From everything I’ve learned about geo-politics over the last 10 years, it’s extremely rare to see truly objective analysis about the very complicated history in the Middle East and how it relates to the rest of the world, especially America.
This interview with Lee Smith about his new book "The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations" is really interesting, for those who like geo-politics and learning about the world as it actually exists.
It’s kind of long, but well worth taking 30-40 minutes to read it. Thanks to Michael Totten for the interview.
In reality-world, Washington just gets in the way of economic growth and jobs creation
Must-read Mark Steyn:
As President Obama sees it, whatever the problem – from health care to education, banking to the environment – the solution is more Washington.
Simply as a matter of internal logic, this is somewhat perplexing. After all, when he isn’t blaming George W. Bush, Obama blames “Washington” – a Washington mired in “partisanship” and “pettiness” and “the same tired battles” and “Washington gimmicks” that do nothing but ensure that our “problems have grown worse.” Washington, Obama tells us, is “unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems.”
So let’s have more Washington! In our schools, in our hospitals, in our cars, in everything!
Which raises the question: Does even Obama listen to Obama’s speeches?
The public does – at least to this extent: They understand that, when he’s attacking the tired old Washington games, he’s just playing the tired old Washington games. But, when he’s proposing the tired old Washington solutions, he means it; that’s the real Obama, the only Obama on offer. And everything the president proposes means more debt, which at the level this guy’s spending means, at some point down the road, either higher taxes or total societal collapse.
Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland, because the rules are known to all parties. You don’t go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the rules are whatever the state’s whims happen to be that morning.
That’s why Obama is such a job-killer. Why would a small business take on a new employee? The president’s proposing a soak-the-banks tax that could impact your access to credit. The House has passed a cap-and-trade bill that could impose potentially unlimited regulatory costs. The Senate is in favor of “health” “care” “reform” that will allow the IRS to seize your assets if you and your employees’ health arrangements do not meet the approval of the federal government. Some of these things will pass into law, some of them won’t. But all of them send a consistent, cumulative message: that there are no rules, that they’re being made up as they go along – and that some of them might even be retroactive, as happened this week with Oregon’s new corporate tax.
In such an environment, would you hire anyone? Or would you hunker down and sit things out? Obama can bury it in half a ton of leaden telepromptered sludge but the world has got the message: More Washington, more microregulation of every aspect of your life, more multi-trillion-dollar spending, and no agreed rules in a game ever more rigged against you.
Federal government tinkering with the economy and regulatory intrusion is almost always a very bad idea. Our economy has grown over the years in spite of, not because of, Washington’s ever-increasing attempts to control it. So how would more Washington help us now?
And frankly, we’ve got quite enough government already. Thanks, but no, I’m really trying to cut down.
Oh, and one more thing. Obama this week acted like the idea that cutting spending and taxes wouldn’t help the economy or the deficit? Oh really. Wanna bet?
Newsflash: cutting tax rates leads to higher revenues for the government. So cutting spending and increasing tax revenue would most definitely help the economy and the deficit.
A President of the United States really ought to understand tax policy and economic markets, don’t you think? Along with the journalists and pundits who cover Washington, and us voters.
We can do what works, or something else. I’m in favor of doing what works.
YouTube – The Toys – A Lover’s Concerto ( Live 1965 )
I’ve always liked this song, and today it was the first song I heard in the car on the way home from the hospital where my 10-year-old son had spent the last 18 hours. He’s OK now, thank God. But when your bright-eyed, talkative, hyperactive son suddenly turns unresponsive and forgets how to spell his last name or get into a car, you get a little concerned. And then, when he doesn’t even recognize his brother, and his brother starts to cry, well, just try to imagine what that is like.
So today at 2:55 p.m. I was driving home from the hosptial, already feeling lucky, and then this song came on, and I felt like it was meant just for me.
And it was good.
And so from now on, every time I hear Lover’s Concerto, I’ll remember today, and the way it felt to know that my son is still healthy after a very scary episode. And it will be good, all over again.
