Rite Wing TechnoPagan

Protecting Your Privacy at International Borders

2012-01-31T21:40:00.001-08:00

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Protecting Your Privacy at International Borders

via Schneier on Security by schneier on 1/11/12

The EFF has published a good guide.

My own advice is here and here.

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The Wall Street Journal Falls for Palestinian Fauxtography Hoax

2012-01-31T08:43:00.001-08:00

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The Wall Street Journal Falls for Palestinian Fauxtography Hoax

via Big Journalism by Evan Pokroy on 1/30/12

The modern Arab-Jewish conflict has played itself out on many fronts in the last 60 years. Israel has been vastly more successful on the field of battle, but the Arabs have managed to co-opt the media narrative. For a generation, the press has been sympathetic to the cause of those who strive to eradicate Israel. This has shown itself over and over again, not only in editorial decisions, but in the blind acceptance of reports coming from Arab sources in the region.
The problem is that those sources have repeatedly shown that they are not interested in reporting the news but, in many cases, in fabricating it. In many cases, these fabrications have been done with the active participation of "respected" news gathering organizations.

In 2006, during the Second Lebanon War, the term Fauxtography was coined to refer to either the embellishing of existing photographs or staging others for the best effect to discredit Israel. The uncovering of tampering resulted in both Reuters and AP disciplining freelance "reporters" as well as having to kill pictures that they had syndicated.

The staging of news photographs, and news in general, is alive and well in disputed areas of Israel even now.

What remains surprising is how otherwise discerning news operations such as the Wall Street Journal still accept, uncritically, the output of suspect sources. Just this past week the Wall Street Journal, as well as a range of other international news operations, posted a picture submitted by Hazem Bader for Agence France-Presse (AFP).

WSJ's "Photo of the Day," Jan. 25, 2012

The caption on the photo explains that the man seen writhing in pain on the ground was intentionally run over by a tractor driven by an Israeli soldier. That is to say that the international press reported, without questioning, that an official representative of the Israeli Government had, without cause, purposely caused a grave injury to an innocent man.
The only problem is that it never happened. There is no record of anyone being injured. CAMERA, a watchdog group that specializes in following anti-Israel media activity, followed all possible leads to find the injured man.

Yet, after checking with both Palestinian and Israeli sources, it seems that the man was not at all injured, and there is no evidence that he was run over. On the Palestinian side, Tthe Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), which provides comprehensive weekly reports about all injuries, fatalities, incursions, and other incidents in both the West Bank and Gaza, makes no mention of this alleged injury in its report for Jan. 19- 25. In addition, the Palestinian Ma'an News Agency did not cover the alleged injury, even though it does report on Israeli army activity that day nearby in Tel Rumeida. And Ma'an also reported a hit and run incident, in which a Palestinian teen was hit by an Israeli driver at a checkpoint this morning. Presumably, then, had this worker actually been run over and injured on Wednesday, Ma'an would have carried the story. Nor does it appear that any English-language wire service or other media outlet covered the alleged injury.

On the Israeli side, Capt. Barak Raz, spokesman for the Judea and Samaria division who had spoken to soldiers at the scene, told CAMERA the following: IDF soldiers were on site to provide security for the Civil Administration, which was preventing Palestinian construction in an area not permitted for building. One Palestinian worker was lying on the ground next to the trailer when he started to scream that he had been run over. Nobody saw him get run over. First he complained that his left leg was injured. An army medic checked him and saw nothing. The medic did, nevertheless, wrap him in a bandage since the worker was carrying on that he had been run over. The man then subsequently claimed that it was his right leg which was injured. According to Raz, the Palestinian Red Crescent, which was also on the scene, checked him, and likewise found absolutely nothing wrong with him.

In short, at worst, this incident is staged, as Raz contends, and the man pretended to be run over and injured, while neither happened. At best, there is zero independent confirmation that he was injured. If neither AFP nor IHT can substantiate the claim, it ought to be immediately retracted.

It doesn't come as a big surprise that AFP is involved in disseminating anti-Israel propaganda after the al-Dura affair. One would, though, expect more from such bastions of serious journalism as the Wall Street Journal.

For shame.

(Special thanks to Elder of Ziyon for bringing this to my attention.)

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The Racial Hypocrisy of Juan Williams, Jeffrey Goldberg, and the Liberal Media

2012-01-31T08:39:00.001-08:00

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The Racial Hypocrisy of Juan Williams, Jeffrey Goldberg, and the Liberal Media

via Big Journalism by Joel B. Pollak on 1/31/12

Yesterday, Juan Williams of Fox News doubled down on his accusation that Republican presidential candidates are using "racial code words."

Today, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic has followed suit with an article rehashing the tired allegation that Republicans are using so-called "dog whistle" tactics–"the use of coded, ambiguous language to appeal to the prejudices of certain subsets of voters"–i.e. white voters (Democrats' use of race to appeal to the prejudices and fears of black voters is rarely subject to scrutiny.)

Jeffrey Goldberg (Photo: Bloomberg News)

Goldberg says that the Obama's Republican opponents have alleged the following (original links, including one to Media Matters–itself the subject of serious charges of antisemitism–included):

Black people have lost the desire to perform a day's work. Black people rely on food stamps provided to them by white taxpayers. Black people, including Barack and Michelle Obama, believe that the U.S. owes them something because they are black. Black children should work as janitors in their high schools as a way to keep them from becoming pimps. And the pathologies afflicting black Americans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, which has created in them a dependency on government not dissimilar to the forced dependency of slaves on their owners.

I'll go even further, and admit that I personally heard a presidential candidate give a speech–in a church, no less–in which he blasted the black community, and black men in particular, for the phenomenon of single-parent households; who noted that black children with absent fathers have a greater chance of becoming criminals; who scolded black parents, "don't just sit in the house and watch 'Sports Center' all weekend long"; and who told blacks to "read a book once in awhile."

That candidate was Barack Obama.

There is a double standard here–one that goes beyond the obvious partisanship, or the reasonable allowances one might make for a member of a group to speak more boldly than an outsider might about its problems. Williams and Goldberg are not willing to examine their own prejudices here–namely, that "certain subsets of voters" are eager to express hatred towards blacks by supporting the candidate who best expresses it.

Moreover, the phenomenon of liberals scolding conservatives–and each other–for pointing out uncomfortable truths about cultural decay in the black community is an old one. It happened to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the sociologist and (later) liberal senator from New York who had the temerity to speculate about the plight of the black family. Moynihan was called a racist–and the decline of black families continued, regardless.

It might surprise Williams and Goldberg, but Republicans who advocate self-reliance among black Americans actually believe they are fighting racism. The essence of anti-black racism is the belief that blacks are inherently inferior. And in conservative eyes, many of the failed policies of the social welfare state accept black inferiority as given. Therefore, Republicans believe, to oppose these policies is actually to oppose racism.

Goldberg alleges: "This presidential election will be one of the most race-soaked in recent history." If so, that will not be due to the Republican candidates, but to the media, which has poured racial gasoline on the political tinder, the better to protect their favored president from scrutiny.

Just this morning, on MSNBC, Jonathan Martin of Politico described the Florida panhandle, where Republicans vote in today's primary, as "cracker counties."

To media liberals, that's not racism; that's just telling it like it is.

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On Ethics Charges, ‘Gingrich Was Exonerated’

2012-01-30T13:49:00.001-08:00

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On Ethics Charges, ‘Gingrich Was Exonerated’

via The Weekly Standard Blog by Jeffrey H. Anderson on 1/26/12

Mitt Romney has been attacking Newt Gingrich for alleged ethics violations during his tenure as speaker of the House. But as Byron York writes, the Gingrich ethics scandal was a product of vindictive partisan politics, it was inflamed by a complicit press corps, and it resulted (with little press coverage) in the Clinton-era IRS's exoneration of Gingrich.

York writes:

"Before the Iowa caucuses, Romney and his supporting super PAC did serious damage to Gingrich with an ad attacking Gingrich's ethics past. Since then, Romney has made other ads and web videos focusing on the ethics matter, and at the Republican debate in Tampa Monday night, Romney said Gingrich 'had to resign in disgrace.'

"…The Gingrich case was extraordinarily complex, intensely partisan, and driven in no small way by a personal vendetta on the part of one of Gingrich's former political opponents [former Congressman Ben Jones (D., Ga.), who played Cooter on The Dukes of Hazzard]. It received saturation coverage in the press....It ended with a special counsel hired by the House Ethics Committee holding Gingrich to an astonishingly strict standard of behavior, after which Gingrich in essence pled guilty to two minor offenses. Afterwards, the case was referred to the Internal Revenue Service, which conducted an exhaustive investigation into the matter. And then, after it was all over and Gingrich was out of office, the IRS concluded that Gingrich did nothing wrong. After all the struggle, Gingrich was exonerated."

York writes that the controversy centered on a course called 'Renewing American Civilization,' which Gingrich had taught with financing from a tax-exempt organization. York writes, "Gingrich maintained that the course was a legitimate educational enterprise; his critics contended that it had little to do with learning and was in fact a political exercise in which Gingrich abused a tax-exempt foundation to spread his own partisan message." York continues,

"…With the charges against Gingrich megaphoned in the press, Gingrich and Republicans were under intense pressure to end the ordeal. In January, 1997, Gingrich agreed to make a limited confession of wrongdoing in which he pleaded guilty to the previously unknown offense of failing to seek sufficiently detailed advice from a tax lawyer before proceeding with the course. (Gingrich had in fact sought advice from two such lawyers in relation to the course.) Gingrich also admitted that he had provided 'inaccurate, incomplete, and unreliable' information to Ethics Committee investigators. That 'inaccurate' information was Gingrich's contention that the course was not political….

"In return for those admissions, the House reprimanded Gingrich and levied an unprecedented $300,000 fine.

"…[T]he IRS [then] began an investigation that would stretch over three years….IRS investigators obtained tapes and transcripts of each session during the two years the course was taught….

"[In 1999, the] IRS concluded the course simply was not political….[T]he IRS wrote, '…the content of the "Renewing American Civilization" course was educational...and not biased toward any of those who were supposed to be benefited.'

"The bottom line: Gingrich acted properly and violated no laws….

"Back in January 1997…the Washington Post's front-page banner headline was 'Gingrich Actions "Intentional" or "Reckless"; Counsel Concludes That Speaker's Course Funding Was "Clear Violation" of Tax Laws.' That same day, the New York Times ran eleven stories on the Gingrich matter, four of them on the front page (one inside story was headlined, 'Report Describes How Gingrich Used Taxpayers' Money for Partisan Politics'). On television, Dan Rather began the CBS Evening News by telling viewers that 'only now is the evidence of Newt Gingrich's ethics violations and tax problems being disclosed in detail.'

"The story was much different when Gingrich was exonerated. The Washington Post ran a brief story on page five. The Times ran an equally brief story on page 23. And the evening newscasts of CBS, NBC, and ABC — which together had devoted hours of coverage to the question of Gingrich's ethics — did not report the story at all…."

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Which fields have the highest GRE scores?

2012-01-30T11:21:00.001-08:00

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Which fields have the highest GRE scores?

via Steve Sailer's iSteve Blog by Steve Sailer on 1/27/12

Razib at GNXP Discover has a good graph showing grad school specialties by GRE scores. Fields that score exceptionally well in verbal and quite well in math include Classical Language, Classics, History of Science, Philosophy, Russian, Comp Lit, and Linguistics. Physics of course does well in math, but is also strong verbally (i.e., no surprise, physicists tend to be smart). Low in math, low in verbal include PE, Criminal Justice, and Social Work.

My old articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

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Google Reader (505)

2012-01-30T10:39:00.001-08:00

Link: http://www.google.com/reader/view/?hl=en&tab=my#stream/feed%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2Fmichellemalkin%2Fposts (via shareaholic.com)

Comparing the Great Depression to the Great Recession

2012-01-30T09:36:00.000-08:00

Link: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/our-economic-past/comparing-the-great-depression-to-the-great-recession/

Causation. The main causes of both crises lie in actions of the federal government. In the case of the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve, after keeping interest rates artificially low in the 1920s, raised interest rates in 1929 to halt the resulting boom. That helped choke off investment. Also, President Hoover signed into law the sky-high Smoot-Hawley Tariff, which stifled trade and damaged American exports throughout the 1930s. Finally, the President signed a large tax increase into law in 1932, which halted entrepreneurship.
The seeds of the Great Recession were planted when the government in the 1990s began pushing homeownership, even for uncreditworthy people, with a vengeance. Mortgage-backed securities built on dubious mortgage loans became "toxic" when the housing market took a downturn, and many American banks verged on collapse. The government's urgent desire to bail out various banks and corporations created uncertainty and instability, and this may have widened the recession.
Massive federal spending. Presidents Roosevelt and Obama responded similarly to the crises. They talked about balancing the federal budget, but instead resorted to massive spending. Earlier presidents, like Cleveland and Harding, cut spending when the nation was threatened with economic hardship. Hoover was the transition president, running deficits with record spending on public works, the first federal welfare program, and the first large-scale federal farm program. The results were budget deficits and 25 percent unemployment.
President Roosevelt became Hoover on steroids. FDR and his advisers, despite some early moves to cut spending and control the deficit that Hoover left behind, decided that ever-larger federal spending would trigger economic expansion and pull the country out of its economic slump. Thus Roosevelt began the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which paid farmers not to produce, and then expanded Hoover's Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which provided bailout money to large banks and corporations. He also expanded spending on public works and targeted large subsidies to various special interests.
President Obama, who often cites FDR, followed his example of targeting spending to interest groups. He signed into law a $787 billion stimulus package that sent tax dollars to various cities and voting groups across the nation. He later supported an expensive "jobs bill" that would send money into key congressional districts. The President also campaigned for a cap-and-trade bill and universal health coverage, both of which promised to increase the federal debt substantially. In fact, the increase in federal debt under Obama and Roosevelt is similar. The national debt more than doubled in Roosevelt's first two terms, and it is projected to double again in eight to ten years.
Spending fails. After the large increases in federal spending under Roosevelt and Obama, unemployment remained high. In the 1930s unemployment fluctuated, but recovery never occurred. In April 1939, toward the end of Roosevelt's second term, unemployment was almost 21 percent. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau complained, "We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work." Nonetheless, almost all of FDR's programs continued—usually with annual budget increases.
When Obama took office unemployment was at 8 percent, and in the next year it steadily increased to over 10 percent before falling back just under that mark. He and his advisers were puzzled that large spending increases did not slash unemployment, and he argued that his spending was saving jobs that would otherwise have been lost.
Critics of Roosevelt and Obama insisted that it was impossible to spend our way out of a recession. During the New Deal, economics writer Henry Hazlitt observed that public-works spending destroyed as many jobs as it created. "Every dollar of government spending must be raised through a dollar of taxation," Hazlitt emphasized. If the Works Progress Administration builds a $10 million bridge, for example, "the bridge has to be paid for out of taxes. . . . Therefore for every public job created by the bridge project a private job has been destroyed somewhere else."

Biodiesels pollute more than crude oil, leaked data show | EurActiv

2012-01-29T21:30:00.000-08:00

Biodiesels pollute more than crude oil, leaked data show | EurActiv

The scientist are rejecting global warming

2012-01-29T20:22:00.001-08:00

Sent to you by Karl via Google Reader:

The scientist are rejecting global warming

via PrairiePundit by Merv on 1/27/12

Opinion Journal:

...
In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: "I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: 'The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.' In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"
In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.
The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

...

The consensus is crumbling because the facts on the ground do not support the theory or the computer models based on the theory.

There is another element of the theory that is only under challenge. The projections of dire results from warming are also unrealistic. I never bought into the apocalyptic consequences predicted by the theory. The history of prior warming periods did not support what they were saying.

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Easily offended? You really should be | The Jewish Chronicle

2012-01-25T19:15:00.000-08:00

Easily offended? You really should be | The Jewish Chronicle

The President of Ameritopia Speaks

2012-01-25T18:44:00.001-08:00

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The President of Ameritopia Speaks

via The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog by Jeffrey Lord on 1/25/12

"We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn't afford or understand them."
-- President Obama in last night's State of the Union Address

Stop right here.

Forget the rest of the speech. Focus just on this single sentence and understand what is really afoot here.

Back in February of 2009, my former Reagan colleague Peter Wallison, now at the American Enterprise Institute, took the time to make a typically Wallisonian in-depth look at the financial crisis and it's causes. He published his findings right here in The American Spectator

What we learned was that in 1993 -- the beginning of the Clinton era -- there was what Wallison termed a "major effort" by Clinton's bank regulators to "reform" banking rules.

Banking rules? What banking rules?

Banking rules put in place by Jimmy Carter in the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act. These Carter banking rules, which replaced earlier banking rules that had replaced earlier banking rules that had replaced still earlier banking rules, were constructed by the government after much study beginning in 1993. Constructed in such a fashion as to do precisely what President Obama described last night.

Wrote Wallison here in The American Spectator back in February 2009:

In 1995, the regulators created new rules that sought to establish objective criteria for determining whether a bank was meeting CRA standards. Examiners no longer had the discretion they once had. For banks, simply proving that they were looking for qualified buyers wasn't enough. Banks now had to show that they had actually made a requisite number of loans to low- and moderate-income (LMI) borrowers. The new regulations also required the use of "innovative or flexible" lending practices to address credit needs of LMI borrowers and neighborhoods. Thus, a law that was originally intended to encourage banks to use safe and sound practices in lending now required them to be "innovative" and "flexible." In other words, it called for the relaxation of lending standards, and it was the bank regulators who were expected to enforce these relaxed standards.

Stop right here.

There is a reason our friend Mark Levin's book Ameritopia is meeting with such bestselling success in this 2012 campaign season. We discussed it here and have every intention of using it as a guide to current events throughout the year.

Last night's Obama State of the Union is exhibit A of Ameritopia at work.

After outlining in detail the eternal and historical left-wing quest for utopia as "the ideological and doctrinal foundation for statism," Levin underlines that:

[U]topianism has long promoted the idea of a paradisiacal existence and advanced concepts of pseudo 'ideal' societies in which a heroic despot, a benevolent sovereign, or an enlightened oligarchy claims the ability and authority to provide for all the needs and fulfill all the wants of the individual -- in exchange for his abject servitude.

With this as the ideological/doctrinal utopian foundation of the left, Levin writes at length about the reality of this in modern America. The "massive administrative state…an army of bureaucrats…highly compensated…." Etc. And the task at hand for this American utopian army? "It monitors daily life and attempts to mechanically extinguish risk, dissimilarity, and choice, as well as that which has become routine and acceptable, in pursuit of societal perfection."

What has Mark Levin just described there?

That's right. He has nailed exactly the driving force behind that one single sentence from the Obama State of the Union speech.

In the quest to create a utopian society of homeowners -- home owning as a stand-alone a fine thing -- the Ameritopians of the Carter era changed the banking rules in 1977. Banking rules that were in fact utopian rules from earlier times in American history. Come 1993 and the dawn of the Clinton era, and -- shocker -- there was no utopian society of homeowners as a result of Carter's utopian banking rules. So, but of course, in another yet another quest for utopia, the Clinton utopians changed the Carter utopian banking rules. Launching Levin's "army of bureaucrats" in the "massive administrative state" that was the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the Clintonites set out anew on the latest utopian quest.

They failed. The financial crisis exploded in 2008 as a result. And so… what?

So now President Obama stands in front of the Congress last night sorrowfully announcing (without mentioning any names, of course) that the promised land of utopia in housing has not been found. He says, without a hint of irony: "We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn't afford or understand them."

Well, duh. Another attempt at utopia hasn't worked as promised. And what does Obama propose to do?

Tonight, I want to speak about how we move forward, and lay out a blueprint for an economy that's built to last…

Meaning? Meaning…now we are supposed to all build Obama's idea of utopia!

That's what last night was about, in short. The latest of an endless line of utopian prophecies from yet another leftist insisting he's the guy who can at long last create the perfect utopian society -- and oh by the way, who cares that this has zero to do with the Constitution of the United States or the Declaration of Independence?

This is the real problem in 2012 -- and in reality, always.

Somebody somewhere is always trying to sell a utopian bill of goods -- a bill of goods guaranteed for failure precisely because there is no such thing as utopia.

That wasn't the President of the United States on your television screens last night.

