China's Bubble Economy

It isn't the stock market that is a bubble, it is the economy itself.

Obama supporter of the week

Next time you hear a Democrat brag about owning California, play them this video.

Profiling the police

So Obama says that the history of behavior of a class of people should guide our thinking about the guilt of an individual's guilt in a particular case.  Uhmmm. Isn't that kind of like profiling?  He is a police office and we know that police officers do th at sort of thing so this police officer probably did ______.  Change police officer to "black man," and how is it not profiling?  And what does the history of getting stopped disproportionately have to do with this case?  You see two guys jimmying a lock you kind of call the police, yes?  And the police have to assume they are bad guys until proven otherwise. 

The smoking gun has some nice tetails from the police report.  It sure sounds like Gates to me. 

Profiling the police

So Obama says that the history of behavior of a class of people should guide our thinking about the guilt of an individual's guilt in a particular case.  Uhmmm. Isn't that kind of like profiling?  He is a police office and we know that police officers do th at sort of thing so this police officer probably did ______.  Change police officer to "black man," and how is it not profiling?  And what does the history of getting stopped disproportionately have to do with this case?  You see two guys jimmying a lock you kind of call the police, yes?  And the police have to assume they are bad guys until proven otherwise. 

Lessons from TennCare

Turns out that single payer has been tried.  Turns out that when stuff is free people use more of it.  A lot more.  A free doctor visit is cheaper than paying $5 for cold medicine at the drugstore.  Turns out that employers prefer free to not free too--over just 55% of the people enrolled in Tenncare came from the uninsured; almost half came from employer provided health insurance.   

Tea Party Republicans

I think the tea party movement is a sign of the republican party's strength.  The tea party protesters are demanding that the republican party live up to its ideology, not down to the normal incentives of facing incumbent Congressmen. The disaffection the public has had with the Republicans is mainly due to the Republicans not living up to their principles.  The disaffection of the public with the Democrats is based on the fear that they might actually live up to theirs. 

The death of innovation

This is a nice summary of the recent pieces by Glenn Reynolds and Megan McArdle about the effect of socialized medicine on innovation.  The great danger of a system that strangles innovation is that no one notices it is gone.  No particular person complains about the cure that wasn't invented.  The interesting thing is that so many Americans have a completely different picture of their health care system. Europeans even more so.  The US's innovation is either subsidizing a world of free riders or barbarically letting people die because they don't have enough money.  I have a British friend who, when I asked why she thought that government would be any better at running the health care system than it is at running airlines or phone companies snapped that providing a certain decent amount of health care for the poor was the minimal test of a civilized society.  To the rest of the world the US is still some sort of nightmare world of rag pickers dying in the street. 

Dick Morris

I am listening to Dick Morris on C-span. He is really great.  Too bad he has this degenerate sex life.  Even if it was only degenerate for a little while (as if I know).

He is really great on the key threat to our freedom, the international bureaucracy.  What I call the mandarinate, is taking over larger and larger swathes of public policy.  As Morris puts it there is a new agreement to make not only international financial regulation but executive compensation in "all industries" will be subject to their "agreements." 

Dick Morris

I am listening to Dick Morris on C-span. He is really great.  Too bad he has this degenerate sex life.  Even if it was only degenerate for a little while (as if I know). 

Does the 14th Amendment Cover White People?

Something from Evan Coyne Maloney's blog about Fredric Dicker's column on the New York State legislature:

"But instead of trying to recruit new hires, they fired nearly 200 almost exclusively white workers and replaced them with a large number of minority employees, many of whom were seen by their fellow workers to be unskilled at their new jobs.

The move produced severe racial tensions, made worse by the fact that, as a high-level Democratic staffer confided, “We’ve been told to only hire minorities.'’

--Well, that would create some tensions, wouldn't it?  Good thing the people fired weren't black, it might also have created a lawsuit. 

The Afghans like it when we kill terrorists

Here is an article from the Washington Times. An interesting point is that the locals like it when the terrorists get killed. Too often we view the fight as between us and the people of Afghanistan, when the real story is that the Afghans often hate the terrorists more than we do.

More porn less rape

here's an interesting item showing that increased availability of pornography decreases the incidence of rape. The overall correlation looks pretty strong. A more formal study, using Internet availability as a proxy for porn seems to reinforce  the finding.

Of course, with any correlation over time there is a big problem with spuriousness. Increased availability of pornography was probably not the only thing to change over the last 30 years. The cost of reporting rape decreased while the cost of committing rape, due in part to the very decrease in reporting cost, probably increased. There has been a cultural and social shift, making rape less acceptable. And while pornography has become more available, so has sex itself presumably. The same relaxing of mores that makes pornography more acceptable and available presumably has the same effect on sex. Also, it may be harder to commit rape. In movies nowadays you see women fighting just as if they were men practically. Even if this is unrealistic, it might mean that women are much more likely to resist violently, making the crime harder to commit.

The deeper and more interesting question is whether sex and rape our substitute goods or complements? Both social conservatives and feminists, through slightly different arguments, must maintain that they are complements. Both of them are forms of objectification of women. Therefore, the more you have the one the more you want of the other.

There also seem to be the possibility that even if one did reduce rape it might also reduce other things, like the quality of relationships and the stability of marriages.

I think we should always be suspicious of time series showing some broad, general trend of improvement and attributing it to one causal factor. Things in general tend to get better because people have an incentive to make them better.