Gentlemen, start your engines:
David Strayer, who studies distracted driving and runs the applied cognition lab at the University of Utah, has found that the likelihood of a crash increases fourfold when someone is talking on a cell phone; if they are texting, they are eight times more likely to crash.
4x and 8x sound like some pretty impressive levels of driving impairment. I wonder how many alcoholic drinks those would equate to? I don’t know, but it sure sounds like it must be in legally drunk territory, possibly even insanely drunk, like 0.20% or more.
So, when does the demonization of “texting while driving” start? The loss of driving privileges, the embarrassing news coverage, the huge legal fees to defend yourself, the PR campaigns and Congressional testimony, the lobbying groups such as MADD, the social pressures through the schools and other places, etc.?
The answer is “pretty soon”, apparently.
‘FocusDriven’ aims to be like MADD
The organization released the study on the same day as its president and CEO, Jane Froetscher, announced with U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood the creation of “FocusDriven” – an advocacy group in the style of Mothers Against Drunk Driving that
will work to fight distracted driving.“Just as groups like MADD changed attitudes about drunk driving, I believe FocusDriven can help raise awareness and change the way people think about distracted driving,” LaHood said in announcing the group. “Together, I hope we can put an end to this dangerous practice.”
The group will be headed by Jennifer Smith, whose mother was killed by a driver on his cell phone. All five board members have also lost loved ones from cell phone distracted drivers.
Yes, it’s a public safety issue. Yes, people shouldn’t text and drive. Yes, it is a tragedy when people are killed by distracted drivers of any type. We all agree on that.
What concerns me is the tendency to over-reach. Do-gooders start out with good intentions, and then they acquire power, and it goes to their heads. Then politicians and law enforcement smell blood in the water, and decide that our individual liberties aren’t that important after all. So they implement unconstitutional practices like roadside stops to check every driver that passes by.
I’m not so keen on expanded police powers when it infringes on individual liberty. Call me kooky.
And if texters are eight times as likely to crash as normal drivers, they should pay higher insurance rates, and they should get EXACTLY the same degree of social abuse, criminal charges, etc., as the level of alcohol that produces an eight-times-more-likely-to-crash outcome.
There is a “felony DUI”, right? Will we see a “felony DWT”? Roadside stops for texters? Lawyers advertising on TV that they can handle your texting-while-driving case?
Doubtful. And we should ask why that is.
Because impaired driving is impaired driving, whether it’s caused by texting or drinking.
Pull up a chair, take a load off, and read about intellectual growth and political discovery
I can most highily recommend A mind is a difficult thing to change: my change story. a multi-part series at neoneocon.com about learning to open our eyes and see the world as it actually is, instead of wishing for a world that doesn’t exist so that we never have to step out of our comfort zones.
It’s fascinating. And it calls attention to the need to always learn and always question our assumptions and received wisdom, and to be careful about relying on visual media like war photographs as a source of reliable information.
In fact, you have to be careful about relying on any media outlet as a source of reliable information.
There is so much more to say about this topic, but for now, I’ll just say that I’ve had a similar experience over the last ten years, both learning new things that would have been very nice to know before, and learning that many of the things I thought I knew were actually 180° wrong.
As she points out, the sense of betrayal from such an experience is quite strong. And it definitely does suck to realize you’ve been buying lies and spin for decades. But it sucks even worse to realize that, and then continue to buy more of the lies and spin anyway.
It’s never too late to learn. And when politicians bring their usual ration of platitudes meant to separate you from your money, in order to shift the balance of power towards an ever-more-corrupt government and away from you as an individual, do you want to be armed with facts, or fantasy?
Global warming nonsense, NOAA and NASA edition:
Climate-gate part II begins now: The scientists with Icecap.us website announced findings late last week that not only was the CRU involved in producing fraudulent weather data, but two United States agencies, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have also been falsifying climate reports for years. NOAA, the report concludes, is actually “ground-zero” for the fraud of global warming, not the East Anglia Institute.
Climate researchers have discovered that government researchers improperly manipulated data in order to claim 2009 as “THE SECOND WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.”
Click over to read the whole sorry tale.
“Politicization of science”, indeed.
Fewer and fewer people favor spanking children, but increasing numbers of us are fine with abusing them via prescription.