That was the President of Ameritopia.

Whatever unfolds this primary season -- Newt, Romney, Santorum, other -- all understand somewhere in their bones that they are running for President of the United States of… America.

Not… Ameritopia.

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The Cato Institute Fact-Checks, Responds to President Obama’s State-of-the-Union Address

2012-01-25T17:57:00.000-08:00

» The Cato Institute Fact-Checks, Responds to President Obama’s State-of-the-Union Address - Big Government

Fact Checking Obama (A Full-Time Job)

2012-01-25T15:32:00.001-08:00

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Fact Checking Obama (A Full-Time Job)

via The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog by W. James Antle, III on 1/25/12

The Associated Press has a nice rundown of the lies, exaggerations, distortions, and outright nonsense otherwise known as the State of the Union address.

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Liberty For All » Being a progressive: The benefits

2012-01-24T21:31:00.000-08:00

Liberty For All » Blog Archive » Being a progressive: The benefits

The Food Stamp President

2012-01-23T21:37:00.001-08:00

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The Food Stamp President

via Power Line by John Hinderaker on 1/17/12

(John Hinderaker)

Newt Gingrich has labeled President Obama the food stamp president. In last night's South Carolina debate, Juan Williams, in an already-famous exchange, tried to push back on that characterization, unsuccessfully. "The fact is more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history," Gingrich told Williams. The White House apparently doesn't like the association between Obama and food stamps; Jay Carney said that the claim that President Obama's policies have added to the food stamp rolls is "crazy."

As happens so often with White House statements, Carney's characterization had no basis in fact. We wrote about the metastasizing food stamp program in Food Stamp Nation:

Food stamp use has exploded during the Obama administration, reaching an all-time high of 45.8 million in August. This chart, prepared by Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee, depicts the extraordinary growth in the program that began when Barack Obama took office in 2009:

That is right: federal spending on food stamps has doubled since George W. Bush left office. In large part, this is due to fraud–another emblem of the Obama administration. As Jeff Sessions said:

The agriculture bill we are considering this week…would result in a quadrupling of food stamp funds from their 2001 levels. At a proposed $80 billion a year, food stamps are becoming one of the largest items in our budget….

There is little if any oversight of the program, resulting in the extraordinary waste and abuse of taxpayer dollars. … In some cases, the only thing you need to become food-stamp eligible is have a brochure from the federal government be sent to you in the mail. …

This program is not being run honestly, effectively, or fairly. It is deeply disappointing and extremely telling that the Democrat-led Senate voted down even this modest effort to address the almost shameless mishandling of taxpayer funds. We're in a fiscal crisis that is already killing jobs, and these bills just increase spending—and destroy confidence—that much more.

Obama, of course, has done nothing to crack down on fraud or try to get a grip on food stamp spending. So, more recently, Sessions has again written to the Obama administration to ask for its cooperation in getting food stamp spending under control. You can read his letter here. An excerpt:

I am writing about widespread reports of fraud and abuse in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps. At $89 billion, the annual food stamp budget is the largest of nearly eighty federal welfare programs that cost taxpayers around $900 billion a year. Following growing concern over lax oversight, the USDA recently issued a press release announcing "new tactics to combat fraud and enhance SNAP program integrity."

While the weak economy has increased the number of people on food stamps, spending on the program has dramatically outpaced the rise in unemployment. … [A]ccording to research by University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan, most of the increased spending on welfare programs (including food stamps) since 2007 is the result of expansions of eligibility, rather than increases in the number of people who would have been eligible under pre-recession rules. …

Records released last month show a couple in Washington State living in a $1.2 million home but still receiving benefits; a Michigan lottery winner was allowed to continue receiving benefits after receiving a $2 million payout (that state also discovered 30,000 ineligible college students its food stamp rolls, later taking action to remove them); and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that Wisconsin food stamp recipients routinely sell their benefit cards on Facebook.

As the Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, I have a responsibility on behalf of taxpayers to hold federal agencies accountable for how public funds are being spent. I would therefore ask that the Committee be immediately provided with a thorough explanation of all oversight actions your Department is taking, as well as a list of recommended federal reforms that would reduce waste, inefficiency, and abuse in the food stamp program.

To my knowledge, the Obama administration has not yet responded to this request for accountability, but I will publicize any response the Department of Agriculture makes. In the meantime, was Gingrich correct in dubbing Barack Obama the food stamp president? Actually, Gingrich was being charitable: he could have called Obama the food stamp fraud president.

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An ignored “disparity”

2012-01-23T10:50:00.001-08:00

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An ignored “disparity”

via Power Line by Scott Johnson on 1/18/12

(Scott Johnson)

Yesterday Thomas Sowell released a four-part series of columns drawing on his vast research on ethnic and cultural differences. Here are links to each of the four columns and a salient quote from each:

An ignored "disparity":

Gross inequalities in skills and achievements have been the rule, not the exception, on every inhabited continent and for centuries on end. Yet our laws and government policies act as if any significant statistical difference between racial or ethnic groups in employment or income can only be a result of their being treated differently by others.

An ignored "disparity," part 2:

Statistics are often thrown around in the media, showing that people with college degrees earn higher average salaries than people without them. But such statistics lump together apples and oranges — and lemons.

An ignored "disparity," part 3:

Historical happenstances — the fact that the Romans invaded Western Europe but not Eastern Europe, for example — left a legacy of written languages in Western Europe that people in Eastern Europe did not have until centuries later.

But the innumerable factors affecting human achievements are not only complex and hard to untangle, they offer neither politicians nor intellectuals the opportunity to simply be on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. Factors which present no opportunity to star in a moral melodrama have often been ignored in favor of factors that do.

An ignored "disparity," part 4:

[M]undane explanations of gross disparities are seldom emotionally satisfying — least of all to those on the short end of these disparities. With the rise over time of an indigenous intelligentsia in Eastern Europe and the growing influence of mass politics, more emotionally satisfying explanations emerged, such as oppression, exploitation and the like.

Since human beings have seldom been saints, whether in Eastern Europe or elsewhere, there were no doubt many individual flaws and shortcomings among the non-indigenous elites to complain of.

Please read the whole thing! Readers interested in the subject should know that Sowell has written three related books on the subject, beginning with Race and Culture: A World View. He has drawn on something like a lifetime of learning to write these four columns.

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Media Plays Up GOP Association, Hides Dem Connection In Two Similar Stories

2012-01-22T07:51:00.001-08:00

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Media Plays Up GOP Association, Hides Dem Connection In Two Similar Stories

via Big Journalism by Warner Todd Huston on 1/22/12

Last week two political operatives were arrested in separate incidents, one Democrat and one Republican. It certainly isn't news that political operatives sometimes break the law, but how the different incidents were reported is typical of how the Old Media establishment uses guilt by association to tar Republicans but rarely does the same thing to take swipes at Democrats.

The similarity in the two stories is that both of the accused are former staffers of high profile politicians. The Democrat was an Obama campaign staffer while the Republican was a staffer of the Republican Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker. Neither currently works for those high profile pols, but only the Republican was linked to his former boss. The Democrat's link to Obama was mostly ignored by the media.

Story One: Some Guy Arrested

We'll begin with the tale of Iowa Democrat operative Zachary Edwards who tried to steal the identity of a rival Republican in order to use that identity to get the Republican in trouble.

Edwards tried to use the identity of Iowa Secretary of State, Republican Matt Schultz (and/or Schultz's brother) to illegally obtain some sort of state benefits so that he could then claim that the Republicans were illegally obtaining state benefits. This Edwards fellow hoped he could smear the GOP Sec. of State as engaging in some sort of unethical behavior. (The Iowa Republican blog has more on the fight between Schultz and Iowa Democrats)

Now, as it happens Edwards is not only a member of a politically connected Democrat consulting firm, Link Strategies — a company with long-standing ties to powerful Iowa Democrat Senator Tom Harkin — but Edwards was also a member of Obama's Iowa team in 2007/08. Edwards' bio has since been scrubbed from the Link Strategies page but read in part, "In September 2007, Zach joined the Obama New Media department as co-director of the Nevada New Media team and then moved on to direct New Media operations in five other primary states (New Mexico, Texas, North Carolina, and South Dakota)."

For a screen shot of Edwards memory-holed bio from the Link Strategy site, see the Iowa Grounds blog.

So, how was Edwards' arrest reported? For one thing, it was hard to find Edwards' Democrat affiliation and his past role as a top Obama campaign staffer in stories of this incident.

KCCI TV Channel 8 (Des Moines) does not bother to note the perp's Democrat ties at all.
The Dubuque Telegraph Herald and the Des Moines Register both published an AP report that simply calls Edwards a "Des Moines man accused of ID theft." Also no mention of his Democrat Party ties.
Finally, Eastern Iowa News blog reports Edwards Democrat ties only at the very end of its story.

It is interesting to note that the story of the criminal action by this former Obama staffer is not easy to find. Few Old Media outlets bothered to cover it.

Story Two: Those Darn Criminal Republicans

Our second story is that of the arrest of Mr. Tim Russell of Wisconsin. Russell was a former aide to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and is accused of stealing funds intended for wounded veterans and families of U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan — an odious crime, indeed.

Russell had been a Walker campaign staffer and county aide up until the Governor took the top seat in the state but has since not been working for him. Along with two others, Russell was arrested for a scheme to defraud the state of $42,000 that was earmarked for veterans.

So, how did the Old Media handle this tale of criminality? Unsurprisingly, Russell's ties to Walker and his party affiliation were either in the headline or the very first paragraph, if not both. And there were dozens of stories posted on this incident, too.

The New York Times slammed Walker with guilt by association in its headline and first paragraph.
Reuters did the same thing as the NYT.
The Associated Press follows suit by mentioning Walker in the headline and the first paragraph.
Green Bay's NBC affiliate also features Walker in the headline, etc.
In a companion story, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel also prominently features the perp's party affiliation.
Politico pulls the same stunt as the others.

There are more stories than these few, of course. In fact, there are far more stories about this former Walker aide than there are about the Obama operative. Politico, for instance, never reported on the Democrat criminal. Apparently the news of the criminal actions of a former staffer for a mere governor is far bigger news than that of a former staffer of the President of the United States.

In any case, this is a perfect illustration of how the Old Media goes for the jugular when reporting on criminal Republicans compared to how they (don't) go after Democrats in similar instances.

It's just apiece with the Old Media's bias against Republicans. All the news that's fit to warp.

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Citizens United: Two Years of Free Speech

2012-01-20T15:26:00.000-08:00

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Citizens United: Two Years of Free Speech

via Big Government by David Bossie on 1/20/12

Two years ago the United States Supreme Court decided the landmark case of Citizens United v. FEC. The Court reversed an anomaly in campaign finance law by restoring the First Amendment protection of political speech.

Over the past two years Citizens United's victory has been the subject of countless attacks. It has inspired some members of Congress to attempt to pass legislation to chill political speech, caused the President to chastise the Supreme Court during the State of the Union, and even led to irrational demands that we amend the Constitution to curtail the Freedom of Speech.

Despite the heated rhetoric, little in politics has changed. Before Citizens United, candidates, independent groups and political parties ran political ads. Shockingly, the same is true after Citizens United. Some lament the amount of money spent on political speech, but as George Will has noted, Americans will spend more money on Easter candy than they spend electing a President.

The liberal drumbeat against the decision seems to be led by a group of leftist non-profit organizations. These groups, with such good governance names as Democracy Unlimited, Democracy 21, Public Citizen, and Common Cause, are fighting to overturn the First Amendment.

One such non-profit organization, Democracy Unlimited, has launched the Move to Amend campaign. Their campaign hopes to pass a constitutional amendment to curtail the First Amendment. This group plans to celebrate the second anniversary of the Citizens United decision by staging "Occupy the Courts" protests across the country. While the corporate-owned press will praise these protests, I have little doubt that if a conservative non-profit employed a similar tactic it would be dismissed as "Astroturf" lobbying, rather than heralded as a populist uprising. Of course the anti-corporate speech protest is paid for and sponsored by Democracy Unlimited.

When I sued the FEC I was fighting to protect the freedom of speech. I'm glad to see these liberals and their corporate sponsors exercising that right.

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What Did Romney Do at Bain?

2012-01-15T12:29:00.001-08:00

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What Did Romney Do at Bain?

via Megan McArdle : The Atlantic by Megan McArdle on 1/10/12

At any time, the Wall Street Journal's article on the fate of companies that Bain Capital invested in during Romney's tenure would have probably made a splash. But luckily for the commentariat, Romney gave the story a nice push by making a really incredibly stupid gaffe--remarkably, the biggest one he's made in months of hard campaigning.

The result has been predictable: the left (and some of his opponents) are accusing Romney of exemplifying predatory capitalism that destroys firms, jobs, and lives, while the right defends his work as creative destruction. What's the truth?

First, the particulars. From the WSJ:

Amid anecdotal evidence on both sides, the full record has largely escaped a close look, because so many transactions are involved. The Wall Street Journal, aiming for a comprehensive assessment, examined 77 businesses Bain invested in while Mr. Romney led the firm from its 1984 start until early 1999, to see how they fared during Bain's involvement and shortly afterward.

Among the findings: 22% either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses. An additional 8% ran into so much trouble that all of the money Bain invested was lost.

Another finding was that Bain produced stellar returns for its investors--yet the bulk of these came from just a small number of its investments. Ten deals produced more than 70% of the dollar gains.

Some of those companies, too, later ran into trouble. Of the 10 businesses on which Bain investors scored their biggest gains, four later landed in bankruptcy court.

I think you can tell two stories from this data--and without looking at each individual case in depth, it's really hard to tell which story is right.

Certainly, there are private equity deals--and maybe firms--that don't add social value. They cash out existing shareholders by burdening the company with a lot of debt, and then either take the company public again or take it into bankruptcy. I've heard it suggested that to the extent these deals unlock value, they do so by getting cooperation from management insiders--which sounds suspiciously like either "collusion" or "bribing them to do their jobs".

On the other hand, private equity deals can shake loose dysfunctional managements that have been systematically running the company into the ground, provide capital and management advice to struggling firms, or give fledgeling companies the push they need to soar.

Either of these stories works with the facts laid out by the Journal. There's a broad spectrum of private equity strategies, from pure cash-flow plays that sell off underperforming assets, to something more akin to a corporate turnaround specialist. Bain is closer to the latter than the former--their "special sauce" is that they have a sort of consulting approach to financial problems (and often, the cream of Bain Consulting's talent, from which they recruit heavily.)

Turnaround situations, and new firms--both of which Bain says it focuses on--probably have a higher failure rate than "sell off an obviously undervalued asset" or "fix a simple cash flow problem". Which could also explain a high failure rate. It's probably a somewhat simpler operation to predict whether you can sell off a division, than whether you can revamp the product line to make it sell to the tween segment.

Largely, I expect people are going to believe what they want to believe; if you're invested in the notion that finance is useless and predatory, you'll see Romney as a predator; if you valorize markets and business, you'll tend to see Bain's record as admirable.

Me, I don't know. Pending more information, I'm suspending judgement.

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More Evidence NY’s Cigarette Tax Hike Was a Bust

2012-01-15T12:00:00.001-08:00

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More Evidence NY’s Cigarette Tax Hike Was a Bust

via Big Government by Capitol Confidential on 1/15/12

The Empire State is struggling to bring in additional tax revenue it projected it would gain from efforts to stop smokers from buying untaxed cigarettes on Indian Reservations, reports the New York Post:

The state's tax collectors were recently calling around to convenience-store owners, wondering what was up. The $130 million in extra tax that Albany was expecting from a change in the law about cigarette sales on Indian reservations wasn't happening.

A memo sent to members of the New York Association of Convenience Stores from the group's president, Jim Calvin — a copy of which I have on my desk — said, "I got a call from Gov. Cuomo's budget office yesterday. In examining cigarette tax receipts so far this fiscal year (April 1 to March 31) it looks like they will fall considerably short of their projection in new revenues. . . ."

The state had hoped to get the extra dough by enforcing a new law that made it illegal for licensed cigarette wholesalers in the state to sell untaxed name-brand cigarettes like Newport and Marlboro to Indian reservations.

Why the need for the extra measures focused on Indian Reservation sales in the first place?

In short, going "On The Reservation" and buying untaxed, name-brand cigarettes became an appealing prospect to many smokers following New York's institution of a $1.60 per pack cigarette tax hike in 2010:

The reservation store would sell the cigarettes to non-Indian customers who were trying to avoid the hefty taxes imposed by the state. The state and legitimate sellers of cigarettes were both hurt.

The sale of nontaxed smokes by stores on Indian reservations became an issue two years ago when the state cigarette tax was raised significantly and many smokers took more of their business to reservations — or to Internet sellers — whose packs aren't taxed. Some folks even bought lower-taxed cigs smuggled in from out of state.

The news that New York could be $130 million short of projected revenue as a result of its particular approach to sin tax policy may serve as a timely reminder to legislatures kicking off their sessions in states around the country where cigarette tax increases are being proposed, either by lawmakers or influential interest groups.

Among those states are Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, and Maryland, the latter of which in particular is no stranger to the issue of black-market sale of smuggled cigarettes.

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Boys will be boys UPDATED

2012-01-15T11:47:00.001-08:00

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Boys will be boys UPDATED

via Bookworm Room by Bookworm on 1/13/12

Boys are born equipped with this neat little toy. Amongst its many enjoyable attributes, you can write your name in the snow with it. There are lots of other things you can do with it. Long hikes without pit stops? No problem. Use a tree or, if you're adventurous, see if you can fill the Grand Canyon. Long drive without pit stops? No problem. That's what empty soda bottles are for. Object that offends you? Well, if you're adrenalized, testosteronized, and hanging around with the boys, that might not be a problem either, 'cause you can whip out your toy and make a statement (warning: slightly graphic and definitely NSFW):

Click here to view the embedded video.

I certainly don't approve of what those guys did. It's vulgar, and I'm opposed to vulgarity on principle. It's stupid, both at a micro level and, as the recent headlines show, at a macro level. It's a typical example of group think. I routinely tell my children to be very careful when they're with a group, because there's something about a group mentality that causes massive IQ loss.

The one thing I'm not is outraged. This is not systemic abuse of the type that surfaced in Abu Ghraib. Nor does it cross the line from stupid and vulgar into terribly abusive. Terribly abusive would have been a video of these men doing the same thing to living prisoners. Having Al Qaeda types — the ones who like to slice of men's cool toy and stuff it in the victim's mouth, or who videotape themselves beheading people, or who torture children to death, or who gang rape women, or who blow up school buses, etc. — having these types express outrage over this alleged "barbarity" only serves to highlight just how innocuous what these young men did really was. Crude? Yeah, sure. But also innocuous.

I'm also not alone in my lack of outrage. Even liberal Washington Post readers are unimpressed. As of this writing, 82% of them think "It's not surprising — things like this happen in war," while only 11% find it an "unacceptable desecration" and 7% an "embarrassment." Americans understand that boys will be boys, they understand that boys will always have their toys, and they understand that, under actual combat conditions, men make foolish decisions that nevertheless do not qualify as war-time atrocities.

UPDATE: In Comment 2, DQ, who my best friend and someone I admire greatly, disagreed with my rather cavalier dismissal of the Marines' conduct. He stated "I am outraged," and then explained why. I countered by explaining why I did not consider what happened an outrage. Later, it struck me what the difference was in our approach to this video.

As I mentioned in my Michelle Obama post, grammar matters. When it comes to the response to peeing Marines, one has to remember that the word "outrage" functions as both a noun and a verb.

DQ is totally within his rights to feel outrage. The verb is his own response to a crude, vulgar, and stupid incident. It marks him as a man with higher, more refined feelings.

I, however, was not really talking about my own feelings when I posted about the Marines. I was talking about the noun, rather than the verb. In the theater of war, and especially in the theater of war propaganda, it is a mistake to call what happened "AN OUTRAGE." That elevates the Marines' conduct to an atrocity or a war crime in terms of their risk of court martial and in terms of the animus America's enemies direct against her.

When the US government and the Pentagon, instead of issuing a dry "their behavior was inappropriate and they will be dealt with," starts apologizing as if the video was the crime of the century, that allows the enemy to justify ever greater efforts against American troops. "They peed on our dead. We're going to torture them, behead them, blow up their women and children, etc."