It's not the lies but the silences

here is a link to the Christian Science Monitor's  report on the recently released transcripts of the FBI's conversations with Saddam Hussein after he was captured. The report emphasizes the fact that Hussein did not have  weapons of mass destruction, but somehow manages to pass over the fact that he tried to give the opposite impression. It usefully brings out an explanation for this: he was afraid of Iran. He worried that the inspectors would reveal his weakness.

The commenters on the article take all of this as more proof that Bush lied and people died. They seem to gloss over the fact that Hussein was actively trying to convince the world that he had  weapons mass destruction. After all, the years of dealing with the UN and Bill Clinton had reasonably convinced him that he had nothing to fear from defying them -- except of course for the sanctions which were starving his people.

Obama care

I went to the state drivers license bureau yesterday. In Mississippi even the most dreary bureaucratic tasks are rendered a bit more bearable by the innate politeness and good nature of Mississippi. Still, the process was frightfully inefficient. I saw two people stand in the information line for about 10 minutes only to be told that they were in the wrong line and should pick a number and start over again. They were told this very politely, this being Mississippi, but the underlying bureaucratic incompetence and indifference to practices which inconvenience their captive clientele was the same as it would be anywhere.

All this is just to say to those who say that we should have a government get directly into the business of supplying healthcare on the grounds that its efficiency will help hold down costs in the private sector:  where do the people on your planet go to get their driver's licenses?

Obama care

I went to the state drivers license bureau yesterday. In Mississippi even the most dreary bureaucratic tasks are rendered a bit more bearable by the innate politeness and good nature of Mississippi. Still, the process was frightfully inefficient. I saw two people stand in the information line for about 10 minutes only to be told that they were in the wrong line and should pick a number and start over again. They were told this very politely, this being Mississippi, but the underlying bureaucratic incompetence and indifference to practices which inconvenience their captive clientele was the same as it would be anywhere.

All this is just to say to those who say that we should have a government get directly into the business of supplying healthcare on the grounds that its efficiency will help hold down costs in the private sector: what planet do you live on, and where do you get your driver's license?

The Hurt Locker

Good review of the movie. The thing that is so disturbing about this movie is that it is actually being touted as an a-political and admiring look at the US armed forces.  The intelligentsia is so insulated from any challenges to its belief system that it doesn't even recognize the monstrous smears commits. 

Obama on the wrong side of history

Why does Obama always choose the wrong side? In Iran, in Honduras? Maybe it isn't the wrong side?  Maybe that is his side?  Socialism!

Politics makes strange bedfellows

Bruce Yandle on Baptists and Bootleggers.

Signing statements

Another Obama-hypocrisy call, this on those monstrous signing statements (how dare he have an opinion!) that Bush was excoriated for.

here is more from the Volokh Conspiracy.

Signing statements

Another Obama-hypocrisy call, this on those monstrous signing statements (how dare he have an opinion!) that Bush was excoriated for.

Now that's a story

Michael Yon mentions the real story behind Rudyard Kipling's "The Man who would be King," in his first posting from Afghanistan. It turns out that the novel was based on the true story of an American Jew named Josiah Harlan, who actually did manage to get himself made a prince if not a king. His descendents are apparently around today and had the title "Prince of Ghor.” that really is better, not only than what I could make up, But what Rudyard Kipling could make up.

He goes on to discuss the situation in an isolated area called Ghor. The Lithuanians are in command of this outpost and they take their job very seriously. He reports at length on an interview he has with a local official. Two points are of interest. One is that the Indian government has provided some support for building a TV station. Moves by regional powers to gain influence in Afghanistan is an underreported aspect of this conflict.

The other point the official argues at length is that the Americans are spending too much money and resources in the South fighting the Taliban, rather than supporting Afghans in the rest of the country. Why spend money and resources on the people are fighting and let your friends go begging? I think this is a very important point.  I've heard this point for many in Afghanistan. It seems to be a leitmotif of our approach to the world in general, to concentrate on our enemies and ignore our friends. I don't know why we do that. Liberal ideologues seem to think that we can make our enemies like us. The military -- perhaps not surprisingly -- concentrates on killing enemies and leaves taking care of our friends to others. I wonder if it is not due in some part to our  judicially oriented approach to foreign policy.

A judicial approach to the world looks at problems primarily in terms of people whose behavior you want to change. People whose behavior is good are ignored. A law-abiding citizen should not only not be punished, but should have no particular contact with the law in general. Moreover, a judicial mindset sees its job not only as leaving the law-abiding alone, but may also induce one to look at benefiting the law-abiding, rewarding those with whom we have no particular complaint as showing favoritism. A court and a judicial system is there to punish wrongdoers.  Rewarding people for not  doing wrong is irrelevant to its reason for existence if not actually corrupt.

I heard over and over again about how America does not take care of her friends. I hear over and over again, particularly from people in the ethnic groups that side with America, that they get nothing out of it. Of course, to a judicial mindset, getting something out of a relationship with an authority is the definition of corruption. But a judicial mindset works well when the state has a monopoly on power. When trying to establish a government in conditions of anarchy, not rewarding your friends is the definition of a loser.

Now that's a story

Michael Yon mentions the real story behind Rudyard Kipling's "The Man who would be King," in his first posting from Afghanistan. It turns out that the novel was based on the true story of an American Jew named Josiah Harlan, who actually did manage to get himself made a prince if not a king. His descendents are apparently around today and had the title "Prince of Ghor.” that really is better, not only than what I could make up, but what Rudyard Kipling could make up.