Well worth your time: Texas Rangers’ Josh Hamilton talks about role faith plays in helping deal with addiction – chicagotribune.com.
An addiction is an ongoing daily struggle. And the same is true for faith.
As a Bears fan, it was frustrating and maddening to watch the Bengals-Jets playoff game on Saturday, featuring two former Bears running backs given away for basically nothing, but who are now prominent and productive backs for their playoff theams.
The Bears traded Jones to clear the decks for Benson because Benson was (a) highly paid and (b) a high draft pick, even though Benson hadn’t earned playing time by beating out Jones. Then Benson did very little as the featured back, and was so unpopular that he was even booed by the home crowd when he left the field with an injury late in the 2007 season. Then, after two high-profile off-the-field legal incidents in the off-season, he was released.
So how did that trade of Thomas Jones work out for the Bears?
The domino effect of Benson fiasco – Inside the Bears
The New York Jets stole Jones from the Bears, swapping second-round picks so the Bears could move up from 63rd to 37th. In exchange, the Jets have gotten 3,833 rushing yards and 31 total touchdowns from Jones.
Yeah, that guy stinks. Good move, Jerry Angelo.
So the Bears stocked two playoff teams with quality running backs for free. Sweet. And now they have a bad offensive line that can’t open holes, also because of Angelo’s mis-management of personnel.
How this guy keeps his job, I have no idea. He must have naked pictures of somebody filed away in a drawer.
UPDATE: Jones has also carried the ball “1,438 times in a row without sustaining an injury serious enough to keep him out of a game”. And he almost never fumbles.
Throwing money at the mortgage mess:
Fed Officials Disagree About Withdrawing Stimulus – WSJ.com
The Fed is on track to purchase $1.25 trillion of mortgage backed securities, and has said it plans to complete the purchases by the end of March. The purchases have helped to drive down mortgage interest rates, providing an important boost to housing and financial markets. When the Fed stops buying, mortgage rates could turn higher.
But it gets worse.
This is on top of 1.1 TREEEL-YUN Dollars that the Fed already shoveled into the furnace in 2009 to prop up the corrupt and insolvent Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Let’s see, that adds up to 2.35 Trillion Dollars. That is a lot of f**king money.
To put that in perspective, if you think of one million as a lot of something, one trillion is one million times one million: 1,000,000 * 1,000,000 = 1,000,000,000,000
So 2.35 trillion dollars is $2,350,000,000,000 more debt we just piled up.
Payable by you, me , our kids, and our grandkids, that is. And for what? To delay the inevitable continuation of bank failures caused by bad mortgage debt?
Can somebody explain the long-term benefit of this to me? Please?
David Tepper runs a hedge fund called Appaloosa Management. He made a big bet in ‘09 that bank stocks would recover, buying BofA below $3 and Citigroup preferred shares below $1. They’re now at about $15 and $3.40 or so.
So, for the year, he made Two point Five BEEEL-YUN Dollars.
I suppose that makes him the latest bad guy in the Other People Making Money Hurts You … Somehow … Just Don’t Ask Me How sweepstakes.
Hooowwww yadoin’ everybody! Step right up and place your bets on USD hyper-inflation!
Can the same disastrous hyper-inflation that hit Zimbabwe also hit the United States too?
We’d better hope not, because that picture is not pretty.
I normally dismiss doomsday scenarios out-of-hand. People are always telling us the world is going to end, or some horrible fate awaits us, due to some goofy reason or another. But it never seems to come true, does it? I’ve learned to disregard such talk on principle.
But economic disaster is different. The risk is real, as we know from past history, as recently as September 2008, with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, where a bank run was already in progress. So, I encourage you to read the article above. Think about it. The pieces he mentions are definitely in place.
There is no doubt that Americans as individuals, and America as a country and a government, have been borrowing against tomorrow to live large today. And we’ve been doing it for a long time now. We’ve been more than happy to eat our cake and have it too, and politicians have been more than happy to let us do that, while insisting that there is plenty more where that came from.
And there is also no doubt that the Obama administration is ramping that whole process way, WAY up.