My post was about proportionate response. I therefore made in my own mind a distinction between being outraged and categorizing something as "an outrage." This distinction is an important factor in figuring out where bad behaviors (and there will always be bad behaviors) belong on the scale of military scandals.

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Articles: Taqiyya for Kids

2012-01-15T10:00:00.001-08:00

Link: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/taqiyya_for_kids.html

Vulture Capitalism

2012-01-14T09:47:00.001-08:00

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Vulture Capitalism

via American Thinker on 1/12/12

Vultures are unsightly scavenger birds but they form a vital role in the eco-system just as "vulture capitalists" form a vital role in the free market economic system. Both consume the dead or dying for personal gain.

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A word from “Zeb” Zobenica

2012-01-09T15:14:00.001-08:00

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A word from “Zeb” Zobenica

via Power Line by Scott Johnson on 1/5/12

(Scott Johnson)

Reader "Zeb" Zobenica writes to comment on the OWS phenomenon:

Watching, and listening to, the #OWS crowd on TV provoked a "flashback" to the time I was readying myself to enter the corporate world.

I was a Marine jet pilot with an engineering degree, a wife, two young kids, a dog…and a cane. After sixteen months of "paint and repair" at a naval hospital following a plane crash, and an additional half-year of rehab, it was decided that I would never sit in an ejection seat again. It was time to meet a new challenge, sell myself to strangers…and put "grits" on the table with a pay check earned in the private sector.

While listening to the #OWS protestors, the realization that "these people are clueless" reverberated between my tinnitus-challenged ears. Memories harkened me back to the approach I used when confronted with job-seeking. Career change preparation included choosing where I wanted to live, proximity to extended family, salary considerations for a person with my education and experience. Research was done on several potential employers in the aerospace industry…corporate structure, plant locations, product lines, customers, hiring and layoff cycles, and an assessment of what I could contribute to their "war effort." Letters were written expressing an interest in their company and stating confidently the belief that I would be an asset to their corporation. The interviews that followed revealed a candidate in a gray business suit, tie, spit-shined shoes, hands and hair groomed, who knew something about the outfit he was hoping to work for, yet faced with the need to assure an employer that my gimpiness would not affect job performance.

Fast forward to #OWS. Is this what the self-esteem movement has produced? Everybody gets a Happy Face? Nobody keeps score? There are no winners and losers? Trophies are for showing up? This is a "me" generation on steroids. They pursued academic degrees that promised little or no return on the investment and now find themselves deeply in debt…Where was the parental advice? School counselors? Was there no consideration given to job opportunities in the field, salaries offered, or a perfunctory cost-benefit analysis performed? Did they not understand that, unless one's applying for a job in a tattoo parlor or a chop-shop, body paint and piercings are not frequently found in the market place? To most employers, such appurtenances suggest a person with issues, consumed with self, an in-your-face personality who may not play well with others. Real life has owners, bosses, and co-workers who are not impressed with ear lobes festooned with "bagels" nor with potential employees who make a habit of reminding others of their rights. The wise human resources manager avoids these sea-lawyers like the plague. Out-of-court settlements are now a cottage industry and it's wise to keep these entitlement-gurus off the company payroll.

Zuccotti Park, in microcosm, took on the characteristics of a bacterial colony in a Petri dish. The population starts small, there is space, and plenty to eat. As the numbers multiply, demand for nutrition increases, and the by-products of consumption began to accumulate, inevitably leading to a toxic environment and disease. Street lesson #1…every organism, whether biological or physical, in order to function, requires a source of energy and produces waste. Chardonnay and pasta become piss and crap; gasoline becomes exhaust. It must be dealt with. It is a local issue affecting those in the Petri colony. It is not of planetary concern. Once handed-off to Gaia, she is well prepared to process what is produced.

Free food, or for that matter, free anything, attracts freeloaders, even in a Zuccotti Utopia. The workload on the gourmet cooks increased and they soon felt put upon. The chefs, after toiling for 18 hours daily, said enough is enough. Street lesson #2…there is no such thing as a free lunch. There exists among our species lazy, slothful slackers who demand access to the fruits of someone else's labor. It's hard-coded in the DNA.

Societies require organization; divisions of labor; systems to produce, manage, and allocate resources, resolve differences, and provide security. This means some become money managers, others collect trash. Some become bureaucrats, others stand before them with hat-in-hand. Who, or what, determines which role individual utopians get to play? Merit? Muscle? Big stick? Bloods or Crips? Street lesson #3…life isn't fair.

"Give peace a chance? Can't we all get along?" Apparently not. Utopia had to come to grips with stolen laptops, broken drums, rapes, and murder. Street lesson #4…there is a reason that cities have police departments and nations have armies. "Kumbaya" is a song, not a policy.

It may be said, simply and forthrightly, that "life is about choices and choices have consequences." This common sense slogan was apparently not taught to the #OWS crowd along the way. They've shown the world their tats, tits, lobes, and asses. We've heard their bongos, read their signs, and smelled their garbage, 'grass', urine, and excrement.

We, the real 99%, are not impressed!

R.M. "Zeb" Zobenica
Capt., USMC (Ret.)

I thought you might enjoy that.

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Media Bias, Stage Two

2012-01-09T15:13:00.001-08:00

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Media Bias, Stage Two

via Power Line by John Hinderaker on 1/8/12

(John Hinderaker)

Scott wrote this morning about the absurdity of Republican debates being moderated by liberal activists like George Stephanopoulos and David Gregory, who, as Scott put it, are "on a mission to take down the candidates by making them appear crazy or by separating them from the base of the Republican Party." But that is just stage one of the liberal press's effort to control the presidential election cycle. Stage two comes when Democratic Party activists posing as journalists report on the proceedings.

From now until November, the leading offender likely will be the Associated Press. Today the AP described last night's debate in November; its account began:

Mitt Romney brushed aside rivals' criticism Saturday night in the opening round of a weekend debate doubleheader that left his Republican presidential campaign challengers squabbling among themselves far more than trying to knock the front-runner off stride.

Three days before the first in-the-nation New Hampshire primary, Romney largely ignored his fellow Republicans and turned instead on President Barack Obama. "His policies have made the recession deeper and his policies have made the recovery more tepid," he said, despite a declining unemployment rate and the creation of 200,000 jobs last month.

The AP's gratuitous editorializing is intended to suggest that Romney's assertion that Obama's policies have worsened the recession and weakened the recovery is self-evidently false. But that is absurd: the nation's "declining unemployment rate" is all the way down to 8.5%, whereas it was 7.6% when Obama took office. Moreover, that comparison understates the deterioration in the nation's employment since Obama took office, since hundreds of thousands of people have given up and left the labor force. Further, as I noted here, the slow rate of job creation under Obama has made this the slowest recovery from a major recession on record.

So it is the Associated Press, not Mitt Romney, that has no idea what it is talking about. Nevertheless, this sort of misleading, biased and outright false editorializing will we constant from now until November.

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MercatorNet: Is it worth it? the economics of same-sex marriage

2012-01-09T09:11:00.001-08:00

Link: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/is_it_worth_it_the_economics_of_same_sex_marriage (via shareaholic.com)

Cavemen and Middlemen | The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty

2012-01-09T08:55:00.001-08:00

Link: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/headline/cavemen-and-middlemen/ (via shareaholic.com)

Can Credit Unions Replace 'Predatory' Lending?

2012-01-08T20:48:00.001-08:00

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Can Credit Unions Replace 'Predatory' Lending?

via Megan McArdle : The Atlantic by Megan McArdle on 1/6/12

Felix Salmon has a really interesting piece about a professor who took out a loan from a personal finance company--at a roughly 40% APR--after her credit union turned her away.

Is it a good idea for the professor to be taking out loans at 40% interest rates? Really, she didn't have much of a choice. She needed the money, she got precious little help from her credit union, and the loan company was friendly and extended her the cash on terms she could afford.

What's more, the professor's relationship with World Finance has indeed improved her credit. Since taking out that first loan, she's obtained two different credit cards, and also bought a brand-new BMW with 2.9% financing. All with essentially no help at all from her primary financial institution, which is Missouri Credit Union. The debt the professor is taking on may or may not be wise, given her unique individual circumstances. And the credit union could in theory be a valuable resource in terms of helping her work out whether, for instance, she can really afford that car. But the relationship there is broken, and I see no chance that it will be fixed.

James does admit that he let the professor down: "I think we did fail her," he says, "and I don't think we did what we should have done." The credit union dropped the ball with respect to her loan application, which was left in limbo when she was in a time of need. But at the same time, he also admitted to me that the credit union would not have given her the unsecured loan she was looking for.

The professor's credit score is now good enough that she qualifies for a mortgage; it wasn't before. That's the kind of help a credit union should be able to give, and it's disappointing that Missouri Credit Union doesn't seem to be able to bring itself to do that. If the professor (a) wanted credit and (b) wanted to improve her credit score, then the loan company was, sadly, the place she needed to go.

Salmon, who is an enormous booster of credit unions, thinks that this points to directions for reform:

So two things are needed here, I think. The first is effective regulation, with teeth; I hope that Richard Cordray, newly installed at the head of the CFPB, will start providing that soon. There's no time to waste.

But regulation isn't enough: we also need alternatives -- non-predatory financial products which allow people with bad credit to repair that credit and get back on their feet. Many credit unions provide such products, but as we've seen, many credit unions don't. And credit unions are in any case often difficult institutions to navigate: it's never entirely obvious who's allowed to join any given one. Can someone set up a Kiva for America? Help is needed, here. And it's very hard to find.

I too, am a fan of the credit union. We got our mortgage through Navy Federal, and even though we could probably refinance to something cheaper, we're sticking with them because I like the customer service and the fact that they will bend over backwards to fix issues with your loan. (Back when I had a car loan, it took me a year to straighten out issues with my car titling, and as long as I made the payments, they kept giving me more time).

But I don't think that they are somehow going to substitute for the lenders at the bottom of the risk market: loan companies and payday lenders. Felix, who is on the board of a credit union, may have some insight into this that I don't, of course. But right now, I don't see it.

Credit unions are not charities. They have responsibilities to the members who deposit money with them: they cannot make loans that are reasonably likely to lose money (at least in aggregate). And while the interest rates on products like payday loans are indeed eye-popping, the companies themselves are not especially profitable. This suggests that the reason the loans are so expensive is that they cost a lot to make.

Why is this? For starters, because the risk of default is very high. It's hard to get good numbers, and estimates vary widely, but I'm pretty sure that they're well north of 10%. That's a pretty high default rate for any type of loan, but particularly one where the term is measured in weeks.

That's not the only reason to think that these loans are expensive. Since they are often for very small amounts, they have high transaction costs relative to the loan amount--it takes just as much time to process forms for a $200 loan as it does for a $10,000 loan.

There's also the structure of the loan, which involves a lot of intensive interaction with the borrower. Remember, the short term (and the fact that they're tied to payday) helps hold down the default costs on payday loans. It's also really expensive to achieve; it means maintaining a storefront with people in it at all hours.

Credit unions might make those loans somewhat cheaper by layering that overhead on top of existing operations, and because they don't need to make a profit. On the other hand, credit unions lack expertise and skill in this sort of loan. In general, credit union loans are not wildly cheaper than similar loans from other institutions.

But I suspect that what Felix has in mind is substituting a different--and much cheaper--type of loan for the payday loans. And I'm skeptical that this can happen. All of the research that I've seen on these super-expensive loan products indicates that most of the people who are taking them are not doing so because they don't understand how high the interest rate is, but rather, because they have exhausted all of their other borrowing options. (And frequently, the alternative is even more expensive: a bounced check fee, a utility disconnect that will require a hefty fee for reconnection, a lost day of work because of car trouble).

So I take it that the reason that the credit unions aren't putting them into cheaper loans is that they can't. The cost of an unsecured loan to someone with terrible credit is high because those loans go bad very frequently, resulting not only in the loss of funds, but in considerable overhead expended on collection. Particularly in the case of credit unions, who--as my auto loan illustrates--work very, very hard to keep their members' loans from going bad.

And I'd guess that credit unions, for all sorts of reasons, don't really want to get into the super-expensive-super-risky loan business. That's why they focus on figuring out how to help you not need the money. Obviously, that is going to be a bad outcome in some particular cases, because no system is ever perfect. But on balance, I can understand why credit unions aren't eager to get into the payday loan game.

Update: Apparently, some are. But the products often aren't substantially cheaper than regular payday loans--though Felix highlights this program at a State Employees credit union, which does look much cheaper.

Felix asks me if there's any reason that last program can't scale. I think there are three possibilities:

1. They're losing money on it, and a lot of credit unions can't be in the business of charity to people who need payday loans

2. Their lending population is somehow different from those who need regular payday loans (state paychecks are pretty steady, and the program requires direct deposit)

3. It's a game changer that will revolutionize payday loans.

I'm pretty skeptical that #3 is the answer--these loans are cheaper than most credit cards, and that's a very competitive space. On the other hand, all game changing innovations suffer from not having been done before: that's no proof that they can't be. I'll only note that the general experience of nonprofits in this space seems to be that they have to charge high APRs (or fees that amount to the same thing) in order to make up for the costs.

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Cruising the Web

2012-01-08T20:39:00.001-08:00

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Cruising the Web

via Betsy's Page by Betsy Newmark on 1/5/12

Here is some interesting data on how many voters each candidate got in Iowa per money spent.

Votes received per $1,000 spent:

1. Rick Santorum, 49
2. Newt Gingrich, 11
3. Ron Paul, 10
4. Mitt Romney, 6
5. Rick Perry, 2

You can also check out the money spent on advertising for and against candidates. You can see why Gingrich is so ticked off. However, as Major Garrett at the National Journal argues, it's his own dang fault and he lost due to his own political malpractice.

Noemie Emery is also fed up with the idea that there is some Republican establishment that was out there to prop up Mitt Romney. As she points out, it wasn't the fault of this mythical establishment that its preferred candidates chose not to run or that so many less-than-optimal candidates did choose to run. And this really only became a line of argument when people started speaking out against Newt Gingrich. This is the sort of vetting that party leaders would have done before the reforms of the McGovern Commission changed how party nominees were chosen. We should be glad to have them speak up about what they knew about Newt Gingrich before voters, through their ignorance, went further in choosing him as the nominee.

For one thing, this Establishment includes Rich Lowry, Ann Coulter, Tom Coburn and others, a collection of squishes if ever there was one, along with useful idiots such as George Will.

For another, it was a welcome attempt to revive the tradition of peer review in selection of nominees to be president, which has been in eclipse since the "reforms" of the McGovern Commission. Those were the reforms that eliminated the process of candidate-vetting by the professionals, and let the candidates in effect vet themselves.

As Robert Merry explains, the system in which pros asked themselves if nominees had scandals, were honest in dealing with others, or had weaknesses that would reveal themselves under the pressure, gave way to one in which "candidates emerge based on their own judgment of their overwhelming talents and virtues, rather than those of their political peers."

When this system, which nearly gave us Presidents Gary Hart and John Edwards, seemed in danger of producing a nominee, Gingrich, his peers and his cohorts jumped into action, and committed out loud and in public the dimension of vetting once done in private, and behind closed doors.

Ilya Somin gives a well-argued defense of negative campaigning, especially in nomination battles. And he has a good response to those who complain that such campaigning turns voters off from politics and inculcates cynicism in government. Perhaps a bit of cynicism about our government is a good thing.

If voters have a more negative view of politicians and government, it might lead them to be more hesitant about entrusting those same politicians with ever-greater power. The dubious nature of most politicians is one of the reasons why it is important to restrict the size and scope of government.

Exactly.

Leon Wolf at Red State chides his fellow conservatives for their over-the-top enmity to Mitt Romney by pointing out that he is more conservative than any other GOP nominee since Reagan and that all his flip-flops have been to the right, something conservatives should celebrate.

Obama wins two "awards" for the worst product failures of 2011. Way to go. And the high-speed train for California will join that list if the California decides to allocate the money to build this billion-dollar boondoggle.

If you want to know what liberals will be saying about Rick Santorum if he stays at the top, here is a dump of accusations against Santorum. And here are some more ethical complaints against Santorum. These are the attacks that Santorum avoided by being below the radar until this week.

Meanwhile, Daniel Henninger posits that the votes for Santorum and Paul in Iowa indicate that voters rewarded consistency in those candidates. Not Romney's forte.

John Steele Gordon takes us on a walk through the history of negative campaigning in America.

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Capitalist Preservation

2012-01-07T12:32:00.000-08:00

Capitalist Preservation

The effect of increasing the minimum wage on low-skilled workers, especially teens.

Capitalist Preservation

2012-01-07T12:29:00.000-08:00

Capitalist Preservation

The effect of increasing the minimum wage on low-skilled workers, especially teens.

Capitalist Preservation: The fallacy of the minimum wage: Part One and Part Two

2012-01-07T12:11:00.000-08:00

Capitalist Preservation: The fallacy of the minimum wage: Part One and Part Two

Former AG Meese: Obama’s ‘Recess’ Appointments Are a ‘Constitutional Abuse o...

2012-01-07T12:01:00.001-08:00

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Former AG Meese: Obama’s ‘Recess’ Appointments Are a ‘Constitutional Abuse of a High Order’

via Big Government by Dr. Susan Berry on 1/7/12

In a Washington Post editorial Thursday, Edwin Meese, the former U.S. Attorney General under President Ronald Reagan, and Todd Gaziano, Director of the Heritage Foundation's Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, wrote that President Obama's unilateral appointment of three individuals to the National Labor Relations Board, and of Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, while the Senate was not in recess, is a "breathtaking violation of the separation of powers and the duty of comity that the executive owes to Congress."

The authors asserted:

…never before has a president purported to make a "recess" appointment when the Senate is demonstrably not in recess. That is a constitutional abuse of a high order.

The beauty of this editorial is that Mr. Meese and Mr. Gaziano provide instruction to handle this rogue president who continues to thumb his nose at the Constitution. They continue:

President Obama's flagrant violation of the Constitution not only will damage relations with Congress for years to come but will ultimately weaken the office of the presidency. There eventually may be litigation over the illegal appointments, but it will be a failure of government if the political branches do not resolve this injustice before a court rules…Congressional leaders of both parties must vigorously (though thoughtfully) defend their prerogatives. Senators could filibuster all presidential nominations, as Sen. Robert C. Byrd did in 1985 over a lesser recess appointment issue, until Obama rescinds these wrongful appointments. The House or Senate could condition all "must-pass" legislation for the remainder of 2012 on an agreement to rescind these appointments. The House also could require the attorney general to produce legal justification and testify at oversight hearings.

The authors conclude:

If Congress does not resist, the injury is not just to its branch but ultimately to the people.

if we were not already aware, "Congress" includes Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who, naturally, praised the president for trampling over her branch of government. Regarding Mr. Obama's power grab, Mrs. Pelosi said, "…we're glad that the president took the lead, went out there, it was bold and made the appointments." (Translation: How else can I get the things I want since I'm no longer Speaker?)

But, "Congress" also includes Speaker John Boehner, whose response to the bird he was just flipped was that the president's action is "bad for jobs." Mr. Boehner said, "This action goes beyond the President's authority, and I expect the courts will find the appointment to be illegitimate."

So that's it? Just file a lawsuit and get back to the business of the day? No defense of the Constitution, of the separation of powers? No conditions placed on future legislation? No talk of impeachment?

Below are some of the Republican presidential candidates' responses, that were available to date, to the president's heinous actions:

Ron Paul: "By making 'recess' appointments to the Consumer Financial Protection Board (CFPB) and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) when Congress is not actually in recess, President Obama has acted in clear disregard of the Constitution…And the President must be called to account for his actions."

Newt Gingrich: "The answer to an imperial president is a Congress which stands on its own rights. And the correct response to what the president just did would be for the Congress to zero out and refuse to fund the National Labor Relations Board. The National Labor Relations Board now has a majority of members who were never confirmed by the U.S. Senate. This is a clear violation of the spirit of the law, and Congress has an obligation to defend our rights, and the correct way is the power of the purse."

Mitt Romney: "Just back from vacation, President Obama has wasted no time in returning to one of the top items on his agenda: doling out favors to his big labor political allies and giving them a dangerous level of power over businesses and workers. His recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board give this unaccountable and out-of-control agency the authority to continue acting in ways that create uncertainty for businesses, drive up their costs, and discourage hiring or investment. President Obama's preference for partisan politics over economic growth will only hurt the millions of middle class families across the country who lose out every time the union bosses win. As president, my focus from day one will be on getting our economy turned around by pursuing policies that strengthen rather than stifle job creation."

