I'd only seen part of one episode. It struck me as strange that it looked a lot more like a Western than a sci-fi show.
But that odd mixture really is a critical part of the show. The main characters are somewhere between cowboys and pirates, running from the law, working as low-level smugglers and transporters. But the show entirely about freedom, independence, privacy and doing the right thing. In fact, a lot of the show is about how a lot of people, alone or in governments, can be pretty rotten and exploitative, but the main characters always end up being (largely) decent to each other.
I only have two real complaints at this point. One, the science is unclear. Sometimes they say that there are hundreds of planets in one system and other times they say it's in the whole galaxy. I assume it's supposed to be galaxy, but then you have the problem of space travel: it could take years and years to get between systems. There's no cryogenics system, and there doesn't seem to be warp drive or hyperspace or anything like that. Also, they appear to use some kind of artificial gravity that works even when the ship's life support fails. Unless they some kind of ultra-dense material in the bottom of the hull, they'd all be floating around in spaceflight.
However, I can excuse both of those as poetic license. It makes the show more interesting that they can roam freely from planet to planet, and it would be weird if they were just floating everywhere all episode. I can also say that the show actually does pay attention to the rule of vacuums; when there's something happening in space or a vacuum (at least a few times) they don't use sound effects. That type of realism is most often ignored by every form of sci-fi entertainment, even though sound can't make waves in a vaccum (there's nothing to wave). But anyway, it doesn't make the show unwatchable, it's just something that's not addressed. It's also cool that they have a lot of Mandarin characters, styles and language in it; given how many Chinese there are, it's inevitable that Chinese will be more prominent in the future.
There are a lot of libertarian themes. I wouldn't say it's explicitly or devoutly libertarian, but that helps keep it unpredictable and interesting. But the captain does say that a government's job is to get in a man's way, and the point of keeping the ship flying is the freedom of the skies.
It's a good show. The entire series is on DVD, currently on sale (14 episodes, 3 of them unaired) at Amazon. The movie Serenity comes out this Friday based on the show (which was prematurely canceled after less than one full season, mostly after FOX mishandled several aspects of the marketing of the show).
Backbone At The Cost Of Truth
by neolibertarian
Lefties and the media have been proudly and triumphantly patting themselves on the back for being aggressive in covering the Katrina aftermath. They're proud to have media outlets that will question the government and hold them to the fire. As usual, these folks missed the point entirely.
The media are supposed to be aggressive in finding the truth: checking their sources, uncovering wrongdoing and so forth. Simply being combative, bratty and whiny isn't the same thing. Geraldo crying on tv, reporters yelling at police and disaster administrators, anchors being snotty in interview to executive officials, these are not respectable or serviceable substitutes for getting out a good story. If anything it simply justifies the closed-door mentality among government people. If you're going to get razzed on everything from a reporter on the street to the ultra-soft Today Show, then why be honest with the media?
No, this is incredibly bad as a precedent. A hostile media-government relationship is exceptable if it has to happen to report the truth (like government wrongdoing). But it's not a good thing, and it's not necessarily a sign that media are doing their jobs.
But now it looks like the story was, of course, grossly exaggerated. In their emotionalism and anger, reporters and anchors blew a story completely out of control in a form of mass hysteria largely limited to members of the media. Widely overblown:Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, the doctor from FEMA - Beron doesn't remember his name - came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.
"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalls the doctor saying.
The real total was six, Beron said.
Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the turning over of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice. State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been killed inside.
At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies were recovered, despites reports of corpses piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, said health and law enforcement officials.
Now, I understand that in a crisis when communications lines are limited, it's easy to get the facts wrong. I also know that the media love a bad story about 100 times more than a good story, if only because a bad story is more dramatic and gripping. And of course, the phenomenal failure Mayor Nagin even said that people in the Dome included hundreds of gang members and called the people there "almost animalistic."
But the real problem is that random disaster victims and Katrina refugees were quoted saying that there were bodies everywhere, children and infants being raped, corpses being devoured, and gang rule. The media, who apparently don't believe government officials even when they make easily-verifiable and impossible-to-lie-about assertions, accepted the unsourced rantings of people in crisis situations.
Yeah, that's an aggressive media. Every once in a while they can scrounge up a story underestimating the carnage in Darfur but every eight seconds for a solid three weeks they managed to ridiculously overestimate the situation in the Gulf Coast.
The one observation I'm left with is that in the absence of well-ordered information, superbly-clear handling and rush-faxed press releases, the media are prone to assume that large groupings of poor black people will behave more or less like the Turner Diaries.
Drugs In Movies
by neolibertarian
Drug dealers are often the villain in cop movies and TV shows as the main bad guy. A distant second is gun runners. Often the mega-villain dabbles in all sorts of illegal activities. It surprises me that movie-makers are so gung-ho on making drug runners look bad, even as they show a surprising sparsity of interest in making Communists or Islamo-fascists look bad.
But running drugs and guns, though not held in high public esteem, is insufficient to make somebody a bad guy. The activity is still seen by most people as more or less victimless in that it's not coercive of itself. Sure, most people think it's a pretty rotten thing to do, but they need more to really see the bad guy as worthy of being the arch-villain. That's why virtually all of the main villains that are involved in drugs have to be involved in murder, mayhem and the like.
Just the act of selling drugs isn't enough to make you really bad. It has to be made worse, like when a child is the one being sold the drugs. Then you also include violence, dishonesty, threats, and general sleaziness of the characters in order to get to a more evil place.
It's interesting to me that movie-makers implicitly admit that drugs by themselves are insufficient to make a sufficiently evil opponent.
What's even more interesting to me is that movies try so hard to make illegal drugs seem so dangerous and life-threatening. They get right on board with the anti-drug theme, but they seem so lukewarm about taking the anti-terrorist line in the war on terror. There have been big-budget movies about Islamic terrorists (The Siege, Executive Decision, Black Hawk Down) but they were generally before 9/11.
It makes little sense that something as inherently small-potatoes as stimulants and depressants is almost invariably paired with violence and evil in movies, while something as clear-cut as blowing up for an Islamic fascism is scarcely portrayed at all in big budget movies. Islamo-fascists already define themselves by their hatred, misogyny, violence, nihilism and destruction. If Hollywood writers can't turn that into an evil villain they're not paying attention.
E-mail to Instapundit
by neolibertarian
Over this piece in the NYT.I have to strenuously disagree with your interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in your third question to Judge Roberts in your NYT piece. The "born or naturalized" line is without a doubt NOT a definition of personhood, but rather a way of specifying which persons "are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." "Born or naturalized" is a modifier of "all persons," the same as the qualification that they be "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" in order to be citizens.
If the first sentence of Section 1 were a definition of persons then it would be open hunting season on immigrants (the non-naturalized) and foreign diplomats (those not 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof'), who would be reduced to no more rights than an embryo or fetus, rules of comity aside. Such is thankfully not the case.
Barone's Blog
by neolibertarian
Michael Barone's blog is only a couple weeks old but it's already full of insightful commentary. Barone has a good grasp of politics and has a great track record, including publishing biennial editions of the Almanac of American Politics (the most recent one just came out). His blog is well worth reading, and so it's now going to the blogroll in the left column.