And finally, there is no doubt that while government does grow, it never, EVER shrinks.
So all the pieces are in place. The stage is set. These are facts.
Will it come to pass? I guess that depends on factors like how much money we print to pay our debts, and how big those debts grow over the next few years.
But economic catastrophe can’t happen here, right?
Why not? Americans like to imagine themselves immune to economic disaster, as if insane levels of wealth are a unique American birthright. And ever since the late 1800s, with a few interruptions, that has been more-or-less true, for much of our population.
But the reason it has been more-or-less true in the past is not just because America is America. The reason is the miracle engine of economic expansion. I.e., if we screw up our economy enough today, the wealth train stops. And some say it has already stopped, because we’ve been borrowing against our future and tapping into our home equity to finance illusory lifestyles, while jobs have been disappearing overseas. And there is much evidence to support that view, too.
So who knows? I don’t have the answers. Well, maybe I do:
Dear Government:
STOP SPENDING SO MUCH FRIGGING MONEY!!!
Thank you.
Sincerely, Jeff
Yeah, you can just cross that off the list, right now.
So, is hyper-inflation just one more doomsday prediction that never comes true? Let’s hope so. I really, really hope so.
But we have to consider the possibility that we might be whistling past the graveyard here. And even when viewed in the best possible light, it seems that our economy is not healthy when it relies so much on consumer spending.
Place your bets. And ask yourself: what does have real value when currency itself has none?
The obvious answers: weapons, your own supply of food and water, and firewood. Welcome to the year 1620!
(via Threedonia)
“Why don’t we just put everyone in the United States on the federal government payroll and call it a day?”
- Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif
If a CO2 study concludes that man is not killing the planet with his evil economic activity, does it make a sound?
No. Don’t be silly.
No Increase of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years « Watts Up With That?
Everybody else in the media today is playing catch-up. So if you’d like to read the original press release and participate in the already ripe comments left then, see this WUWT story: Bombshell from Bristol: Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing? – study says “no”
That second link starts out:
New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.
Scientific consensus could not be reached for comment.
Barney Frank spends our money like a drunken sailor. He seems to be OK with financial fraud, too.
Instead of focusing on Bernie Madoff and Goldman Sachs, we ought to be paying more attention to the role of our government leaders:
By the end of 2008, Fannie and Freddie held or guaranteed approximately 10 million subprime and Alt-A mortgages and mortgage-backed securities (MBS)—risky loans with a total principal balance of $1.6 trillion. These are now defaulting at unprecedented rates, accounting for both their 2008 insolvency and their growing losses today. Since 2008, under government control, the two agencies have continued to buy dicey mortgages in order to stabilize housing prices.
There is more to this ugly situation. New research by Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer for Fannie Mae and a housing expert, has found that from the time Fannie and Freddie began buying risky loans as early as 1993, they routinely misrepresented the mortgages they were acquiring, reporting them as prime when they had characteristics that made them clearly subprime or Alt-A.
So it wasn’t good enough for Fannie and Freddie to make risky loans using other people’s money. Our money. No, they had to compound that error and commit systemic fraud, which turns out to be much, much worse.
In general, a subprime mortgage refers to the credit of the borrower. A FICO score of less than 660 is the dividing line between prime and subprime, but Fannie and Freddie were reporting these mortgages as prime, according to Mr. Pinto. Fannie has admitted this in a third-quarter 10-Q report in 2008.
An Alt-A mortgage is one in which the quality of the mortgage or the underwriting was deficient; it might lack adequate documentation, have a low or no down payment, or in some other way be more likely than a prime mortgage to default. Fannie and Freddie were also reporting these mortgages as prime, according to Mr. Pinto.
It is easy to see how this misrepresentation was a principal cause of the financial crisis.
Market observers, rating agencies and investors were unaware of the number of subprime and Alt-A mortgages infecting the financial system in late 2006 and early 2007. Of the 26 million subprime and Alt-A loans outstanding in 2008, 10 million were held or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie, 5.2 million by other government agencies, and 1.4 million were on the books of the four largest U.S. banks.