Rick Santorum: "I hope that the United States Senate does what they're supposed to do, and they should go and even take the president to court. This is not something that the president should get away with."

I know "It's the Economy, Stupid." But, for whatever it's worth, the major issue of the upcoming election is whether our Constitution, and the nation as we know it, endures. In my book, presidents and members of Congress who violate the Constitution, or fail to uphold their oaths to defend it, are, in a word, unelectable.

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How to Confront the Anti-Israel Fixation of the Left

2012-01-03T08:18:00.001-08:00

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How to Confront the Anti-Israel Fixation of the Left

via PJ Media by Belladonna Rogers on 1/3/12

PJ Advice Columnist Belladonna Rogers on how to challenge the Israel-bashers and how to tell when their efforts to delegitimize Israel are based on anti-Semitism.

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Response to “Paul Krugman”

2012-01-01T20:47:00.001-08:00

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Response to “Paul Krugman”

via Cafe Hayek by Don Boudreaux on 12/30/11

After posting this item a couple of hours ago, I received an e-mail from "Paul Krugman." Here's my reply to that e-mail:

Dear "Paul Krugman":

While I doubt that you're the Paul Krugman, your argument against my most-recent blog post is both fair and one that Krugman himself likely would raise.

You argue that if Uncle Sam taxes Americans an extra $1 billion in order to raise my personal income by $1 billion, that Americans as a group, in fact, are not made worse off – that, while some Americans are made worse off, my benefit "counterbalances fully enough the cost imposed on" other Americans so that this tax and expenditure together impose no net burden on Americans as a group.

I disagree, although I see that that my example doesn't clearly enough reveal the net harm.

So suppose instead that Uncle Sam decides to level the Rocky Mountains. That program (whatever its merits or demerits) would require the use of enormous amounts of capital and human labor. To direct these resources to the task of razing the Rockies would require a huge government expenditure – say, $10 trillion dollars.

Suppose Uncle Sam hires only American workers and buys only American-owned resources to raze the Rockies. Suppose further that Uncle Sam finances this program exclusively by raising taxes. An extra $10 trillion in taxes is raised, and every cent is spent successfully leveling the Rockies.

According to Krugman, because "we" received every cent that "we" paid to level the Rockies, the net burden to "us" as a group of leveling the Rockies is zero! The program is costless! But clearly that conclusion is incorrect.

Massive quantities of valuable, real resources are used up to raze the Rockies. The workers and resource owners didn't pay for these resources to be used in this way (as these workers and owners voluntarily contributed, for pay, to the effort). Taxpayers paid; and the cost can be reckoned in the foregone value of whatever it is those workers and resources would have produced had they not instead been used to raze the Rockies. The net cost to Americans of razing the Rockies clearly is $10 trillion – a cost that doesn't disappear simply because the tax payments by some Americans of $10 trillion were received fully as income payments by other Americans.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

…..

Note, btw, that my argument above – which is simply the argument that Jim Buchanan revived in 1958 after that argument had been confusingly dismissed, especially by Keynesians, in the early and mid 20th century – says nothing directly about the merits or demerits of deficit financing. Projects funded with public debt might well be agreed by every one, even God, to be worthwhile – and worthwhile to fund with debt. But even unambiguously worthwhile projects have a cost, and that cost does not vanish simply because the recipients of repaid debts are citizens of the same country as are the people taxed to repay these debts.

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The Top Ten Unfounded Health Scares of 2011 > News & Commentary > ACSH

2011-12-30T19:13:00.000-08:00

The Top Ten Unfounded Health Scares of 2011 > News & Commentary > ACSH

Liberty Square Blueprint - The Commons

2011-12-27T20:50:00.000-08:00

Liberty Square Blueprint - The Commons This was offered as an explanation of the goals of the Occupy Random Places movement.

#Occupycalypse Now, Part I: OWS Rises to Power

2011-12-26T09:20:00.001-08:00

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#Occupycalypse Now, Part I: OWS Rises to Power

via Big Government by Tom Stilson on 12/24/11

For some of us, it's difficult to take the Occupy movement seriously. However, for once, let's do just that and ask the simple question, "What if the Occupiers take power?" To answer that, I need to first address what they would need to do to rise to power (I will address the consequences of them in power in a later post). We need to understand the means through which the Occupiers will reach their ends — communism or anarchy. The answer can be discerned from the perspective of experts on mob mentality and mob rule.

To stand any chance at gaining control over our nation, the Occupy movement would first need to disrupt our current system of governance and commerce. Jim Rawles, editor of Survivalblog.com, New York Times best-selling author, and a former US Army Intelligence Officer, offers a historical perspective on the matter by referencing the International Workers of the World (IWW) protests of the 1920s and 30s.

"In that situation, The IWW relocated people from very long distances. They intentionally overwhelmed the local police by relocating large numbers of protesters. It's analogous to the military massing their firepower for an offensive…If there is an overreaction on the part of the police or conceivably the military, if the protests grow to a large scale beyond the police's ability, there's the potential for a lot of violence."

Further violence from the Occupy movement is not a far-fetched expectation; it's something we have already seen. Historically, mass sit-in protests, such as those of the 1960s or the Veteran's Bonus Encampment of 1932, have the capacity to generate a violent and confrontational end result. After all, Occupy has already attempted to disrupt our economy on Black Friday through mass action protests (and miserably failed). History does repeat itself, by the way, as the IWW is heavily involved with the Occupy protests.

Jerry Ahern, an expert and author of dozens of fiction and non-fiction books on survival, firearms, and defensive strategies proposed another possibility for disruption:

"If [the Occupy movement] continues to grow and branches out into other areas beyond their current movement and if it's still around when the conventions occur, you will see some really, really nasty demonstrations not unlike the riots we saw at the '68 conventions."

With winter on the horizon, there should be a wane in the energy of the Occupy protests. As spring and summer return, a resurgence within the movement is certainly reasonable to expect. In reality though, the only way the Occupy movement could garner power would have to be through direct, possibly violent, confrontations with authority figures. Their demands are too absurd to be accepted by the general public en masse. Even then, action from a potentially sympathetic White House will most likely fail to deter, and could seek to encourage, the protesters. Our President has shone the utmost respect and support for what is a very violent and disruptive movement — not dissimilar to his support of mob rule in Libya, Syria, and Egypt. Even then, OWS's ranks have failed to cause a significant enough disruption within our system — something that could be proven wrong if they are aided by other organized factions during their upcoming planned disruption/"shut down" of West Coast ports on the 12th.

Naturally, I had to ask (to satiate the left's palette), could the right wing be the one to initiate a violent upheaval?

Ahern responded:

"The majority of the right wing is not looking to change much of anything, nor is it into confrontation. By the same token, the left wing wants to change things. The left wing accepts confrontation as a necessary tactic for bringing about sweeping social change. For instance, a topic brought up in Alinsky's 'Rules for Radicals' is it's OK to lie. The political or social goal you want to achieve is so much more important than something as mundane as the truth. It doesn't matter what you do to accomplish your goal because the goal supersedes all else. When you have a situation like that, it becomes very dangerous."

Therein lies the issue: For Occupy to have power in this country, they may very well have to destroy the very system that, ironically enough, ensures their survival. They will have to disrupt our commerce (which they have tried to do) or garner sympathy from a largely apathetic general public. For now, the consequences of those actions are left up to "when" Occupy takes power.

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Secular Theocracy: Newsroom: The Independent Institute

2011-12-23T16:06:00.000-08:00

Secular Theocracy: Newsroom: The Independent Institute

Why Pilot Projects Fail

2011-12-21T15:30:00.001-08:00

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Why Pilot Projects Fail

via Megan McArdle : The Atlantic by Megan McArdle on 12/21/11

It seems that the LA Unified School District recently revamped its lunch menus to eliminate fattening standbys like chicken nuggets, nachos, and flavored milk. The resulting meals are much healthier, but apparently also much less appetizing. As a result, participation in the program is down, and the LA Times found students replacing the Beef Jambalaya and lentil cutlets with things like Cheetos.

This happened despite the fact that the menu was tested extensively before they put it into operation:

Andre Jahchan, a 16-year-old sophomore at Esteban Torres High School, said the food was "super good" at the summer tasting at L.A. Unified's central kitchen. But on campus, he said, the chicken pozole was watery, the vegetable tamale was burned and hard, and noodles were soggy.

"It's nasty, nasty," said Andre, a member of InnerCity Struggle, an East L.A. nonprofit working to improve school lunch access and quality. "No matter how healthy it is, if it's not appetizing, people won't eat it."

At Van Nuys High School, complaints about the food were so widespread that Principal Judith Vanderbok wrote to Barrett with the plea: "Please help! Bring back better food!"

Among other complaints, Vanderbok said salads dated Oct. 7 were served Oct. 17. (Binkle said the dates indicate when the food is at its highest quality, not when it goes bad. They have been removed to avoid misinterpretation.) On campus, even adults -- including a Junior ROTC officer and an art teacher -- have been found selling black market candy, chips and instant noodles to hungry students, she said.

"I compare it to Prohibition," Vanderbok said.

This is one more installment in a continuing series, brought to you by the universe, entitled "promising pilot projects often don't scale". They don't scale for corporations, and they don't scale for government agencies. They don't scale even when you put super smart people with expert credentials in charge of them. They don't scale even when you make sure to provide ample budget resources. Rolling something out across an existing system is substantially different from even a well run test, and often, it simply doesn't translate.

Sometims the "success" of the earlier project was simply a result of random chance, or what researchers call the Hawthorne Effect. The effect is named after a factory outside of Chicago which ran tests to see whether workers were more productive at higher or lower levels of light. When researchers raised the lights, productivity went up. When researchers lowered the lights, productivity also went up. Obviously, it wasn't the light that boosted productivity, but something else--the change from the ordinary, or the mere act of being studied.

Sometimes the success was due to what you might call a "hidden parameter", something that researchers don't realize is affecting their test. Remember the New Coke debacle? That was not a hasty, ill-thought out decision by managers who didn't care about their brand. They did the largest market research study in history, and repeated it several times, before they made the switch. People invariably told researchers they loved the stuff. And they did, in the taste test. But they didn't love the stuff when it cost them the option of drinking old Coke. More importantly, they were being offered a three-ounce cup of the stuff in a shopping mall lobby or supermarket parking lot, often after they'd spent an hour or so shopping. New Coke was sweeter, so (like Pepsi before it) it won the taste test. But that didn't mean that people wanted to drink a whole can of the stuff with a meal.

Sometimes the success was due to the high quality, fully committed staff. Early childhood interventions show very solid success rates at doing things like reducing high school dropout and incarceration rates, and boosting employment in later life. Head Start does not show those same results--not unless you squint hard and kind of cock your head to the side so you can't see the whole study. Those pilot programs were staffed with highly trained specialists in early childhood education who had been recruited specially to do research. But when they went to roll out Head Start, it turned out the nation didn't have all these highly trained experts in early childhood education that you could recruit specially--and definitely not at the wages they were paying. Head Start ended up requiring a two-year associates degree, and recruiting from a pool that included folks who were just looking for a job, not a life's mission to rescue poor children while adding to the sum of human knowledge.

Sometimes the program becomes unmanageable as it gets larger. You can think about all sorts of technical issues, where architectures that work for a few nodes completely break down when too many connections or users are added. Or you can think about a pilot mortgage modification program. In the pilot, you're dealing with a concrete group of people who are already in default, and in every case, both the bank and the individual are better off if you modify the mortgage. But if you roll the program out nationwide, people will find out that they can get their mortgages modified if they default . . . and then suddenly the bank isn't better off any more.

Sometimes the results are survivor bias. This is an especially big problem with studying health care, and the poor. Health care, because compliance rates are quite low (by one estimate I heard, something like 3/4 of the blood pressure medication prescribed is not being taken 9 months in) and the poor, because their lives are chaotic and they tend to move around a lot, so they may have to drop out, or may not be easy to find and re-enroll if they stop coming. In the end, you've got a study of unusually compliant and stable people (who may be different in all sorts of ways) and oops! that's not what the general population looks like.

So consider the LAUSD test. In the testing phase, when the program was small, they were probably working with a small group of schools which had been specially chosen to participate. They did not have a sprawling supply chain to manage. The kids and the workers knew they were being studied. And they were asking the kids which food they liked--a question which, social science researchers will tell you, is highly likely to elicit the answer that they liked something.

That is very different from choosing to eat it in a cafeteria when no one's looking. And producing the food is also very different. Cooking palatable food in large amounts is hard, particularly when you don't have an enormous budget--and the things that make us fat are, by and large, also the things that are palatable when mass-produced. Bleached grains and processed fats have a much longer shelf life than fresh produce, and can take a hell of a lot more handling. Salt and sugar are delicious, but they are also preservatives that, among other things, disguise the flavor of stale food.

I think one anecdote in the article is particularly telling. People complained that salads dated October 7th were served on the 17th--and the district responded by first, pointing out that that was the "best served by" date, not the date when the food actually went bad; and second, removing the labels because they were "confusing". Now, as anyone who has forgotten to eat a bag of lettuce knows, while it may not actually be rotten after 10 days, it probably doesn't look much like something you'd eat voluntarily. This is not something that you can change by stamping a different "sell by" date on the container. If that were my choice, I too would come to school with a backup bag of Cheetos.

So why would he say something so obviously weird? There are two reasons I can think of: 1) in a large and complicated distribution system, and with their limited funds, he knows that there is no way to actually solve this problem, so they mounted the only defense they could. Or 2) the school district still has the mentality of the old system, which is mostly focused on not poisoning anyone. In fact, there isn't much difference between Chicken nuggets that won't poison you, and Chicken nuggets at their absolute peak of freshness. And the employees just sort of assumed that the same set of rules would work for lettuce.

That's what real world applications are up against. They're not an awesome pilot project with everyone pulling together and a lot of political push behind them; they're being rolled out into a system that already has a very well established mindset, and a comprehensive body of rules. The new program implemented by the old rules often turns out to be worse than the old program. You don't move kids from pizza to salad; you move them from pizza to cheetos.

This is not, obviously, an argument against ever changing anything. It is, however, an argument against assuming that your changes will work. No, not even if you had a great pilot.

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Obama: There He Goes Again

2011-12-21T14:46:00.001-08:00

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Obama: There He Goes Again

via The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog by Aaron Goldstein on 12/21/11

You probably know by now that President Obama told Steve Kroft in an unaired portion of his 60 Minutes interview earlier this month that he had accomplished more in his first two years in office than any other President ""with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln."

John Hinderaker of Powerline (who drew everyone's attention to this display of immodesty) does a nice job of comparing Obama's first two years in office with that of Ronald Reagan.

Well, it's good to know that President Obama believes that signing the Stimulus Bill into law is a greater accomplishment than George Washington presiding over the passage of the Bill of Rights.

It's good to know that President Obama believes that caving into Russia on ballistic missile defense is a greater foreign policy achievement than the Louisiana Purchase under President Thomas Jefferson.

It's good to know that President Obama believes that apologizing for America's sins, real or imagined, did more good than President John F. Kennedy establishing the Peace Corps.

If Reagan were still around to hear Obama's bragging I suspect he would say, "There he goes again."

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Conservatives and Climate Change-Part II

2011-12-21T14:16:00.001-08:00

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Conservatives and Climate Change-Part II

via Commentary Magazine by Peter Wehner on 12/19/11

As I pointed out in a previous post, many conservatives and Republicans are skeptical of global warming and the role humans play in it. (In a March 2011 Gallup survey, for example, 36 percent of Republicans said they believed pollution from human activities had contributed to increases in Earth's temperature during the last century, while 62 percent of Republicans attributed the warming only to natural changes in the environment.)

They hold this view despite the fact that the science on global warming is near-unanimous: anthropogenic global warming is real. Groups like the National Academy of Sciences, which in the early 1990s issued a report saying that "there is no evidence yet" of dangerous climate change, have shifted their stance, arguing that human activity is having a substantial impact on increases in global temperatures. But what is less clear are the implications of global warming and what steps need to be taken to address it.

Many climate scientists fear that unless dramatic steps are taken soon, we'll see rising sea levels, contracting ice sheets, more floods and intense tropical cyclones, the spread of tropical diseases like malaria, the submergence of parts of continents, alterations in our ecosystems, and food and water shortages. Perhaps so; those concerns are certainly worth considering. But as Jim Manzi –who combines a sophisticated understanding of the scientific and economic stakes of the climate-change debate — has pointed out, pumping out more CO2 triggers an incredibly complicated set of feedback effects, and the most important scientific debate is really about these feedback effects. In Manzi's words, "Climate models generate useful projections for us to consider, but the reality is that nobody knows with meaningful precision how much warming we will experience under any emissions scenario. Global warming is a real risk, but its impact over the next century could plausibly range from negligible to severe."

Conservatives should be part of that conversation. There's an intellectually credible case to be made that it's unwise to embrace massive, harmful changes to our economy in the face of significant uncertainties based on incomplete knowledge of how the climate system will respond in the middle part of the 22^nd century. It's reasonable to argue that a meaningful deal to cut carbon emissions among the worst emitting nations (China, the United States, the EU, India, and Russia among them) is almost surely beyond reach and that our focus should be on adaptation (see here) and relatively low-cost investments in technologies rather than drastic carbon cuts. And it's fair to ask whether the best data suggests that Earth's temperature has not risen in more than a decade; and if so, why that's the case.

To acknowledge global warming does not necessarily lead one to embrace Al Gore's environmental agenda.

But rather than offer constructive ideas on how to deal with global warming, some conservatives simply deny global warming has occurred. Their concern is that admitting global warming is real opens the door to government restriction on liberty, so it's simply better to keep the door bolted shut. Given the undeniable political agenda some global warming advocates embrace, those concerns are understandable. And some climate scientists have not helped their cause by endangering their role as honest brokers (see the Climate Research Unit scandal at the University of East Anglia for more). Nevertheless, the problem for those who deny global warming is empirical: Earth's temperatures have increased and human activity has contributed to it. To deny this is to deny reality, to subordinate truth to ideology. And in the long run that can only damage conservatism.

As I mentioned before, I'm quite open to those who would refine, amend, or contradict my interpretation of things. And in the process we can all agree we should be open to revising our views based on the best evidence we have; that we let facts and data determine our views rather than the other way around. Because even in science, the wish can be father to the cause.

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How To Plot A Coordinate Dataset In Google Maps [Aardvarchaeology]

2011-12-16T13:26:00.001-08:00

Sent to you by Karl via Google Reader:

How To Plot A Coordinate Dataset In Google Maps [Aardvarchaeology]

via ScienceBlogs Select by Martin R none@example.com on 12/14/11

As an archaeologist I often need to plot coordinates on maps and plans. At every scale, really: from individual finds on the plan of an excavation trench to the distribution of something across Europe. Just dots of varying shapes and colours on various background maps. Most often, it's GPS data from field walking and metal detecting. My colleagues in contract archaeology and academe use ArcInfo for these things, but I've never had incentive or opportunity to learn to use it. Also, once you know the software, you still need a map to plot stuff on, and those are expensive. So I've been wondering if I could somehow plot my coordinate data via Google Docs in Google Maps. Free software, free maps, free updated aerial photographs.

Turns out, you can. And today I figured out how. I believe it was David Petts who nudged me in the direction of Google's "Fusion Tables". And Hans Persson (who is an inveterate geocacher) asked me to write my findings up on Aard.

1. Data formatting
Convert your coordinate data to decimal lat & long after the WGS84 datum and with a decimal dot, not the Swedish decimal comma. For instance, my house is at lat 59.289576 long 18.258234. Call the northings column "Latitude" and the eastings column "Longitude". (There are Excel macros to do coordinate conversions. For the Swedish systems, I find Robert Larsson's on-line conversion utility handy, though it doesn't do batch jobs.)

You may also want to add a "Text" column to describe what each point marks, and an "Icon" column that takes entries like "small_red" and "large_blue".

(The Map function is pretty smart and also happily works with street addresses or place names if you put them in a "Location" column.)

