Monday, February 28, 2011

Oil Prices Start Dropping again.

Daily Caller:


Oil and gasoline prices soared last week as the rebellion in Libya halted oil shipments from the country. On Monday, oil dropped on reports that a tanker bound for China was loading oil in the Libyan port of Tobruk and Saudi Arabia was boosting exports.


I Guess It's Finally Over, Over There...

The Last Doughboy has rejoined the rest of his comrades. Frank Buckles was an ambulance driver in the Great War, and all of 16 years old in 1917. His fondest wish: to restore the DC War Memorial, get a monument for the AEF, and to be buried by General Pershing.

"It has long been my father's wish to be buried in Arlington, in the same cemetery that holds his beloved General Pershing," Flanagan wrote as she began to prepare for the inevitable in a letter she sent to home-state U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia.
Here's hoping the Defense Department can make that happen. He ended up involved the the second war as well.

Buckles, after World War I ended, took up a career as a ship's officer on merchant vessels. He was captured by the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II and held prisoner of war for more than three years before he was freed by U.S. troops.
That sounds like more than one's fair share of bloodshed and toil. RIP.

UPDATE: As of now, the only living veterans of WWI are subjects of Queen Elizabeth: a British Woman and an Australian Man.

Friday, February 25, 2011

Well then, Cui Bono?

John Carney at CNBC takes us to school on "regulatory capture":

Pennell asked whether MERS was worried about an investigation by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The general counsel’s reply was a stunning admission—basically MERS isn’t worried because it is convinced that the government regards it as too important to be sanctioned for misconduct.

As Leona Helmsley might have put it, regulations are for the little people. They exist not to rein in the powerful, but to protect them from competition.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Iran is the Lodestone.

Pejman Yousefzadah links Amir Tahiri on the protests in Iran, which are becoming triumphant merely for surviving.

Many Iranians believe that the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings that toppled two Arab despots were inspired by Iran’s pro-democracy demonstrations of 2009. This week’s protests revealed three things: Iran’s opposition movement is wounded but alive; it is united in its rejection of Mr. Ahmadinejad; and, slowly but surely, it is discarding the option of change within the regime and seeking to change the regime.

For some reason, the Sunni Middle East seems to take its cue from Shi'ite Iran. Thus far that cue has been for jihad and Jew-blaming. Democracy and dictator-shaming is a welcome change.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Justin Bieber's Litmus Test

I cannot bring myself to write about Justin Bieber at Genre Confusion, so I'm doing it here. It's more about politics, anyway.

So the golden boy of the pop world got asked a bunch of questions that have nothing to do with music, and he may not have answered them like he was supposed to:

"I really don't believe in abortion," the teen idol said. "It's like killing a baby?" When asked if he was still adamantly pro-life in cases of rape, his stance didn't really change. "Um. Well, I think that's really sad, but everything happens for a reason," he said. "I don't know how that would be a reason. I guess I haven't been in that position, so I wouldn't be able to judge that."

So far, so 16-year-old. It's probably not something he's ever really thought about, and he mumbled through it as best he could. Whatever. I neither know nor care what he really thinks enough to criticize him on how artfully he articulates it.

Another point of contention from the interview is the Canadian crooner's admission that he never plans to become an American citizen. "You guys are evil," he joked. "Canada's the best country in the world." The young man even took a dig at the U.S. healthcare system. "We go to the doctor and we don't need to worry about paying him, but here, your whole life, you're broke because of medical bills."

Let's give the kid a little credit here. Sure, he's traveled the world and is in a higher tax bracket than most of us can even fathom, but how many 16-year-olds are even remotely aware of how insanely expensive healthcare can be? The fact that he's cultured and tuned in to the everyday struggles of those surrounding him (he mentions his bodyguard's premature baby and the costly complications stemming from that) is a refreshing glimpse of a Hollywood star that hasn't completely lost touch with reality and everyday people.

This, on the other hand, is just bursting with stupid. Not Bieber's polite and thoughtful opining on the intricacies of health care, that's just the opinion every Canadian is issued at birth. What's stupid is this particluar Popeater claiming that mere chauvinism coupled with declarations of evil reflects maturity and insight.

Justin Bieber doesn't know anything about health care or how much it costs. He doesn't have to: he's Canadian. Debates about health care costs occur above his pay-grade. Somber, credentialed professionals in brightly lit rooms have these debates for him, so that, as he boasts, not a golden hair of his pretty head ever need be disturbed by them.