In addition, about 7.7 million subprime and Alt-A housing loans were in mortgage pools supporting MBS issued by Wall Street banks—which had long before been driven out of the prime market by Fannie and Freddie’s government-backed, low-cost funding. The vast majority of these MBS were rated AAA, because the rating agencies’ models assumed that the losses that are incurred by subprime and Alt-A loans would be within the historical range for the number of high-risk loans known to be outstanding.
But because of Fannie and Freddie’s mislabeling, there were millions more high-risk loans outstanding. That meant default rates as well as the actual losses after foreclosure were going to be outside all prior experience. When these rates began to show up early in 2007, it was apparent something was seriously wrong with assumptions on which AAA ratings had been based.
Losses, it was now certain, would invade the AAA tranches of the mortgage-backed securities outstanding. Investors, having lost confidence in the ratings, fled the MBS market and ultimately the market for all asset-backed securities. They have not yet returned.
By the end of 2007, the MBS market collapsed entirely. Assets once carried at par on financial institutions’ balance sheets could not be sold except at distress prices. This raised questions about the stability and even the solvency of most of the world’s largest financial institutions.
Read the whole thing.
Obviously, Fannie and Freddie are corrupt organizations, with systemic fraud from top to bottom, and they need to be disbanded. Barney Frank is the chairman of the Financial Services Committee. All of this rampant criminal activity occurred on his watch. And unless he’s a friggin’ idiot, he had a series of nice paydays from it, too.
But they will never be disbanded, of course. That would be horribly inconvenient for Barney Frank’s bottom line. And the bottom lines of probably thousands of other rent-seekers, too.
Barney Frank was the captain of this Titanic. And he recently pushed through a financial regulation bill that authorizes up to $4 TRILLION dollars in bailouts. Just what we need, more guidance from the government that got us into this mess, and more promises of paying money that it doesn’t have.
To review, government is responsible for the following steps in the mortgage meltdown:
- forcing banks to make risky loans
- using taxpayer money to buy those loans
- re-packaging those loans in a fraudulent manner by calling them prime
- thereby, passing on obscene risk to the financial system at large
So, where is the outrage at the government?
Last night I went swimming with Jordan and Jacob, my two youngest boys, and we played a silly game called “Chocolate Cake”.
You tell a story, and eventually you say the phrase “chocolate cake”, and then everybody has to jump into the pool. Last one in is the loser. They learned it in swim class at that same pool, and they love it.
For the three of us, I think the game is mainly an excuse to have a big giggle-fest, because we try to work in phrases like “chocolate steak”, “chocolate lake”, etc. This might sound lame to you, but for an audience of 8- and 10-year-old boys, it’s Pure Comedy Gold.
Usually I just do the story-telling part, but this time, I hauled my heft out of the water and played a couple of times. I even managed to win once. Pwned!
The stories go on and on and on … and on … and they are ridiculous. Stupid and silly and funny. We all make each other laugh a lot. One time I questioned whether Jordan said “cake” or “kake”. Hey, you never know.
And then when the “chocolate cake” kicks in, somebody wins and somebody loses, but we don’t care. Much. The end is actually anti-climactic, because we’re having fun with it during the game. An audience of 8- and 10-year-old boys can do that.
These are the kind of memories I don’t have enough of, and that I crave for myself as I grow old. My oldest son James is 21 now, and it bugs me that I can’t really picture him in my mind as an 8-year-old, or re-imagine what his voice sounded like back then. I don’t know why it matters—this imagined ability that maybe nobody else has—but it seems important to me, somehow, in a way that even I do not understand.
I guess the “art therapy rehab” didn’t work so great.
Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit were released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison in November, 2007, according to American officials and Department of Defense documents. [...] American officials agreed to send the two terrorists from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia where they entered into an “art therapy rehabilitation program” and were set free, according to U.S. and Saudi officials.
Huh.
Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that releasing terrorist, enemy-combatant scumbags from military prison has consequences?
And that finger paints didn’t pacify their American-murdering ways?
Wow. I need a second here. Holy crap! This could be a problem.
I was under the impression that these fine fellows would retire to a life of leisure and philanthropy. I mean, what else am I to think when so many smart people were telling us that we were depriving these gentlemen of their rights?