2. Where to put the data
Stick this data into a spreadsheet in Google Docs. Save and close the spreadsheet.

3. Plot your dots
Now click the Create button on the start page of Docs and select "Table (beta)". Tell the software to grab the data from the Docs spreadsheet you just created. (At this stage you can also tell it to disregard any extraneous data columns.) I don't quite know how to conceptualise the distinction between these tables and standard Docs spreadsheets. But for practical purposes, tables are useful because (unlike spreadsheets) they have a Visualize menu including a Map alternative. Use it and zoom in on your area of interest.

4. Colour your dots
At first, all of your dots will be small and red. To get the software to use the data you entered into the "Icon" column, (such as "large_blue"), click "Configure styles", change the "Marker icon" settings to "Column", and select "Icon".

Tell me how you're doing with this, Dear Reader, and I'll update the entry as I learn more. The first thing I want to find out now is how to create a dynamic link between my spreadsheet and the map, so that any changes to the data appear automatically on my maps. At the moment I have to make a new table every time I change the spreadsheet. Also, the only way I currently know of to get maps out of the software is screen grab, which doesn't make for great resolution.

Read the comments on this post...

Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Inside the Outbreaks on the ScienceBlogs Book Club

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If I Were a Poor Black Kid

2011-12-14T10:28:00.001-08:00

Sent to you by Karl via Google Reader:

If I Were a Poor Black Kid

via Megan McArdle : The Atlantic by Megan McArdle on 12/14/11

Gene Marks has been taking some entirely justified twitting for outlining what he'd do if he were a poor black kid. Like most of the people making fun of him, I assume that if I had been a poor black kid, I would have made the same choices that poor black kids make in those circumstances. I was as easily led as any other sixteen year old--I wanted to be liked, and I preferred hanging out with my friends to doing schoolwork. The main differences, as I see them, are that I grew up knowing a lot of people who had achieved enjoyable and remunerative careers via college degrees; and the peer group available to me at the Riverdale Country School all thought that it was really, really important to graduate high school and get into a good college. I was willing to work much harder to impress my friends than for a nebulous shot at a future job that was, from my perspective, a half a lifetime away.

After yesterday's post, someone asked me: why am I cutting more slack to fat people than I am to poor kids? After all, when I write about obese people, I write about the biological systems making it hard to eat less than your body wants. When I write about poor kids, he said, I emphasize choice.

Not exactly. Yesterday, I was writing about an argument for an environmental intervention (more jobs) that was supposed to be a "silver bullet" for the problems of educating poor kids. And when people have proposed such silver bullets for obesity (menu labeling, sugar/calorie taxes, restrictions on fast food restaurants), I've made approximately the same argument as I did yesterday: heavy people are choosing to eat because they want to, not because there aren't enough carrots available at McDonalds.

But when people blithely say "They're fat because they're lazy/greedy/insert bad character trait here", I point out that the people making the accusation have a much easier time making "good choices". Their bodies are not insistently demanding food in the same way that obese bodies are, so of course it's easier to pass up that big helping of pasta.

I'd say the same thing about people who are poor. They could be middle class if they made a serious of hard choices. But those choices are really hard--much harder than they are for the people who are already there. Chances are, you would also have a hard time making those choices.

Obviously, I am not going to adequately characterize all the difficulties of being poor. And since I have not actually been poor, I can only write about what I understand from a combination of imagination, interaction, and academic research. With that caveat, here are some of the constraints that strike me as powerful:

1. Not knowing anything different Middle class people have a very strong image of everything they'd lose if they'd end up in a housing project. Kids from poor neighborhoods, who do not see, say, successful people who have gotten out, have a much less clear idea of what leaving would look like. It's hard to work towards something you can't really imagine.

2. Leaving means living among strangers. Most of the middle class readers of this blog would--quite apart from the crime rate--find it very difficult to start a new life as a welfare mother in a housing project in the South Bronx. The kids from the housing project find college just as alien. That's not to say that poor people somehow prefer the irritations of crappy housing projects, high crime, and hassling with various government bureaucracies--they do not. But that doesn't therefore mean they actually want to abandon their friends and loved ones and the world they know.

3. Economically sound long term decisions have uncertain payoffs. Middle class kids can assume that if they work hard enough, they'll make it through college and get some sort of a decent job. Most poor kids can't assume that--a lot of those who try, flunk out--and those who try and fail won't have much help to get a second chance.

4. Their payoff matrix is different. Middle class kids can make $75,000 out of school if they get a solid degree in engineering, or a job at an investment bank. But most poor kids who study hard and go to college are not going to get one of those jobs. Realistically, dealing drugs probably offers many of them a more certain chance of making good money in their twenties than staying in high school.

Is it crazy that poor black kids focus on being entertainers and sports stars? Numerically, yes. But the odds must seem longer still of becoming an investment banker. People from their backgrounds become rap stars and football players. Few of them end up as the president of Merrill Lynch.

5. If your peer group accepts bad short-term decisions, you will often make bad short term decisions. I like to think that I work hard simply because I'm such a stellar human being, but the fact is, I would be utterly humiliated if I had to tell people that I got fired. Ditto if I'd had a baby at 21.

You can spin this into "bad culture" or "bad values" but this seems irrelevant to me, because there is no way to replace someone's values; there is no context in which the necessary discussion could take place. I don't see much likelihood that we can influence a bunch of 15 year olds to suddenly remake their value matrix to something more pleasing to a bunch of contemptuous affluent white people. If I recall high school correctly, the contemptuous affluent white people weren't very good at doing this even with their own kids.

6. Criminal records make it very, very hard to get a good job. A middle class kid who joy rides in a car or gets a DUI gets the benefit of the doubt when he claims that this was just youthful hijinks. Poor black kids with recognizeably "black" names--or poor white kids with recognizeably "poor" names--mostly don't. Once you're in that place, what's the point of trying?

7. Little economic social capital. If you're a poor kid who screws up, Mom doesn't have three relatives and a college roommate who can help you find a job to get you back on your feet.

8. Too much other social capital. Poor people have very little financial capital. But they have very strong help networks that help them survive. These networks are vital to keeping them off the bottom, but also make it harder to rise--there's a much greater expectation that if you get your hands on some money, you share it; that you will take in needy friends and relatives even if that makes your life much harder, and so forth. (There's some really interesting work on how microfinance actually functions as savings for people who cannot save because their savings will be tapped before they can be used by needy relatives and friends. The EITC seems to work the same way here). The more you have, the more you have to share. This erodes the incentive to get more.

9. Short time horizons There are all sorts of arguments about whether this is cultural, genetic, driven by the harassments of poverty, or whatever. All I can say is, if I was contemplating the possibility of the rest of my life in a housing project, I would do my best not to think about the future.

10. Lack of capital is really expensive. If you have to keep buying a $1,000 car every six months because your last $1,000 car broke down, you end up spending a lot more than if you could have bought a $5,000 car. If you don't have the money for an apartment deposit, you end up living in a much more expensive motel. Buying in bulk from Costco is cheaper than buying in small lots from a corner store. Etc.

The upshot is that the poor have to defer a lot more consumption to get their hands on a given amount of capital. That makes it hard to decide to amass the capital.

11. The jobs the poor do are really unpleasant. Yes, yes--we all did them in high school and college! But that was temporary. It's very different to work your way through college as an orderly at a school for the retarded (as my mother did) and to have that be your actual whole life. Particularly since that sort of thing wears on your body. I'm 38, and I can no longer raise my left arm all the way over my head. Thank God my job doesn't actually require that sort of thing.

When I've had a particularly crappy, tiring day, I throw money at the problem: I get nice takeout instead of cooking, pay Peapod to deliver my groceries instead of trekking to the store, treat myself to a manicure or a massage, whatever. I have fewer crappy tiring days than people who do unpleasant manual labor for years on end--and I have more money to make the associated stress go away.

I'm thinking it's a lot harder to get out of bed on Monday in year 13 of your stint as a janitor than it was on day 300--and that it's harder to get out of bed on Day 300 if you know there's probably going to be a Year 13.

12. Super high marginal tax rates Because of benefit losses and tax-credit phase outs, it is very possible for working poor people to be made actually worse off by getting a raise or a better job. They face higher marginal tax rates than all but the most affluent people in our society, which makes it less than surprising that they find it hard to move that far above the poverty line.

13. Discipline is a finite resource. Having a low-wage, low status job is usually not very enjoyable. Nor does it leave you much money for enjoyments outside of work. This makes it harder to get up the mental energy to do even more joyless tasks, like studying or harassing your kids about their homework.

14. Not everyone likes school. I've always been struck by this passage of Orwell's in The Road to Wigan Pier:

The time was when I used to lament over quite imaginary pictures of lads of fourteen dragged protesting from their lessons and set to work at dismal jobs. It seemed to me dreadful that the doom of a 'job' should descend upon anyone at fourteen. Of course I know now that there is not one working-class boy in a thousand who does not pine for the day when he will leave school. He wants to be doing real work, not wasting his time on ridiculous rubbish like history and geography. To the working class, the notion of staying at school till you are nearly grown-up seems merely contemptible and unmanly. The idea of a great big boy of eighteen, who ought to be bringing a pound a week home to his parents, going to school in a ridiculous uniform and even being caned for not doing his lessons! Just fancy a working-class boy of eighteen allowing himself to be caned! He is a man when the other is still a baby. Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel Butler's Way of All Flesh, after he had had a few glimpses of real life, looked back on his public school and university education and found it a 'sickly, debilitating debauch'. There is much in middle-class life that looks sickly and debilitating when you see it from a working-class angle.

It's still true: the mania to get more and more people into college is the brain child of people who think that school is fun, and that anyone who doesn't go is being deprived of something like a trip to Disneyland packaged with a job guarantee.

Lots of people think school is rather miserable, and they wish to leave as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the "school is fun" crowd has made an education a virtual pre-requisite for a stable and well paying job in this century. If you don't like school, and aren't good at it, what do you do? Spend the rest of your life popping chicken tenders into the deep fry at Popeye's? Or deal drugs?

15. Loss aversion is more powerful than potential gain. Over a period of years, you will work harder to keep from falling out of the middle class, than you will for a 15% chance at $100 million.

16. Racism in hiring still exists. It's harder to get your resume picked out of a pile if your name is LaShonda (or Elvis). Maybe your mother shouldn't have named you something so strongly identified with low-income mothers, but the fact remains, you may find it harder to get a job. And changing your name to please employers who are prejudiced against your ethnic group is just as fraught for LaShonda Washington as it was for Moishe Rabinowitz and Mairead Murphy--especially if you suspect that passing the initial screen just means you'll get dinged in the next round when you walk in looking identifiably Jewish, Irish, or Black.

The knowledge that employers do not trust members of your ethnic group changes the payoff of investments in human capital. We can argue about whether such statistical discrimination is rational for employers, or whether it's less powerful than poor black kids may think. But it still changes the calculation.

I think of poverty as a bad equilibrium--a pretty stable bad equilibrium, unfortunately. The coping skills that make it easier to live in poverty make it harder to get out. Bourgeois employers are actually completely correct that it is not safe to trust someone with a prison record around their cash drawer--and also, it is actually going to create more crime if criminals have no hope of rehabilitation. Poor people would actually be economically better off if they separated themselves from their friends and relatives, and used their money to attend college rather than help out struggling relatives--and also, if they fail, they'll actually be worse off than they were before. People will lead more economically successful lives if they are ashamed to skip work, go on benefits, or lose a job--and a community where most of the available jobs are unstable, pay low wages, and require pretty sound health, cannot possibly enforce such norms.

Sum it all up and the answer is: if you grew up as a poor black kid, you'd be making decisions under the same constraints, which probably means you'd make the same decisions. The fact that different decisions could produce different outcomes is important--but to state this is not to state an obvious solution.

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Left Turn: When hell broke loose

2011-12-12T13:56:00.001-08:00

Left Turn: When hell broke loose

via Power Line by Scott Johnson on 7/18/11

omorrow is the official publication date of Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, by Tim Groseclose. Groseclose is the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics at UCLA. He holds joint appointments in the political science and economics departments.
The publication of Professor Groseclose's book — previewed here by Paul Bedard at USNews and here by Professor Groseclose himself — is a signal event. To the vexed question of media bias, Professor Groselose brings the methodology of the social sciences. Professor Groseclose and his publisher have kindly granted us permission to publish the preface (here) yesterday, introduction and eighth chapter of his book (Tuesday through Friday), starring our friend Katherine Kersten, over the course of this week.
When Professor Groseclose published his findings with Professor Jeff Milyo in 2002, all hell broke loose. It is a revealing story with few twists and turns as well as a happy ending. He tells the story in the introduction to the book. Here it is:
Discussions about media bias can really inflame people's passions.
In the Spring of 2002, I began a research project with Jeff Milyo, who at the time was a public policy professor at the University of Chicago. Our goal was to create a method that would objectively measure the bias of the media.
The motivation was simple. In social science we have lots of precise, numerical devices that measure how liberal or conservative politicians are. There ought to be something similar for the media.
Three and half years later, after thousands of hours of gathering and analyzing data, we achieved that goal. For 20 major news outlets, we estimated a score, between 0 and 100, that described how liberal the outlet was. The beauty of the scores—which I now call Slant Quotients—is that they are directly comparable to Political Quotients. This means that they can answer questions such as: (i) "Is the New York Times to the left or right of Hillary Clinton?" or (ii) "Is Fox News to the left or right of John McCain?".

The results generally agreed with the claims of conservatives. For instance, our method found that 18 of the 20 outlets were left of center. The only two that were not were the Washington Times and Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume.
Our findings, however, contradicted a few claims of conservatives. For instance, they showed that some mainstream news outlets are nearly perfectly centrist, albeit still left-leaning. Two were ABC's Good Morning America and [PBS's] The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. Also, we found that many supposedly far-left news outlets were not that far left. For instance, we found that National Public Radio was no more liberal than the Washington Post, Time, or Newsweek. And we found that it was less liberal than the average speech by Senator Joe Lieberman.

We thought that, maybe, people on both sides of the political spectrum would appreciate the study, that each side would say something like "finally, an answer to the age-old debate."
We now realize how naïve that thought was.
We posted the results on my website. The public relations office at UCLA, where I work as a professor of political science and economics, wrote a press release that summarized the results.
Then came the firestorm. Our study was denounced by hundreds, and maybe thousands, of left-wing blogs, including Media Matters, the Daily Kos, and the Huffington Post. At one point if you googled "crap UCLA study," most of the first ten listings would refer to our study.
On January 5, 2006, I appeared on CSPAN's Washington Journal to discuss the study. That morning, the Daily Kos, made me the focus of an "action alert," which encouraged readers to call CSPAN and force me to "answer some tough questions" about my and Milyo's "highly flawed study."
Many of the blogs attacked us personally and tried to insinuate that right wing groups had paid us to fudge our results.
The emails were even more vicious. "I've been in media relations for twelve years, and I've never seen anything like this," said Meg Sullivan, the UCLA publicist who wrote the press release and who was listed as the contact person. "Every other study that I've been involved with will get maybe a few emails. This one has gotten hundreds. And some are scary. I hope your home address is not public."
A few people emailed the UCLA chancellor, insisting that I be fired. One of them noted on the subject line "Groseclose must be fired IMMEDIATELY," as if simply firing me next week would a grave injustice.
Of the many emails that leftwing strangers sent me, the first one was representative of the anger and viciousness:
Dear Tim,
Sounds like that cockamamie load of bulls**t study of yours started with the results you wanted (i.e., that Fox News is "fair and balanced") and then concocted the most ridiculous, asinine set of parameters you could think of to ensure the results you were after.
You've obviously never watched Fox News, [otherwise you'd realize how many people] will be laughing at your "study".
…
Sorry man, sounds like a bunch of BS to me, and that's from an independent. …

Xxxx Xxxx
One of my colleagues at UCLA, whom I'll call Byron B. Bright, may be the smartest political scientist on the planet. He knows seemingly everything about politics, economics, math, and computers. And he's the best person to ask if you need your car, refrigerator, or anything else fixed. Once, a statistical software package wouldn't do what he wanted. So, to solve his problem, he wrote a computer program that would write a series of other computer programs, which would successively execute the statistical package—that's right, he wrote a computer program that would write other computer programs.
At the same time, he's a staunch liberal, approximately as staunch, maybe more staunch, than I am a conservative. Our first debate occurred only a few weeks after meeting each other, almost twenty years ago. He casually mentioned how the only people who listen to Rush Limbaugh are ignorant extremists. I quickly explained why he was wrong, and told him, in fact, that I had been listening to Limbaugh that day.
In a more recent debate, I told him, "No, it's not true that liberals and conservatives are equally decent. Liberals have worse manners, they go to church less, they more often live in aggressive, urban environments, they shout people down at public speeches, and they use more vulgarity when they talk." At first he didn't respond. I think he decided that the best response was just to give me a look as if I had just claimed that the earth was flat. But then, just for good measure, he said "Funny how all of those well-mannered conservatives favor pre-emptive strikes against innocent Iraqis."
So after I received the above email, I gleefully showed it to Byron. I responded to the email even more gleefully:
Dear Mr. Xxxx,
Thank you for your thoughtful comments.