Justin and his opinions on premarital sex are understandable -- the kid is, after all, a sex symbol to millions of tween girls -- but were the questions about abortion, rape and even politics appropriate given his age and the fact that these topics have seemingly nothing to do with his music, movie or any of the products he sells?

"I think that anyone who has as much sway in popular culture as Justin should be asked all questions," Grigoriadis said. "I agree that he does not bring up these issues in his work at the moment, but it's possible that he will in the future, as he decides that he wants the public to know more about him."

How does one say "bullshit" in Canadian?

Rolling Stone asked these questions for one reason and one reason only: to determine if Frankie Avalon Leif Garret Justin Bieber was one of the Right People with the Right Opinions. If he is, then RS can insert the Teen Idol as More Sophisticated Observer of Human Affairs Than We Would Have Thought angle. If not, so much the better: the Pop Sensation With Troubling, Controversial Opinions angle always sells better (you don't think these thumb-suckers actually like interviewing 50 Cent and Eminem, do you?).

So based on this, I'm guessing he got a C+. Expect continuing coverage for the next several millenia.

I Love the Smell of Disco in the Evening. It Smells Like Victory.

One of the standing lines from the Right since Obama's rise has been that he is Carter in blackface. Instapundit, and myself, have long been of the opinion that Carter II is about the best we could expect from Obama. But he might mean something different from what I mean.

Carter's great virtue from a conservative point of view was his complete impotence, an almost adorable inability to come to terms with the challenges of his time. This had nothing whatever to do with his intellect. James Earl Carter, Jr. graduated from Annapolis and studied nuclear physics; such men are not without grey matter. Rather, he persistently misconcieved what the country the times needed and wanted.

And why was this good? Because by 1978 it was arguable, and by 1980, obvious. A sea change could and did occur in the American political landscape because the country had percieved that the New Class had failed to provide what it had promised. Conservative success in 2012 depends in no small part on a similar perception.

As P.J. O'Rourke once put it, after we get Carter, we get Reagan.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Good Morning, Mr. Taliban. You are Dead.

XM25s in Afghanistan 

The XM25 allows Soldiers to engage defilade targets -- those behind a barrier, protected from oncoming weapons fire. The XM25 measures the distance to the enemy's protective barrier, and can then program the round to detonate a user-adjustable distance past that -- allowing Soldiers to put an air-bursting round directly above the enemy's head, inside their protected area. 
 We're just beta-testing the things now.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Baltimore Sheds Another 30,000 People

Investigative Voice is in full cry-havoc-and-let-slip-the-dogs mode:

And that’s why, ultimately, this city is losing. Not because of crime, or ineffective schools that managed to muster just a three-percent advanced-placement pass rate for students in a state that averaged 25 percent.

Not just because the city can’t raise enough revenue to keep the same bloated payrolls that allowed multiple Department of Public Works employees to not do their jobs for weeks at a time — and at least one to be kept on the public payroll while serving time in jail for molesting a teenage girl — with not a single superior taking notice.

The reason the city failed to keep and attract residents is that the policies that have informed the past are constructed for the benefit of people who don’t live here. For tourists, cops, and small handfuls of politicians and business insiders who trade tax breaks for political donations.

When this process is over, the population of Baltimore will consist of the powerless poor and the grasping government. Read the Whole Thing, as they say.

For the Children

Hat tip: Ace



Tax Reform now, indeed...

Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Walter Russel Mead on Sun Tzu

Since I mentioned it, here's an example of the kind of argument that only military historians make, and only conservative military historians at that:


The Art of War, a book which has inspired Chinese emperors, Japanese shoguns, Napoleon, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, does not just subvert conventional morality. It is even more profoundly opposed to the bureaucratic mind: the approach to the world that believes that everything can be reduced to technique and procedures.

Much of America today is as addicted to bureaucratic, rule based thinking as ancient China. The uncertainties of life in a thermonuclear world haunt us. There must, we feel, be infallible techniques for making the economy grow, keeping inflation at bay, understanding international events and managing American foreign policy. When there is a problem — a financial crash, a revolution in a friendly country, an attack by hostile forces — somebody must have made an obvious mistake. They must have misapplied or failed to apply an obvious technique. We would rather believe that our leaders are foolish and incompetent (which they often are) than face the truth that we live in a radically unpredictable world in which no methods and no rules can guarantee safety.

We believe in reason, and reason is predictable. We claim that the world was made by forces which we can a) understand, and b) harness. This is a matter of gospel in the modern world. A conservatives, faced with an intractable problem which flies in the face of the creed, shrugs his shoulders and says, "it is what it is." A progressive cannot, for that is giving up on those who deserve his aid, and that is the sin by which the world is corrupted.