And now we find out that they received the much-ballyhooed art therapy and still went back to trying to commit mass murder?
I just don’t know what to believe any more.
It’s almost enough to make me think the idea to release them in the first place was dangerous and naive, and even stupid, not to mention “objectively pro-terrorist”, to borrow a line from George Orwell.
Maybe we should give them a wad of cash when we release them. And a car. Maybe a blank passport, too. There must be something we can do to help them, and make them like us!
Tonight the Chicago Bears play the Minnesota Vikings at home for the chance to have a better record than … the Oakland Raiders!
True fact. The Raiders have won 5 games, including away games at Denver and Pittsburgh, and home wins over Cincinnati and Philly . The Bears did beat Pittsburgh, but got drilled by the Bengals and dominated by the Eagles.
This year has been, I think, the biggest train-wreck we’ve seen here on a football field since Northwestern infamously lost all those games in a row in the early 80s.
There were expectations going into this year. Hopelessly incorrect ones, but expectations none-the-less. We’d been deluded into believing that the basic structure of a winning team was in place, and all we needed was an upgrade at QB and it would all fall into place: division titles, playoff success, maybe even a ring.
HA! What were we smoking?
See BookTV’s incredible list of best books of 2009, including links to tons of similar lists on other sites.
One reason that I love BookTV: they focus on non-fiction in three two of my favorite subject areas: history and economics. The third focus is politics, which can be interesting when it centers on policy and the results of same, or when written by humorous people like P.J. O’Rourke or Mark Twain. Otherwise … not so much.
Cecil Adams writes fondly about the hobby shops of yore:
Model airplanes figured prominently, but you could also find battleships, submarines, missiles, tanks, artillery, and other warlike gear, plus a smattering of sports cars, trucks, and similar objects of boyish fascination. … Each kit had numerous parts, many of them tiny, which were to be assembled in accordance with detailed numbered instructions, a process that could take days. It’s fair to say a good deal of extraneous detail was omitted by the more impatient participants, because the fate of the typical military model was to be blown up with firecrackers or filled with lighter fluid and thrown off the porch. I however was more punctilious about it, believing this to be in the national interest. To this day, were a crisis to arise, I’m sure you could find lots of ex-ten-year-olds capable of assembling a Nike Ajax antiaircraft missile, but if they’re anything like my brother they’ll slobber glue on the warhead and mount the thrusters cockeyed on the launch rail, to say nothing of omitting the decals. Should the Iranian air force come with nukes, therefore, be sure you stick with me.
Later he mentions passing the torch to his sons:
Years later a hobby shop opened up near my house. I took the little researchers there a few times to purchase B-17s and such, till one day a sign announced a going-out-of-business sale — everything half or more off, including a formidable inventory of trains. Here was an opportunity. The kids demanded their own locomotives, showing an impressive eye for quality, and naturally I felt the need to purchase a couple additional items just to fill things out. Before I knew it I had spent, well, a lot. We took it all home and set it up in the basement, and for quite a while thereafter had an extravagant display, with a tangle of switches and crossovers and multiple circling trains worthy of Casey Jones on drugs. Eventually it had to make way for a Ping Pong table, so we packed the trains away. Maybe someday I’ll take them out again, maybe I won’t — the essential goal had been accomplished. Some will deride this as a sign of eternal adolescence, but to me it merely shows a dream deferred isn’t necessarily a dream denied.
I loved hobby shops as a kid. We had one in Evanston, at Central and Green Bay Road, just a block from where we lived. They raced slot cars. I was about six years old, and I can vividly remember to this day walking in there on a Saturday morning and being mesmerized by the HUGE track they had set up. Of course, everything seems huge when you’re six, but that is part of the wonder of that age.
When I got a little older, I used to build models, too. Planes, tanks, ships. I remember distinctly building the Bismark battleship. It took quite a few days, if I remember correctly, but it was so cool when it was done.
I see there is a place called Oakridge Hobbies and Toys in Downers Grove, not all that far from here. They’ve even got slot cars and a track. I’ll have to check that out, and maybe I can get my kids interested, too.