Please keep in mind, however, that in creating the statistical estimation method and in designing the set of parameters for it, I have benefited greatly from the help and comments of Byron Bright, a colleague at UCLA. An argument could be made that he deserves to be a coauthor. His email address is byronbright@ucla.edu.
Tim
At the University of Missouri, where my coauthor Jeff Milyo had just taken a job, the press office described our study in favorable terms and posted it on a prominent university web site.
Soon after the posting, the chairs of the humanities and social-science departments held a regular meeting with the dean. Although it was not supposed to be a topic for the meeting, our study soon became the focus of a heated discussion. The chairs of the departments of sociology, religion, and German and Russian languages were especially angry, and they called it "offensive" and "scandalous." One said "The study isn't research. It's agitprop for the conservative blogosphere."
After the meeting, one of the professors sent Milyo an email to reprimand him:
… In that lay part of my objection, and here I have to say that it's not to your work qua research at all. Rather, its presentation on the website made a pretty categorical claim about bias that taps into a charged political environment. There are difficult issues that underpin the website headline, and your study is complex and sophisticated enough to treat many of them; far more subtle and nuanced than the journalistic reductio. There are of course issues outstanding or open to discussion (what's included by way of news sources, whether conceptual categories like liberal and conservative have veridical legitimacy as identity markers, where and how one designates boundaries of same [i.e., you can call something X and cite as reason a widely accepted standard, but that in no way means that the thing really is X, or so a philosopher would say], how one categorizes constellations of dispositions, how one treats what Bakhtin called dialogism in discourse analysis, and so forth. …
Milyo and I couldn't understand him either. But the fact that he would take the time to write such an email is yet another example of the passions that the study inflamed. It wasn't Milyo's idea to post a description of the study on the university web site. Also remember, Milyo had just moved to the University of Missouri. That was his welcome.
The most vicious response of all was by Eric Alterman, a writer at Media Matters. He insinuated that we were paid by rightwing think tanks to fudge our results. "Rigging the Numbers" was the title of his essay. The following were his concluding paragraphs:
Check the fine print and one finds this study—naively touted as both objective and significant by the UCLA public affairs office and published, inexplicably, by the previously respected Quarterly Journal of Economics, edited at Harvard University's Department of Economics, was the product of a significant investment by right-wing think tanks. In 2000-2001, Groseclose was a Hoover Institution national fellow, while Milyo has been granted $40,500 from the American Enterprise Institute; both were Heritage Foundation Salvatori fellows in 1997.
And yet despite its shockingly desultory intellectual underpinnings and almost comically obvious ideological imperatives, we can be certain we will hear about this study over and over for the next decade—from the very people who have written off normative knowledge and scientific research as some sort of liberal plot to subvert the values of Heartland America.
Really, you just can't make these people up.
At one level I can understand why so many leftwing strangers sent me angry emails, and why writers, like Eric Alterman at Media Matters, would say such false and vicious things about Milyo and me.
If people believe the results of our study, then they will begin to believe that they are not getting the whole truth from the media.
They might begin to think, "Maybe lower taxes are a better idea than I thought." "Maybe government should scale back its involvement in the economy." "Maybe affirmative action is not such a great idea."
Larry Greenfield, a fellow at the Claremont Institute, has made a profound observation about the psyche of the far left: "They worship the god of Equality." A corollary of his observation is the following: While other virtues, such as kindness and honesty, are important, they are secondary when they clash with Equality.
Our study, at least in small ways, harms the goal of Equality. In at least small ways, it works to make U.S. public policy less "progressive" and less consistent with "social justice." If you are an advocate of "social justice" and "progressive" values, then, even if you believe that our study is true, you should hate it. Further, if you value Equality more than other virtues, then it would be appropriate for you to conclude, "Smearing Groseclose and Milyo's study is justified, even if the smears are false." You would also be justified in attacking us personally, even saying false and vicious things about our character. As the leftwing icon Saul Alinsky advised, "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it [my emphasis], and polarize it."
At this point, let me warn you, if you are such an advocate of "social justice" and "progressive" values, then you will hate this book even more than my and Milyo's original study. I provide additional objective, precise measures that show that the media is at least as liberal as the original study concluded.
Plus, I provide evidence that the bias really does affect people's views. As I will explain, the left does not yet understand that they should disagree with the latter fact. It implies that the present views of the average voter are distorted—that is, if it weren't for media bias, then those views would be more conservative. While my original study found that the media is to the left of the (distorted) position of the average voter, the above fact means that the media is even further away from the natural, non-distorted position of the average voter. That is, not only is the media biased, it's even more biased than people realize.
But before I describe that research, let me describe the most surprising response to our study—that of professors at elite universities.
First, before the study was published, several professors invited me to present the research at their universities. I gave presentations at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke, as well as two presentations at Stanford. Although the audiences at those universities were overwhelmingly liberal, and often they raised methodological objections, not once did anyone attack me personally; nor did anyone ever suggest that I was anything but honest while conducting the research.
Next was the response at the University of Missouri. At the heated meeting of the department chairs, the chair of the economics department suggested, "Hey, we're all scholars here. Maybe we should settle this like scholars—with a debate. Let's allow Milyo to present his findings at a public forum, and we'll allow others to have a chance to criticize it." The dean agreed, and he set up such a forum. Not one of the professors who criticized the study showed up at the debate.
We submitted our paper to the Quarterly Journal of Economics. This is the oldest scholarly economics journal. It is based at Harvard University, and the three editors of the journal, all professors in the Harvard economics department, are almost sure to win Nobel prizes someday. All professional economists consider the QJE one of the top four economics journals, and some consider it the top journal.
One of the most wonderful aspects of the response to our paper is something that Milyo and I—and most other scholars—usually take for granted. This is that at no point in the review process did anyone at the QJE ask, "Are you currently, or have you ever been, associated with any conservative organization?" Many leftwing blogs, including Media Matters, denounced our paper because of our prior affiliation with conservative groups. Some blogs, for the same reason, even denounced the QJE for accepting our paper. The writers at these blogs should consider how much they sound like Joe McCarthy—once you substitute "conservative" for "communist." The beauty of the review process at the QJE—and all other scientific journals of which I am aware—is that they don't care about the political views and associations of the authors who submit papers. They judge the papers strictly by their merits.
It may surprise some people that a group of Harvard professors approved of a paper that concludes that the media has a liberal bias.
But if you think that's strange, just wait.
A few months after the QJE accepted our paper, instead of firing me, UCLA promoted me—from Associate Professor of Political Science to "full" Professor of Political Science.
That one surprised me. Out of the many hundreds of professors at UCLA, I'm aware of only nine who voted for John McCain in 2008, and one of those nine asked me never to reveal that fact to anyone at UCLA. I am almost certain that not one dean, chancellor, or vice-chancellor at UCLA voted for McCain in 2008 or Bush in 2000 or 2004.
A few months later, the professors in the economics department at UCLA voted to give me a "joint" professorship in their department. Around the same time, Caltech invited me to be a Visiting Professor for a quarter.
Shortly after, the University of Missouri promoted Milyo—from Associate Professor of Economics to "full" Professor of Economics.
Then it got really, really strange. Yale University offered me a job … as a full professor. The average professor at Yale, I am certain, is even more liberal than the average professor at UCLA. Although I believe that Yale offered me the job in spite of, not because of, my media-bias research, Yale did not consider that research a reason to blackball me.
Soon after that, the University of Chicago offered me a job as a full professor with an "endowed chair." UCLA responded with an endowed chair, plus a significant increase in salary.
But from a personal standpoint, the most wonderful response came from an email that I received one day. "Dear Mr. Alterman," it began. Alterman, you may recall, was the writer at Media Matters who said that Milyo and I "rigged" our numbers and insinuated that we did it because rightwing think tanks had "invested" in us.
I was very disappointed to read your review of my colleague Timothy Groseclose's paper on media bias. The lack of civility and the personal nature of your review struck a tone that I had not expected from you. …
As much as you and, indeed, I want to believe that the results of Tim's study are false, they are not the result of cooking the books. Tim is nothing if not careful. Yes, he is a conservative and, yes, I am sure he is pleased with the way the results turned out. But, the method was laid out before the data were collected and I am confident that the paper would have been published regardless of the outcome.
For what it is worth, here is the truth about the paper from someone who does not share Tim's politics. … It is academically honest research by careful and serious scholars who do not pursue a research agenda at the behest of any conservative patron.
Once I realized that the email was written by one of my UCLA colleagues, I quit reading and bolted down the hall. This deserved an immediate thank you.
But as I approached his door, it occurred to me that I might not be able to express my thanks without my voice breaking or eyes watering. So I slowed my walk, cleared my throat, and blinked my eyes. The reason the email was so touching was not so much its words but who wrote them … Byron B. Bright.
From Left Turn by Tim Groseclose, PhD. Copyright © 2011 by the author and reprinted by kind permission of St. Martin's Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

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nutmeg maple butter cookies | smitten kitchen

2011-12-10T17:04:00.000-08:00

nutmeg maple butter cookies | smitten kitchen

Eight Warning Signs of Junk Science

2011-12-10T13:27:00.000-08:00

Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Seven Eight Warning Signs of Junk Science

Here is a non-exclusive list of ~~seven~~ eight symptoms to watch out for:

Science by press release. It’s never, ever a good sign when ‘scientists’ announce dramatic results before publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. When this happens, we generally find out later that they were either self-deluded or functioning as political animals rather than scientists. This generalizes a bit; one should also be suspicious of, for example, science first broadcast by congressional testimony or talk-show circuit.

Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of eschatological panic. When the argument for theory X slides from “theory X is supported by evidence” to “a terrible catastrophe looms over us if theory X is true, therefore we cannot risk disbelieving it”, you can be pretty sure that X is junk science. Consciously or unconsciously, advocates who say these sorts of things are trying to panic the herd into stampeding rather than focusing on the quality of the evidence for theory X.

Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of moral panic. When the argument for theory X slides from “theory X is supported by evidence” to “only bad/sinful/uncaring people disbelieve theory X”, you can be even more sure that theory X is junk science. Consciously or unconsciously, advocates who say these sorts of things are trying to induce a state of preference falsification in which people are peer-pressured to publicly affirm a belief in theory X in spite of private doubts.

Consignment of failed predictions to the memory hole. It’s a sign of sound science when advocates for theory X publicly acknowledge failed predictions and explain why they think they can now make better ones. Conversely, it’s a sign of junk science when they try to bury failed predictions and deny they ever made them.

Over-reliance on computer models replete with bugger factors that aren’t causally justified. No, this is not unique to climatology; you see it a lot in epidemiology and economics, just to name two fields that start with ‘e’. The key point here is that simply fitting historical data is not causal justification; there are lots of ways to dishonestly make that happen, or honestly fool yourself about it. If you don’t have a generative account of why your formulas and coupling constants look the way they do (a generative account which itself makes falsifiable predictions), you’re not doing science – you’re doing numerology.

If a ‘scientific’ theory seems tailor-made for the needs of politicians or advocacy organizations, it probably has been. Real scientific results have a cross-grained tendency not to fit transient political categories. Accordingly, if you think theory X stinks of political construction, you’re probably right. This is one of the simplest but most difficult lessons in junk-science spotting! The most difficult case is recognizing that this is happening even when you agree with the cause.

Past purveyers of junk science do not change their spots. One of the earliest indicators in many outbreaks of junk science is enthusiastic endorsements by people and advocacy organizations associated with past outbreaks. This one is particularly useful in spotting environmental junk science, because unreliable environmental-advocacy organizations tend to have long public pedigrees including frequent episodes of apocalyptic yelling. It is pardonable to be taken in by this the first time, but foolish by the fourth and fifth.

Refusal to make primary data sets available for inspection. When people doing sound science are challenged to produce the observational and experimental data their theories are supposed to be based on, they do it. (There are a couple of principled exceptions here; particle physicists can’t save the unreduced data from particle collisions, there are too many terabytes per second of it.) It is a strong sign of junk science when a ‘scientist’ claims to have retained raw data sets but refuses to release them to critics.

It would be way, way too easy to list the ways these symptoms have manifested with respect to the AGW panic. It’s a more useful exercise for the reader to think back and try to recognize them in previous junk-science flaps. Go and learn. And don’t get fooled again.

‘Occupation’ Is Not ‘Speech’: #OccupyBoston, #OccupyDenver Lose in Court

2011-12-08T10:10:00.001-08:00

Sent to you by Karl via Google Reader:

‘Occupation’ Is Not ‘Speech’: #OccupyBoston, #OccupyDenver Lose in Court

via Big Government by Joel B. Pollak on 12/7/11

McIntyre: permission to occupy the bench! (Photo credit: AP)

Suffolk County Superior Court Judge Frances McIntyre, who was prematurely panned for granting Occupy Boston a temporary reprieve (and for being a Mitt Romney appointee), delivered an elegant decision against the protestors today:

Plaintiffs claim that their occupation of the site and the community they have established thereon are protected by the First Amendment. They seek a preliminary injunction against their removal by the defendants.

But the injunction is denied because, while Occupy Boston protesters may be exercising their expressive rights during the protest, they have no privilege under the First Amendment to seize and hold the land on which they sit…[T]his court seriously doubts that the First Amendment permits the plaintiffs to seize and hold a public forum to the exclusion of others. (1, 15)

Judge McIntyre noted that "the setting up of tents, sleeping, and governance" on a public square is "expressive conduct," albeit subject to local regulations that have a merely "incidental" impact on free speech, and which are consistent with established time, place, and manner restrictions on the First Amendment. However, the fact that protesters sought to "Occupy" that public square crossed the line from speech into land seizure.

(Time to rename that movement, perhaps?)

Meanwhile, in Denver, a federal judge ruled against Occupy Denver's request for a restraining order to stop city policy from ticketing them, ahead of a lawsuit to decide the substance of their claim.

The Denver Post reports that U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn (a George W. Bush appointee) ruled that Occupy Denver had failed to show evidence that the police were acting in retaliation to the protestors' opinions.

The attorney for the activists blasted the judge: "The problem with the court system today is there are so few judges willing to stand up for civil rights and civil liberties and so many judges willing to enhance the power of the police."

(Time to try a different legal strategy, perhaps?)

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The Left still shapes the debate

2011-12-08T09:46:00.001-08:00

The Left still shapes the debate

via Bookworm Room by Bookworm on 8/30/11

One of the big issues heating up for the election is "science." I noted the other day that Krugman has thrown down the gauntlet, saying that the Republicans are returning us to a flat earth world, and, many, including Roger L. Simon, have picked it up, pointing out that Krugman and others have totally abandoned scientific method in order to support their ever-more-dubious claims. Rich Lowry continues in the Simon vein, elaborating on the way in which Leftists use science as a political and social bludgeon, instead of a method of rigorous analysis.

Jonah Goldberg, however, makes the best point of all, which is to challenge the way in which the Left still determines which science matters:

Rich: I liked your column today. But you only struck a glancing blow at my biggest peeve about the whole anti-science thing: Why does the Left get to pick which issues are the benchmarks for "science"? Why can't the measure of being pro-science be the question of heritability of intelligence? Or the existence of fetal pain? Or the distribution of cognitive abilities among the sexes at the extreme right tail of the bell curve? Or if that's too upsetting, how about dividing the line between those who are pro- and anti-science along the lines of support for geoengineering? Or — coming soon — the role cosmic rays play in cloud formation? Why not make it about support for nuclear power? Or Yucca Mountain? Why not deride the idiots who oppose genetically modified crops, even when they might prevent blindness in children?

Goldberg has focused upon a small subset of a much larger issue: not only does the Left still control the dissemination of information (so that its decision to be silent about Obama's history with Rev. Wright meant most people didn't hear about it), it also decides what topics are worthy and what aren't. Using it's still bullyish pulpit, it dictates that Republican candidates deserve to have their colons examined, while Democrat candidates get kudos.

During the Bush era, the media focused obsessively on battle deaths, but during the Obama era, that tragic information is all but ignored, even if it takes a more startling or extreme form than it did under Bush's watch. It takes the Army to tell us what the MSM ignores. (Proving, definitely I think, that the focus on deaths was never out of respect for the dead but was always intended to make Bush look like the man murdering, en masse, American youth.)

I am reminded of George Orwell's point in Newspeak: if the vocabulary is killed, the ability to think the thoughts dies too. The media, which has a weakened, but still strangling, hold on American discourse, is trying to place some ideas in our minds (Perry is a stupid, anti-scientific troglodyte) while utterly erasing others (anything bad about Obama). Since it frames the debate, and sets the rules, it's going to win or, at the very least, have an disproportionate advantage.

This media framing may be why the guy who picked winners in the last seven elections thinks Obama will win the next one. Obama fits the majority of Lichtman's 13 "keys" to election or, in Obama's case, re-election. Most interestingly, he counts ObamaCare and the stimulus in Obama's favor ("major domestic-policy changes in his first term"). Allahpundit rightly points out that these are deeply unpopular measures, so they shouldn't count:

[S]urreally, he's counting the stimulus, which the public reviles, and ObamaCare, about which the public is deeply suspicious, as a point in Obama's favor because they are, after all, major "changes" to American domestic policy. By that standard, even the dumbest, most hated piece of legislation should be treated as an asset to a presidential campaign so long as it's significant enough to constitute "major change." If you flip that Key to the GOP, then you've got six for the Republicans — enough to take the White House by Lichtman's own metrics.

What Allahpundit isn't considering, though, is that the media, which will shape the prism through which the election plays out, will constantly sell both the stimulus and ObamaCare to the public as "good things." The question is whether the public is going to believe the media or its lying eyes. Past elections, sadly, have shown that, to paraphrase Mencken, you can never go broke underestimating the analytical abilities of the American public. (Although Ace wonders if even the public can be that dumb.)

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The Failure of Market Failure | The Freeman

2011-12-08T07:35:00.001-08:00

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/headline/failure-of-market-failure/

People object that there's no such thing as a free market. (Therefore, I suppose, we need not worry about how unfree a market may become.)

The proper response to that objection is, "so what?" What's important is now how close to error-free a system is, but how good its error correcting mechanisms are.

...In the technical literature a market failure refers to any situation in which a market does not produce the "Pareto-optimal, general equilibrium" outcome. Standard neoclassical theory argues that "perfectly competitive" markets will produce outcomes in which resources are allocated to their highest valued uses and no one person can be made better off without making at least one other person worse off. In general equilibrium, prices of all goods are exactly equal to the marginal cost of producing them and all households maximize their utility. In addition, all firms are profit maximizing, but the level of real profits earned is zero, as no reallocation of resources could improve on the current one.

Unreal Conditions

Strictly speaking, any market outcome short of this reflects a "market failure" in that markets have failed to produce the ideal outcome that theory predicts. However, in the real world the conditions necessary to produce a general-equilibrium outcome are not remotely feasible: perfect knowledge, homogeneous products, and a large number of small firms in every market with none able to influence price. Given that such a world is not possible, the charge of market failure boils down to the claim that markets don't produce a level of "perfection" that is unattainable under any realistic circumstances.

In this sense of the term, markets "fail" constantly. It takes an Austrian perspective to understand that these sorts of imperfections (a better term than "failure") are not only part and parcel of real markets; they also are what drive entrepreneurship and competition to find ways to improve outcomes. In other words, what markets do best is enable people to spot imperfections and attempt to improve on them, even as those attempts at improvement (whether successful or not) lead to new imperfections. Once we realize that people aren't fully informed, that we don't know what the ideal product should look like, and that we don't know what the optimal firm size is, we understand that these deviations from the ideal are not failures but opportunities. The effort to improve market outcomes is the entrepreneurship that lies at the heart of the competitive market.

MercatorNet: A mortal threat to marriage

2011-12-07T08:33:00.001-08:00

Link: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/a_mortal_threat_to_marriage

What gays and lesbians want is marriage lite, not real marriage. This confers the right to do karaoke versions of "Going to the Chapel of Love" in public, but little more. Divorce is an ever-present possibility, fidelity is unnecessary and children are optional. Big deal.

What compelling reason is there for the state to support such an impoverished institution? Traditional marriages nurture children, who are the future of society and deserve protection. But why should the state get in the business of supporting what is little more than friendship with benefits?

Cook Perfect Rice Without a Rice Cooker (and Store It for Quick Reheating) [...

2011-12-06T14:45:00.001-08:00

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Cook Perfect Rice Without a Rice Cooker (and Store It for Quick Reheating) [Food]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 12/5/11

Most people who make a lot of rice swear by rice cookers, but food blogger Darya Pino (and me, actually) have had mixed experiences. So, instead of relying on inconsistent rice-cooker results, Pino set out to find how to cook perfect rice without a rice cooker. More »

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Why can't lefties be honest about the First Amendment? | Mark Tapscott | Columnists | Washington Examiner

2011-12-06T10:50:00.001-08:00

Link:
http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/11/why-can-t-lefties-be-honest-about-first-amendment

... leftists like Reich have been apoplectic since the Citizens United decision, which among much else, affirmed the First Amendment rights of individual Americans associating with each other in corporations (and unions, a fact that Reich conveniently forgets to acknowledge).

Leftists like Reich – and President Obama, with his demagogic attack on the high court as the justices sat in the congressional chamber listening to his 2010 state of the union address – endlessly repeat the falsehood that Citizens United created a new corporate right.

In fact, the Supreme Court has held nearly two dozen times since FDR was in the White House that corporations are associated persons who have constitutional rights. In 1978, for example, the Court said in First National Bank of Boston v Bellotti that it found in the context of ballot measures "no support for the proposition that speech that otherwise would be within the protection of the First Amendment loses that protection simply because its source is a corporation."

....

Indeed, it is only a short distance between advocating limits on political speech in order to avoid "the appearance of corruption" - or, as Cass Sustein, Obama's regulatory czar, argues, to correct or prevent "conspiracy theories" in the general populace - and endorsing such limits on newspaper editorials, opinion columns, or Talk Radio commentaries because they, too, allegedly create such an appearance.

Dear Left: Corporatism Is Your Fault

2011-12-06T10:24:00.001-08:00

Link:
<https://www.google.com/reader/view/?hl=en&tab=my#stream/user%2F11614470787439797294%2Flabel%2FJJR>

Dear members of the moderate left,

America is suffering from rampant, run-away corporatism and crony capitalism. We are increasingly a plutocracy in which government serves the interests of elite financiers and CEOs at the expense of everyone else.

You know this and you complain loudly about it. But the problem is your fault. You caused this state of affairs. Stop it.

Unlike we libertarianish people, you people actually hold and have been holding significant political power in the US over the past 50 years. What have you done with this power? You've greased the corporatist machine every chance you've gotten. You've made things worse, not better. Our current problems are your fault. You need to stop.

We told you this would happen, but you wouldn't listen. You complain, rightly, that regulatory agencies are controlled by the very corporations they are supposed to constrain. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create power—and you people love to create power—the unscrupulous seek to capture that power for their personal benefit. Time and time again, they succeed. We told you that would happen, and we gave you an accurate account of how it would happen.

You complain, perhaps rightly, that corporations are just too big. Well, yeah, we told you that would happen. When you create complicated tax codes, complicated regulatory regimes, and complicated licensing rules, these regulations naturally select for larger and larger corporations. We told you that would happen. Of course, these increasingly large corporations then capture these rules, codes, and regulations to disadvantage their competitors and exploit the rest of us. We told you that would happen.