Bias Amongst the Bias-Hunters

In Other News, Duh.

The fields of psychology, sociology and anthropology have long attracted liberals, but they became more exclusive after the 1960s, according to Dr. Haidt. “The fight for civil rights and against racism became the sacred cause unifying the left throughout American society, and within the academy,” he said, arguing that this shared morality both “binds and blinds.”

Many on the Right have commented on this. I am of two minds about it. On the one hand, it's good to see epistemic cloture being breached, and anything that would let moonbats and wingnuts see each other as differently-thinking rather than non-thinking would be welcome.

On the other, I dislike the idea of being made part of a Designated Victim Group. One of the reasons conservatives don't study psychology and anthropology has to be that conservatives tend to be drawn to study other things. How many progressive military historians are there?

Still, if this is what it takes, well, such is the Age of Revolution.

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Trains are For Nerds.

When I was a young fellow, I had a weekly commute from Philadelphia to Monmouth  by way of a particularly painful combination of AmTrak and NJ Transit. I did this because I didn't have a car, and I didn't have a car because I was still figuring out costs and other such things. It's all part of being 21 and out in the wide world for the first time.

On one particular Sunday rehearsal, I wasn't able to get off the NJ Transit train at my stop, because I sat too far back in the train, and the doors weren't opening. So I had to get off at the last stop, and try to figure out how to get to my corporate hotel room from there. This was 1998, before cell phones were attached to everyone's hip, so I had to use a phone card to get in touch with my hotel. I had to wait an hour before the hotel could manage to get a car and driver out to where I was.

Within a few weeks, I'd purchased a crappy old 1986 Lincoln Mark VII. I totalled it within a matter of months and had to buy another car, but whatever. I was never going to endure that agony again.

And that's why I roll my eyes whenever proggies get themselves all worked up over public trains. Trains work only when nothing else is faster or more convenient than they are. Such instances are as follows:

" the Woodrow Wilson Institute for Liberals Who Want To Seem Smart About Foreign Stuff"

That there's funny, I don't care who you are.

Thursday, February 03, 2011

Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles....

First comes inflation qualitative easing.

Then comes food riots.

What comes next?

This is Not Racism



But the Tea Party? Totally racist. Totally.

GE Enjoys its Benefices

Serve the realm, and the king will reward you.

Of course, once again, as a GE stockholder, a bit of these plums will eventually trickle down to the likes of me. Beggin' yer pardon, milord...

Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Richard Dawkins Struggles With the Whole Logic Thing

Via Carthago Delenda Est, this:

Because a university science department would be justified in turning down holders of these beliefs, Dawkins wishes us to think, it follows that UK was justified in rejecting Gaskell. Dawkins's illustrations are three cases of Biblical literalist YEC belief and three fantasy beliefs the likes of which no one you'll ever meet actually holds, certainly no one who could rise to a level of scientific achievement where hiring him to teach at a university would come up for practical discussion.
I don't necessarily buy ID, but I have noticed a similarity between ID-opponents and AGW-proponents: the willingness to malign and conflate their opponents.

If an Inquisition existed today, Dawkins would run it with glee

2012: We've Seen this Movie.

The trouble with the presumptive 2012 GOP candidates is that every single one of them is a re-tread from 2008. Someone who lost to John McCain just doesn't seem like a strong candidate off the bat, and his Veep candidate has her own problems.

Which is why I like Daniels, among other reasons. He's untainted by 2008 failure.

Ace has his suspicions about Daniels. I filet the front-runners here.

Tuesday, February 01, 2011

The Aristocracy of Pull

Ayn Rand has her issues, but she did come up with a few deft phrases, and one of them is the beginning of Francisco d'Anconia's rant in Atlas Shrugged: that in the new progressive age, the aristocracy of wealth would be replaced by "the aristocracy of pull," or political connection.

If there's another way to interpret the fact that eternal corporate pariah Wal-Mart pays %33.6 percent of its profit in taxes, while the Obama Adminstration's bankroll, GE, pays 3.6%, I'd like to hear it.

It's not that I have a problem with GE paying so little. I'm a GE stockholder, and I likes my dividends. But the idea that one corporation should pay more taxes than another by an order of magnitude --whether due to political favor or tax farming -- ought to be offensive to conservatives and progressives alike.

Or perhaps someone would like to explain how a single 10% corporate tax rate with no loopholes or deductions would not be more just?