It's not rocket science. It's public choice economics. You recognized, rightly, that public choice economics was a threat to your ideology. So, you didn't listen, because you didn't want to be wrong. Public choice predicted that the government programs you created with the goal of fixing problems would often instead exacerbate those problems. Well, the evidence is in. You were wrong and public choice theory was right. If you have any decency, it is time to admit you were wrong and change. Stop making things worse.

You spent the past fifty years empowering corporations and the most unscrupulous of the rich. You created rampant moral hazard in the financial sector. You created the system that socializes risks but privatizes profit. You created the system that creates a revolving door between Obama's staff and Goldman Sachs. There's a reason why Wall Street throws money at Obama. It's because you, the moderate left, are Wall Street's biggest supporters. Oh, I know you complain about Wall Street. But your actions speak louder than your words.

SOURCE

How Congress Occupied Wall Street

2011-12-06T09:16:00.001-08:00

Link:
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204323904577040373463191222.html?mod=djemITP_h>

The legislature comprises less than 1% of the people, and are uniquely advantaged. They spend large sums of money to get and keep their offices, because they reap much more in profit from having been elected. Maybe the Occupy Random Places crowd is targeting the wrong 1%?

Mark Twain famously wrote, "There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress." Peter Schweizer's new book, "Throw Them All Out," reveals this permanent political class in all its arrogant glory. (Full disclosure: Mr. Schweizer is employed by my political action committee as a foreign-policy adviser.)

Mr. Schweizer answers the questions so many of us have asked. I addressed this in a speech in Iowa last Labor Day weekend. How do politicians who arrive in Washington, D.C. as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires? How do they miraculously accumulate wealth at a rate faster than the rest of us? How do politicians' stock portfolios outperform even the best hedge-fund managers'? I answered the question in that speech: Politicians derive power from the authority of their office and their access to our tax dollars, and they use that power to enrich and shield themselves.

The money-making opportunities for politicians are myriad, and Mr. Schweizer details the most lucrative methods: accepting sweetheart gifts of IPO stock from companies seeking to influence legislation, practicing insider trading with nonpublic government information, earmarking projects that benefit personal real estate holdings, and even subtly extorting campaign donations through the threat of legislation unfavorable to an industry. The list goes on and on, and it's sickening.

Astonishingly, none of this is technically illegal, at least not for Congress. Members of Congress exempt themselves from the laws they apply to the rest of us. That includes laws that protect whistleblowers (nothing prevents members of Congress from retaliating against staffers who shine light on corruption) and Freedom of Information Act requests (it's easier to get classified documents from the CIA than from a congressional office).

The corruption isn't confined to one political party or just a few bad apples. It's an endemic problem encompassing leadership on both sides of the aisle. It's an entire system of public servants feathering their own nests.

None of this surprises me. I've been fighting this type of corruption and cronyism my entire political career. For years Alaskans suspected that our lawmakers and state administrators were in the pockets of the big oil companies to the detriment of ordinary Alaskans. We knew we were being taken for a ride, but it took FBI wiretaps to finally capture lawmakers in the act of selling their votes. In the wake of politicos being carted off to prison, my administration enacted reforms based on transparency and accountability to prevent this from happening again.

We were successful because we had the righteous indignation of Alaskan citizens on our side. Our good ol' boy political class in Juneau was definitely not with us. Business was good for them, so why would they want to end "business as usual"?

The moment you threaten to strip politicians of their legal graft, they'll moan that they can't govern effectively without it. Perhaps they'll gravitate toward reform, but often their idea of reform is to limit the right of "We the people" to exercise our freedom of speech in the political process.

I've learned from local, state and national political experience that the only solution to entrenched corruption is sudden and relentless reform. Sudden because our permanent political class is adept at changing the subject to divert the public's attention—and we can no longer afford to be indifferent to this system of graft when our country is going bankrupt. Reform must be relentless because fighting corruption is like a game of whack-a-mole. You knock it down in one area only to see it pop up in another.

What are the solutions? We need reform that provides real transparency. Congress should be subject to the Freedom of Information Act like everyone else. We need more detailed financial disclosure reports, and members should submit reports much more often than once a year. All stock transactions above $5,000 should be disclosed within five days.

We need equality under the law. From now on, laws that apply to the private sector must apply to Congress, including whistleblower, conflict-of-interest and insider-trading laws. Trading on nonpublic government information should be illegal both for those who pass on the information and those who trade on it. (This should close the loophole of the blind trusts that aren't really blind because they're managed by family members or friends.)

No more sweetheart land deals with campaign contributors. No gifts of IPO shares. No trading of stocks related to committee assignments. No earmarks where the congressman receives a direct benefit. No accepting campaign contributions while Congress is in session. No lobbyists as family members, and no transitioning into a lobbying career after leaving office. No more revolving door, ever.

This call for real reform must transcend political parties. The grass-roots movements of the right and the left should embrace this. The tea party's mission has always been opposition to waste and crony capitalism, and the Occupy protesters must realize that Washington politicians have been "Occupying Wall Street" long before anyone pitched a tent in Zuccotti Park.

This, by the way, was written by a female former governor of Alaska.

We Can Care Without Riding The Short Bus. › 2.0: The Blogmocracy

2011-12-05T18:23:00.000-08:00

We Can Care Without Riding The Short Bus. › 2.0: The Blogmocracy

We, here in America are somewhat victimized by our own success. Many of us here, feel that we were just lucky to have been born in a Nation which controls 67% of the world’s GDP and wealth. Many of us feel that for this to have happened, it means that the remainder of the world is forced to do without. The fact is, that wealth and productivity were created by our great grandparents and grandparents who worked hard and made sacrifices on our behalf. The U.S., way back in its infancy, was in fact a third world nation. it was the economic freedom, and the very restrictions placed on authoritarians which made the industrial revolution and subsequent increase in living standard possible. There is a reason why we here in America, even with our latest economic crisis, continue to feed most of the remainder of the world. Bear in mind also, that most of this aid is in the form of aid, and not compensated for properly.

Stop and search blamed for riots

2011-12-05T11:59:00.001-08:00

Deciding oneself to be a victim seems to be the root of a lot of evil.

Sent to you by Karl via Google Reader:

Stop and search blamed for riots

via Samizdata.net by (Rob Fisher (Surrey)) on 12/5/11

Here is what London's Metropolitan Police say about stop and search:

Being stopped does not mean you are under arrest or have done something wrong. In some cases, people are stopped as part of a wide-ranging effort to catch criminals in a targeted public place. A police officer, or a community support officer must have a good reason for stopping or searching you and they are required to tell you what that reason is.

Reasons include that the police officer thinks you are carrying drugs, or there has been violence or disorder in the vicinity.

It is safe to say that stop and search is a really bad idea. It is reasonable to expect to be left alone by the authorities when you are going about your lawful business. However:

Of the Reading the Riots interviewees, 73% said they had been stopped and searched in the past 12 months – they were more than eight times more likely than the general population in London to have been stopped and searched in the previous year.

Reading the Riots is a report by the Guardian and the London School of Economics who interviewed 270 rioters to find out why they said they rioted. One could argue that cause and effect are reversed; the rioters are criminals and that is why they get stopped and searched a lot.

Theodore Dalrymple, who I do not think is right about everything but is right about a lot, analyses what he calls the underclass in his book Life at the Bottom. Reading through some of the quotes from rioters in the Guardian, his analysis rings true. The essence of it is that people have decided that bad things just happen to them and it is not their fault. Their view of themselves as victims is reinforced by their social workers who get their ideas from articles in the Guardian.

From the Guardian's report of the research:

Rioters identified a range of political grievances, but at the heart of their complaints was a pervasive sense of injustice. For some this was economic: the lack of money, jobs or opportunity. For others it was more broadly social: how they felt they were treated compared with others.

This sense of being treated unfairly is exactly the victimhood mind-set. As for jobs, Dalrymple writes:

the unemployed young person considers the number of jobs in an economy as a fixed quantity. Just as the national income is a cake to be doled out in equal or unequal slices, so the number of jobs in an economy has nothing to do with the conduct of the people who live in it but is immutably fixed. This is a concept of the way the world works that has been assiduously peddled, not only in schools during 'social studies' but in the media of mass communication.

So stop stopping and searching because it is a good idea anyway, but they will find other excuses to riot.

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Dead Movement Walking: Top Ten New Media Moments That Brought Down #OccupyWa...

2011-12-05T10:24:00.000-08:00

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Dead Movement Walking: Top Ten New Media Moments That Brought Down #OccupyWallStreet

via Big Journalism by John Nolte on 12/4/11

Now that they've officially been hung out to dry by both the elite media and the Left, Occupy Wall Street has apparently decided to die with a whimper instead of with dignity. Five lonely Occupiers in Chicago. Three in Indiana. And when that evil (not really) Rush Limbaugh makes an appearance in the very heart of Occupied territory, New York City, and only a dozen or so neo-hippie crybabies bother to show up, methinks that's a death rattle I hear.

But you have to remember 'twas New Media that killed Obama's astro-turfed, anti-American army of poopers, rapists, vandals, drug abusers and trespassers — and that without New Media the MSM would've gotten away with their evil (yes, really) master plan, which was to recreate the sixties' anti-war movement. The whole of the MSM intended to give these Occupy degenerates the same oxygen they gave anti-war degenerates forty years ago. The worst people in the world would be spoon fed the encouragement and legitimacy required to spin them into something they are not. And all of this was going to be made possible through the covering up of a hundreds of sins both big and small.

The only problem for the MSM, though, is that this isn't the sixties and, therefore, they no longer control every portal of mass communication. Thus, armed with our own cameras, the power to disseminate information without funneling through the media's corrupt filter, and armed with THE TRUTH — video by photo by investigative report, Occupy collapsed under the exposed weight of their own hypocrisy, noxious beliefs, and craven misdeeds.

In the form of a victory lap, here are my top ten New Media moments:

10. The Copper-Pooper Photo That Went 'Round the World

A moment captured on film frequently comes to define a movement. Just as the flag-raising at Iwo Jima defined WWII and one brave soul stopping a contingent of tanks defined Tienanmen Square, so will the Copper-Pooper Photo forever define Occupy Wall Street. Anarchy, depravity, incivility, and the utter pointlessness of it all captured forever.

The photo might have been snapped by the mainstream media, but it was New Media that wouldn't and will never let it die.

9. #OccupyWallStreet Cult Chant: 'You Can Have Sex With Animals'

—–

Again and again, we were told the lie that Occupy was "just like the Tea Party," a spontaneous grassroots uprising. But very early in the movement, this video went viral and told anyone with an IQ above room temperature that something was amiss at #OccupyStepford. This was our first glimpse at the real Occupy: drones, minions, dupes, and pathetic lost souls willing to do anything to conform and belong… including advocating sex with animals.

Another important thing happened with this video no one would've seen had Al Gore's invention not made viral sensations possible and MSM coverups impossible. This initiated the ridicule of Occupy, and once your movement becomes a joke, it's over before it begins. Twitter was invented for exactly this kind of thing, and if you go to the #OccupyWallStreet tag, you'll see that the mockery is and has been one of the most potent slayers of Obama's Army of the Pathetic.

8. #Occupy Trust Fund Baby

—–

The original video went viral and Occupy was certain they had found their poster boy. Naturally, the MSM played right along, but unfortunately for them, it's not their rodeo anymore. After it was discovered that this poor tortured soul was in fact Edward T. Hall III, a graduate of Columbia and a trust fund baby, Occupy and their media allies couldn't get to the memory-hole fast enough.

7. 'New York Times' Reporter Busted As #Occupy Activist, Supporter

—–

As I said above, every movement requires a defining moment, and New Media's movement to prove that Old Media was working as Occupy's propaganda arm was crystallized for all the world to see with this original piece of reporting.

6. Anti-Defamation League Condemns #Occupy Anti-Semitism

—–

The corrupt MSM's favorite game during the rise of the Tea Party was to cry racism where there was none. Furthermore, the MSM gleefully spread defamatory and provable lies which they only corrected with about 1/1000th the effort they put into spreading them (if they corrected them at all). When it came to Occupy's troubling and foundational anti-Semitism, however, the MSM not only refused to expose it, they went so far as to excuse it. A phony racist narrative wasn't able to destroy the Tea Party, but exposing Occupy as more than a little tolerant and accepting of Jew hatred would do the burgeoning movement more damage than it could likely handle. Therefore, the MSM did everything in their power to cover it up.

Conservative New Media wouldn't stand for it, though, and after some pressure was applied using something called facts, the ADL spoke out.

Though the corrupt MSM wouldn't give the ADL statement even a hundredth the coverage they gave to the NAACP's Tea Party lies, they were still obliged to cover it and yet another wheel came off the MSM's phony Occupy narrative-wagon.

5. Exposure of #Occupy Sexual Assaults, Including Alleged Rape of a Deaf Man

—–

As Americans, we're all pretty willing to look past a little reefer smoking and some late-night drumming, but only the MSM and elected Democrats are willing to ignore report after report of one sexual assault after another. While those horrible people over at Politico were writing a hundred-plus stories about 15 year-old sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain and the rest of the craven MSM was gleefully joining in the pile-on, actual rapes, gropes, and acts of public masturbation involving children were all but ignored.

Conservative New Media, however, actually is outraged by an organization tolerant of rape and child abuse, so we used every power at our disposal, and the truth got out.

4. #OccupyOakland Threatens Reporter With Physical Violence

—–

This put to bed the lie the MSM was spreading about Occupiers being nothing more than a peaceful bunch of neo-hippies anguished over social injustice.

What New Media did here was what the MSM refused to do — take a local report and turn it a national news story. The above video clip was disseminated nationwide over the Intertubes and the effect was two-fold. First, it put a different face on the Occupiers, and secondly, it let the rest of the country know the MSM wasn't telling them the full truth. "Why isn't Brian Williams telling me this?" people asked. "Why am I only hearing about this online?"

Remember, any damage done to the MSM's credibility is a blow against Occupy and a victory for America.

3. The 'Kent State Moments' That Collapsed Under New Media Scrutiny

—–

Right in the middle of this video's MSM world tour, New Media found the full video that showed an entirely different story. The police officers were, in fact, not beating defenseless Occupiers, they were acting in self-defense. Once New Media got the word out, another important part of the Left's sinister plan collapsed. The idea, of course, was to recreate the sixties and look for that Kent State moment (as this blithering idiot suggested). Demonize the cops, victimize the protesters, and you got yourself a second wind.

What ended up happening, however, was just the opposite. Because the malicious editing of that video was exposed, Occupy and their media allies lost ever more credibility with the public, and every attempt afterward to gin up a Kent State moment was pretty much met with indifference.

The MSM gave it the old college try again, though, with the "infamous" pepper spray incident at UC Davis. This was the MSNBC meme for at least two days, until…

—–

Nice try, MSM. But we're all journalists now. We all have cameras, we all have Internet access with which to distribute our own reporting, and we have the truth.

You lose.

2. The Occupy Wall Street Rap Sheet

When it came to the Tea Party, the MSM would take a single incident — an outlandish sign, for example — and use it in an attempt to smear the entire movement. When it came to Occupy the media did the exact opposite. The MSM would dutifully report each criminal incident but just as dutifully make sure America never connected the dots that would define these degenerates for the thugs they really are.

New Media made this coverup impossible.

Through the power of Twitter, email, and crowd-sourcing, The Rap Sheet was created, and the dots were (and are) updated and connected on a daily basis for all of New Media to spread and the world to see.

1. 'Crowdsource This': Occupy's Astro-turf Exposed In Massive Email Dump

There it was in black and white — the truth. This was no grassroots movement and it was about as spontaneous as a royal wedding. Without New Media, these documents would've lied there like a toxic dump our MSM Overlords never would've touched. But New Media was not only able to report on it, we were able to make every document available to every single online citizen.

Occupy's most important narrative went up in smoke, and suddenly all the other pieces came together: the criminality, cult-like chanting, anti-Americanism, Marxism, anti-Semitism, sexual depravity and overall stench suddenly made perfect sense. This wasn't some spontaneous movement generated by youthful idealism. This was the left, and this is who the left is.

—–

By the hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands, citizen journalists took everything listed above (and more) and then went around the corrupt MSM in order to let the word go forth.

While the mainstream media told their lies and half-truths and chose whatever context would fit their pro-Occupy narrative, within seconds, real truths were emailed, posted on Facebook pages and blogs, tweeted and re-tweeted. With lightning speed, photographs and videos told the story the MSM attempted to cover up….

…and all of this was generated by We The People.

Old Media never had a chance.

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The Hitchhiker's Guide to Ancient Cookery

2011-12-02T22:06:00.000-08:00

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Ancient Cookery

http://www.aspiringluddite.com/

http://www.godecookery.com/

Dead Movement Walking: Top Six Signs the Left and the MSM Have Hung Occupy o...

2011-12-01T15:03:00.001-08:00

Sent to you by Karl via Google Reader:

Dead Movement Walking: Top Six Signs the Left and the MSM Have Hung Occupy out to Dry

via Big Journalism by John Nolte on 12/1/11

Let's back up a little bit before we get to the list…

A few weeks ago in Denver I had the opportunity for some up close and personal time with the Occupy movement, and what I saw was about what you would expect. These are marginal and marginally intelligent people who have grown up conditioned by public educators and the welfare state to believe that they're something special and entitled to the good life just because they're special and entitled to the good life. And they've also been brainwashed to believe that if America doesn't acknowledge their specialness and if, indeed, they're not enjoying the good life, the problem must be a corrupt America.

Occupy is all about greed, self-actualization, and narcissism. The fastest and easiest way to feel superior is to assume the role of a victim … because a victim is always superior to his or her oppressors.

Occupy is also an army the left and Alinksy-style community organizers like Barack Obama have been breeding for decades. The formula is simple: feed enough self-esteem to those who don't deserve it and you create an entire generation of entitled crybabies desperate to direct the frustration of their unfulfilled lives at whomever.

The left thought they had found the right moment to launch their Army of the Frustrated. With Obama's poll numbers in the tank and the crippled economy unable to leap on a white stallion to save him, the idea was to launch Occupy in the hopes it would change the 2012 election conversation and media narrative from Obama's failed record to ground upon which he might be able to win reelection: income inequality and those evil one-percenters on Wall Street who destroyed the economy.

And so the filthy, frustrated, and brain-fried, under the direction of their Adbuster Masters (more about this below), took to the streets, and for a few weeks the plan went perfectly. High-profile Democrats, including President Obama, endorsed and encouraged them, while the corrupt MSM worked overtime to cover up the movement's hundreds of subhuman misdeeds (literally) and held it up as an example of all that is pure and righteous in America.

But then something happened the left and their media allies didn't expect. They had woefully underestimated the power of New Media to expose the truth, and expose the truth we did, until the Occupy dream all came crashing down in an overwhelming narrative (overwhelming because it was true) involving Occupy's frightening tolerance for rape, violence, vandalism, and public masturbation and defecation.

Occupy Wall Street was a pretty important pre-season game leading up to the 2012 election, and Obama and his Media Palace Guards haven't even started licking their wounds from the New Media ass kicking they took. And the bad news for Occupiers is that they're now scampering off the field, tail tucked between their legs, and desperate to untie themselves from the political liability these Occupiers have become.

If you don't believe me, Occupy, here are six undeniable signs that the same media and leftist elites who promised you air cover in the revolution that would finally fulfill your frustrated dreams have just left you swinging in the wind, fully exposed and more than a little humiliated with nowhere to go:

1. MSM Is No Longer Infatuated With Occupy: Other than the big stories surrounding Occupy evictions, the mainstream media's all but stopped covering the Occupy movement. 12 to 14 hours a day the cable nets are on in my office, and even leftist CNN and far-left MSNBC have ceased trying to use the Occupiers as a way to jump-start Obama-friendly narratives about taxing the rich and how Wall Street is to blame for Obama's failed economy.

No more on-the-street profiles of earnest young Occupy faces just looking to make the world a more fair and equal place.

And I can pinpoint the day this occurred. The day after GOP presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich suggested Occupy take a bath and get a job, both CNN and MSNBC went apoplectic in the hopes this "ugly" statement would backfire on the Speaker. When just the opposite happened, that was pretty much all the proof the left-wing media needed that Occupy was hurting the left, not helping.

2. Jon Stewart Guts Occupy: On November 17, "The Daily Show" took the "cool" out of Occupy with a devastating report (see above) that exposed the movement for the Orwellian Animal Farm these kinds of movements always become (which of course was Orwell's point). No one in media understood better how useful this movement could've been to Barack Obama than Jon Stewart, but he's also smart enough to know when it's time to fire off a flare warning Obama to stay away — and that's exactly what this segment was meant to do, and did.

3. AP Pretends Democrats Never Supported Occupy: On November 18, the Associated Press laughably and transparently attempted to memory-hole the Democrats' very public and energetic embrace of all things Occupy.

Gee, I wonder why?

4. Slate Freaks Over Ad Connecting High-Profile Democrat To Occupy: Slate's Libby Copeland was so panicked over a political ad that truthfully and effectively laid out Elizabeth Warren's once-proud connection to the Occupy movement that she made a public fool of herself labeling the ad as "sexist."

That's desperate. And more than a little funny.

5. New Yorker Bares Occupy's Astro-turf For the World To See: Even though Big Government exposed all of this over a month ago, the fact that the New Yorker would, in a major feature piece, finally put to bed the lie that Occupy was just some sort of organic, grassroots organization like the Tea Party, is the final nail in the movement's coffin.

After all, someone has to take the blame for this.

6. Liberal Cities Evict Occupy: Mayors of some of the most liberal cities in America (Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia) are playing Bull Connor to all those wonderful little hippies who only want "social justice." Furthermore, in their latest reports, the MSM has even stopped trying to make the cops look bad during these evictions. The coverage can best be described as obligatory.

Democratic mayors of big, urban liberal cities don't evict popular movements, do they? They wouldn't even evict a movement popular with the Obama's base.

—–

Don't get me wrong; this doesn't mean I'm going to stop ridiculing them, but as you look over the lay of the land, it's hard not to feel a little sorry for Occupy Wall Street. They're really just useful idiots and aggrieved Frankenstein monsters raised on promises their statist creators never intended to keep. And now that they've raped, pooped, and vandalized themselves into a political liability for their creators, they might actually have to take a bath and get a job.

The horror, the horror.

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New at Reason: Greg Beato on Pepper Spray’s Progressive Origins

2011-12-01T14:22:00.001-08:00

Sent to you by Karl via Google Reader:

New at Reason: Greg Beato on Pepper Spray’s Progressive Origins

via Hit & Run on 12/1/11

Pepper spray is in the air. In late September, a New York cop started spritzing Occupy Wall Street protestors with the predatory zeal of a Macy's fragrance demonstrator dispensing free samples of Kim Kardashian's latest perfume. Then, Seattle's finest chemically neutralized an 84-year-old grannie. Next there was Lt. John Pike in central California, quelling a very quiet riot on the campus of UC Davis.

Now, perhaps, may not seem like the most auspicious time to champion pepper spray as a populist triumph, the eye-searing embodiment of some of America's most cherished ideals. But as Greg Beato reminds us, the government's favorite air freshener is also a tool of individual empowerment.

View this article.

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Jesus Wants a Little Governmental Forgiveness

2011-12-01T12:36:00.001-08:00

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Jesus Wants a Little Governmental Forgiveness

via The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog by Doug Bandow on 12/1/11

I always knew that the United Church of Christ was, shall we say, a bit lax on theology. Susan Brooks Thistlewaite, a UCC-ordained minister, writes on faith for the Washington Post. And she has determined that God wants the government to forgive student loans. Based on the Lord's Prayer:

Currently, I'm advocating debt forgiveness. It is the moral thing to do and it is the right civic thing to do. This is what Jesus actually meant; real debts, real debtors, forgiving and forgiven. This is what government is actually about-of the people, by the people, for the people. We still have a chance to show young people that democracy can work for the common good.

It's a novel interpretation, never before proposed in the two millenia since Jesus walked the earth. (Thanks to Ken Shepherd of NewsBusters for publicizing this.) But I guess that is what good, innovative theologians do. Come up with heretofore unrecognized (cynics might say implausible, silly, and nonsensical, but not I!) interpretations of traditional texts.

But why stop at student loans? I've been meditating on the word and I believe God believes in a lot more forgiveness. To start, he would have the government forgive my taxes. I'm not getting good value for my money, could use the money better myself, and have been feeling unloved recently. Some tax fortgiveness would be a very good thing.

Government also should forgive us our duties to fill out census forms. Government shouldn't pry, and time is money, as we all know. So when I repeat the imprecation to "forgive us our debts," it should apply to the census.

Also, entrepreneurs should be forgiven their legal duty to pay the minimum wage. Economists long have recognized that setting wages discourages the hiring of the least skilled, educated, and experienced workers. It also punishes people hiring the most vulnerable and disadvantage. Sounds like a good opportunity for some governmental forgiveness to me!

In fact, there are a lot more regulations with which all of us should be forgiven having to comply. Many are special interest measures intended to enrich the special interests who often gain control of expensive and expansive government. When Jesus taught his disciples how to pray he obviously was telling us that government should forgive us following other arbitrary rules and laws.

I'm sure there are some areas that I'm forgetting. I mean, God is a God of forgiveness. Think of all the other areas where God obviously wanted government to forgive us!

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Adam Carolla Explains the OWS Generation

2011-12-01T11:52:00.001-08:00

NSFW, not Family Friendly, but spot on.

Sent to you by Karl via Google Reader:

Adam Carolla Explains the OWS Generation

via Big Government by MRC TV on 11/30/11

If you feel no one has quite captured how you may feel about the 'Occupiers', look no further than this. There are seriously no words for how much awesome is packed into this 9 minute rant. That's really all that can be said about it.

That and I guess we should warn you there's some foul language contained throughout.

Enjoy as Adam verbally rips them to shreds, explains the problem, then provides us with a solution. (Language Warning…once again for good measure)

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"Support that at your own risk"

2011-12-01T11:25:00.001-08:00

"Support that at your own risk"

http://wizbangblog.com/2011/11/22/support-that-at-your-own-risk/

A clear concise piece describing why you have to be ignorant or gullible to be supportive of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

What is remarkable to me is how otherwise observant, thoughtful individuals have excused the endless stream of criminal acts perpetrated at and by OWS crowds. The line, as it goes, is: All causes or political movements are going to have fringe elements, and they are going to behave badly or stupidly. But you can't judge the whole based on the actions of those few. Their overall message is sound, and you can't discredit the people or their message, or allow yourself to be distracted from that message because of these acts.
There are two problems with this position. First of all, their message, their position, their entire ideology is far from sound. Don't let hypnotic, deadpan, monotone NPR radio announcers lull you into a sense of apathy or, worse, comfort over these people. The OWS people will tell you there is this system and it is designed to work against you, but there really is no "system." There are numerous, individual agreements between adults to exchange value: effort as any combination of talent, physical labor or intellectual skill for currency. And it's not exploitative; it is mutually beneficial. Suppose you make a lot of money; you can then hire me, as an employee, or as a vendor to help you make more, and if your business does well and I'm an investor, I make money when your stock goes up; when you make more money, you can open more stores so I have better selection, lower prices, and a closer, more convenient trip to make. In America and countries like it, quality, hard work and acceptance of personal responsibility results in success–if not now, certainly for your future. However, since this does leave out everyone who does not do those things, Occupy Wall Street finds its opening with such persons.
OWS asserts that, currently, the power is in the hands of the wealthy but that it should be the hands of academics and other people smarter than you and, therefore, know better than you what's best for you and everyone else. So their stated mission is replace the system with a new one that is leaderless. However, this is not an honest statement because it is incongruous with their perception of society. Social justice implies someone is being wronged (perhaps exploited or outright stolen from), and that there is a judicial punishment. Therefore, people that stratify society by classes of victims according to gender, race or even sexual orientation are doomed to seek supremacy, not just opportunity equality, for these victim classes. When you see someone demanding social justice, they are looking to shift the class for whom they see as the owner of social power; a shift that moves power from the so-called "haves" to the so-called "have-nots." It sounds like a good idea, but it isn't, and history proves it.
Look at the legacy of Che Guevara, Hugo Chavez and Venezuela or Fidel Castro's Cuba, the revolution that brought the Ayatollah to power in Iran or Kim Jong-Il and Mao's famine-stained brand of Communism in North Korea and China. The reality is, the only place where Communism ever "works" is when it is brought about through intimidation, fear, actual torture and death. While propaganda from the American Left perpetuates conspiracy concepts around the so-called military-industrial complex accusing the CIA and the Pentagon of all sorts of "black helicopter" or "men-in-black" tactics to silence political dissidents, you have actual oppression throughout Islamic Arab countries, Socialist Central and South American banana republics, and communist regimes in parts of Africa and Asia. Actual kidnappings, rapes, murders of people and their families, including children for preserving power.
In that world, there is no constitution that limits the government. There is no legislative representation. There is no due process. There is just the way of the state and what the intellectuals have decided for you, as an adult, what is best and right for you. Socialism is the creed of shared misery. Communism is the philosophy of outcome equality through universal failure. And they sell it on the concept that if nobody is rich, then there can be no one in a class above you. But that is the biggest lie of all, because the advocates of that system want to be in the class above you that tells you what you can or cannot drive, eat or buy, or how much money you are allowed to earn. The road to hell was paved with good intentions and the message of the Occupy Wall Street movement is no exception.
Then, there is the "every political movement has a fringe element" excuse. This does not fly because in another well-known political movement called the Tea Party protests, you did not have numerous felonies. Tea Parties have not hosted shootings, murders, dead bodies, sexual assaults including rape, public masturbation, public fornication, vandalism–including defecation on police vehicles, open use of illegal narcotics, trespassing, battery of journalists and peace officers, theft of private property, public health code violations and untold economic damage to the local businesses whose customers do not want to risk blood and urine being thrown at them while standing at a hot-dog cart. You can Google every single last incident I've named to find they've happened at least once in every single city where OWS has darkened the pavement.
There are too many of these incidents to call them one-offs in the same way that out of the 1.2 Million tea party protesters that showed up in Washington, D.C., you might have had a few dozen people hoisting racially incentive picket signs directed toward the President. However, not only were there very few outsiders willing to explain them away as minor, fringe elements that do not represent the core values of the Tea Party, there is former President Jimmy Carter claiming that the heart of their opposition to the President is based in racism. At Tea Party protests, parks have been left in nicer condition than before they arrived. Will we be able to say the same when the OWS crowd is eventually evicted from the parks and lawns of public buildings in our cities? If it was anything like the union losers that tried to occupy the state capitol in Wisconsin when Scott Walker tried to institute fiscal sanity in that state, the answer will be: of course not.
So, certainly, crony capitalism between Democrats in Congress and in the White House financial institutions–either through collusion or severe legal pressure–that nearly destroyed the American economy in 2008 is bad. However, the only thing worse than a problem is a bad solution. There are good solutions to that problem, and, it would be one thing if the OWSers were just too stupid to avoid bad solutions. But this is exploitation. The Occupy Wall Street people are gunning for the most important American value that there is, Individual Liberty, and they are exploiting the misery caused by Left-wing, big government policy to advance a cause that will end Individual Liberty.
Support that at your own risk.

The Wheel of the Year: Now available on Amazon Kindle

The Official Manual for Spice Cadets: Now available on Amazon Kindle

Elizabeth Warren’s Non Sequitur | The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty

2011-12-01T10:52:00.001-08:00

Link: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/perspective/elizabeth-warren%e2%80%99s-non-sequitur/?utm_source=The Freeman&utm_campaign=3319b04bde-Freeman_Jan2010_Issue&utm_medium=email (via shareaholic.com)

Fwd: books

2011-12-01T10:38:00.001-08:00

Recommended books for Wicca

"Wicca for Beginners" by Thea Sabin is my first choice for any seeker. Written by a 3*BTW HPS, for beginners. There's nothing in it that I wish seekers weren't exposed to, as is often the case, and it covers all the basics in a way that is compatible with BTW practice.

The Elements of Ritual by Deborah Lipp thorougly explains the mechanics of circle casting. Actually explains WHY. Very helpful.

I really like what David and Sorita are putting out via Avalonia Press. 'Toward A Wiccan Circle', 'Circle of Fire' and 'Wicca Magical Beginnings'. In turn these books cover practical 101, conceptual/symbolism and History.

As for beginners, but not at the total start, I still heart Vivianne Crowley's "Wicca - the old religion for a new century".

One of my up-line elders, Eileen Smith, wrote a couple of books. The first, "Earthgard Wicca" was published almost a decade ago and the second, "A Witches Heart" was published only a couple of years ago. She was also the teacher at the Wicca 101 that got me started in all this.

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The Wheel of the Year: Now available on Amazon Kindle

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When Propaganda Burns More Than Pepper-Spray

2011-11-30T11:16:00.001-08:00

Sent to you by Karl via Google Reader:

When Propaganda Burns More Than Pepper-Spray

via Big Journalism by Liberty Chick on 11/30/11

Today, students, faculty and supporters at the University of California, Davis, have called for a general strike to protest tuition hikes and to demand the resignation of Chancellor Linda Katehi after police pepper-sprayed eleven protesters who blocked a public access way at an #OccupyUCDavis event on November 18th. Students maintain it was Chancellor Katehi who requested the police remove the Occupy encampment and clear access to the facility. The incident sparked a firestorm of media all across the world and has become a viral phenomenon, and now even an Internet meme.

We stand behind those calling for Chancellor Katehi's resignation. But not for the reasons they might think.

The events of UC Davis and the way in which the pepper-spray was handled has set a number of dangerous precedents. In the setting of academia, the rights of the majority of students are being trampled on to appease the tyranny of a minority. Further, the very system of law and order and its public servants instituted to protect the rights of the public at large have been undermined by incompetent leaders, unable to withstand the growing pressure of a noisy minority and the corrupt media that supports it. Most importantly, propaganda has established a foothold that is now stronger than ever, and far more dangerous than the short-term effects of pepper spray.

Over the last week, we have seen the media pick up the UC Davis story and run with it, always highlighting the same twenty seconds of one Officer Pike, methodically pepper-spraying eleven "peaceful protesters," while onlookers gasp and scream in horror and dismay. The public was almost undivided in its immediate condemnation of the act.

But just as Winston Churchill once said, "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." Perhaps in this case, it's not so much a lie, but a lot of omissions.

We know now that the Davis 11 locked arms to block the public access way, creating both a safety hazard and barring other students and the public from gaining access to facilities beyond that point. What the media has never explained is that the protesters were repeatedly warned to clear the path. Video shows officer Pike, the one with the pepper spray, informing each protester one last time that they would be "subject to the use of force" if they did not voluntarily move. The protesters acknowledge the warning and hunker down for the consequences.

The media also never provides an accurate portrayal of why the students were protesting in the first place, and what prompted them to block the access way. In an interview with Democracy Now, UC Davis Sustainable Agriculture student Elli Pearson, one of the protesters in the blockade who was pepper sprayed, reveals the truth.

She describes that the students were there to stand in solidarity with UC Berkeley students and the Occupy Wall Street movement, and to "protest tuition hikes that are happening at public universities all across the nation." Pearson goes on to explain:

"We linked arms and we sat down peacefully to protest their [riot police] presence on our campus, and then at one point we had encircled them [police] and they were trying to leave and trying to clear a path, and so we sat down and linked arms, and said that if they were trying to clear a path they would have to go through us."

When asked if the student protesters were given any sort of warning by police, Pearson responds:

"I believe they told maybe one student or maybe had some dialogue, but certainly not everyone could hear, it wasn't like an announcement that was made."

They intentionally encircled the police and blocked them in. In doing so, the Davis 11 created a very serious public safety hazard. But you'd never see that from the same twenty seconds of video splashed across every media outlet. Not until other bloggers began to delve into the story did the more complete versions of the incident begin to crop up on video.

But by then, the damage was done.

Police Chief Annette Spicuzza and two officers, including Lt. John Pike, have already been placed on administrative leave, and petitions calling for their resignation have been collected. Videos and internet memes of the "Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop" have gone viral. The hacktivist collective Anonymous posted Pike's information online and encouraged people to call and harass the officer. YouTube has since removed the video for violating its policies, so the transcript of the video is as follows:

Greetings police forces of the world. We are Anonymous.

Since the beginning of the Occupy movement we have watched as police violence toward the otherwise peaceful protestors has steadily increased. Your brutalization of our citizens is both unjust and uncalled for. Your raids on our encampments and the illegal actions of corrupt officers within your ranks will no longer go unpunished.

Any officer found to be guilty of these crimes against peaceful protestors will be doxed and have their personal information released to the public. It is time you take a dose of your own medicine and stop hiding behind your badge.

U. C. Davis Campus Police, Lieutenant John Pike, Records Unit Manager.

You pepper sprayed a crowd of peaceful students sitting on the ground. You are a coward, and a bully.

A tool of the corrupt. A puppet for your masters.

Citizens of the world, flood his home phone at [REDACTED].

Flood his cell phone at [REDACTED].

Flood his email at, [REDACTED].

Flood his home with pizza deliveries and junk mail at [HOME ADDRESS REDACTED].

Flood his skype at [REDACTED].

Flood his phones, email and mailbox to voice your anger.

Flood the campus of U.C. Davis.

Flood the streets of the world and stand up for your rights, and against injustice.

We are Anonymous. We Are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us!

All of this before anyone could hear or see the other side of the story.

Other law enforcement personnel have explained that pepper spray is often used as a compliance tool when necessary. "People don't consider what it takes to break up an unlawful assembly if the protestors refuse to disperse. It always takes some kind of force," said one law enforcement worker we spoke with. The officers needed to remove the protesters, who'd linked arms to form a blockade. Reaching in to manually break them apart would have required the use of physical force, while leaving the officers' weapons vulnerable to seizure. In that case, most procedures indicate that pepper-spray is justified and the most humane of all options. While it creates temporary discomfort for the protestors, it enables the officers to safely contain, and in this case, arrest the protesters in order to remove them from blocking the public's access. Protesters have since admitted, they intentionally surrounded the police and blocked them in. While the video footage shown on mainstream media may not appear this way, the complete footage that has since surfaced clearly backs up the officers' claims.

Police officers are public servants, they are people too. Where are they supposed to turn when a situation has become so politicized that they aren't supported by their own chain of command? Did these officers not have a right for the full video to be reviewed and an investigation conducted before being judged?

In March, some of the very same protesters encountered similar events during the March 4^th Day of Action to Defend Public Education (video & photos), when protesters blocked a major California highway in a standoff with police, then went on to "Occupy" buildings and classrooms at UC Davis. One of those participants listed was Kase Wheatley, the same protester featured in the high-end raincoat and overalls at the November 18^th event as one of the Davis 11 in the video that's appeared all over the media. Clearly, Kase is no stranger to such conflict, and apparently came prepared.

You see, Kase and other students like him have been at this for some time, supporting union causes like unionized teaching assistants at UC Davis and protesting union busting on behalf of AFSCME.

"The UC system has actually hired one of the premiere union busting firms in the country to basically break up the unions on campus," Wheatley said. "They're all connected, it's happening all over the world. It's happening with riots and protests in Tunisia and Egypt, and all the way to the United States."

Instead of pointing out Kase's activism experience to provide balance, media outlets like MSNBC have exalted Kase to martyr status, where he was most recently heralded by Michael Moore, who calls the incident an iconic moment in the Occupy movement akin to "Tiananmen Square."

The ramifications of the pepper spray incident reach further than the topic of the use of force. Too many fail to realize that 200 protesters in a school of over 30,000 tuition paying students is a tiny minority, less than 1 percent. What about the 99 percent in this case? The 99 percent who want to go about their daily routines, be safe on their college campus, not be afraid to voice their own opinions, and want to attend the classes they're paying for?

There is no better example of this majority than a young woman and a young man who spoke up at a Town Hall meeting that was held with Chancellor Katehi and other administrators from UC Davis. As the woman so eloquently stated:

"My concern is what the events of the last week have been doing to the quality of our education. I know that myself personally I've already had two days worth of classes canceled by the professors, I expect to have more classes canceled on Monday with the general strike and I don't think I'm alone in this. As was just stated, we have midterms coming up, we have finals coming up, and it's both ironic and sad that one of the initial starting points of this movement was to defend the right to education by not making it a classist place, and I do feel as though within the last week we have had some of those rights taken away from us. Not only are we not able to attend class because of noise, but classes are actually being canceled, we don't have the option to go."

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