Archive for 2011

NOT YET ANCIENT HISTORY: John Demjanjuk was just convicted of helping the Nazis murder Jews during the Holocaust. The U.S. deported him to Germany in 2009.

Meanwhile, two men were arrested for allegedly buying weapons and plotting to attack New York City synagogues.

THEY TOLD GLENN REYNOLDS THAT IF HE VOTED FOR JOHN McCAIN, jingoistic warmongering toys would flood the market and influence kids to grow up to fight in Perpetual Wars, and they were right!

HOOVER INSTITUTION’S KORI SCHAKE: “What our country’s nineteenth century experience teaches us about China today.”

GM BAILOUT: STILL NOT A GOOD IDEA.  No, seriously.  I mean it.

HEY, REMEMBER WHEN MERE CLIP ART BULL’S-EYES WERE CONSIDERED ELIMINATIONIST?  “WaPo op-ed contributor and former Gitmo detainee posts photoshopped dead Obama pic on his website,” Neil Munro of the Daily Caller writes, along with a copy of the gruesome Photoshop in question:

The Washington Post’s Outlook section just gave ex-jihadi Moazzem Begg a half-page this Sunday to lament the U.S. war on jihadis, and Begg repaid the Post by showcasing a photoshopped image of a dead President Barack Obama on his advocacy website.

“The decision to publish Begg’s piece does not reflect a blanket endorsement of his views or of everything that appears on his organization’s Web site,” according to a statement from Carlos Lozada, the section’s editor. He reports to Marcus Brauchli, the Post’s executive editor. “It reflects our interest in exploring the many ways that Osama bin Laden shattered and upended lives… [and] the experience of a Guantanamo detainee is completely relevant.”

The Investigative Project on Terrorism directed TheDC to the photo on Begg’s website.

Begg’s action came just before Thursday, when shareholders are expected to protest financial losses by the newspaper’s parent company, The Washington Post Co. The company’s main revenue-source, the Kaplan education division, has lower profits than expected.

But then as Ramesh Ponnuru of the Corner notes, Begg’s article isn’t the only “Exceptionally Strange” item the Post has run in recent days:

Richard Cohen’s attack on “American exceptionalism” — which “has been adopted by the right to mean that America, alone among the nations, is beloved of God” — takes him into some strange territory.

The huge role of religion in American politics is nothing new but always a matter for concern nonetheless. In the years preceding the Civil War, both sides of the slavery issue claimed the endorsement of God. The 1856 Republican convention concluded with a song that ended like this: “We’ve truth on our side/ We’ve God for our guide.” Within five years, Americans were slaughtering one another on the battlefield.

Therein lies the danger of American exceptionalism. It discourages compromise, for what God has made exceptional, man must not alter.

Does Cohen really want to maintain that the Republicans of the 1850s should have been more willing to compromise on slavery? Is this what liberalism has come to?

Whatever it’s morphed into, I’m not sure if “liberal” is the necessarily the best word to describe the current state of the left.

WELL, THAT’S ONE WAY TO DESCRIBE HIM: PJTV’s Trifecta: “Ron Paul Sounds Like an Angry,  Constipated Chicken and Other Thoughts of the GOP’s 2012 Field:”

“Mitt Romney has RomneyCare around his neck. Sarah, I love her, but she’s sunk in the polls to the middle tier of likely candidates.

Giuliani can’t get nominated. Herman Cain has no money. Ron Paul sounds increasingly like an angry, constipated chicken…and on it goes.” — Steve Green

Approximately nine minutes; click here to watch:

DEMOGRAPHY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH: Tyler Cowen links to this study on shifting demographics of a society in relation to financial market returns, and cautiously suggests there might be something to it.  I agree perhaps there is.  But strikingly, it is precisely what I’ve been turning over in my mind since reading Tyler Cowen’s fine, short essay, The Great Stagnation: How We Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit.  I think, actually, it should have been subtitled, How We Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit and After That All the Next Generation’s Seed Corn.

The essay suggests that we’ve already absorbed the easy gains that more or less follow on the genuinely history changing Industrial Revolution, and that incremental gains are much tougher to come by, unless we are fortunate enough to find some new scientific or technological breakthrough of a kind that is difficult to predict, let alone will into being. (I’m simplifying and perhaps editorializing.) Even as I read it, however, my reaction was that it did not take into account – in multiple directions – the effect of an aging population.  Which is what the cited paper attempts to do.  Aging populations take less risk, innovate less, make fewer breakthroughs in new technology, consume more but not necessarily in ways that produce increases to the general standard of living.  And when the aging generation has political power from numbers, they tend to think in terms of themselves – and call it social justice.  Insofar as they have not produced lots of new children, they are less invested in the future after themselves, and are perfectly willing to eat the next generation’s seed corn.

I think all those effects have a huge impact on Cowen’s “low-hanging” thesis, which seems – perhaps I am mistaken – to oddly operate from a demographically static model.  Yet thinking there is something right about this thesis is not the same as saying that investors can easily benefit from it, precisely because it is a generalized effect across markets, asset classes, investment opportunities.  The growth rate in innovation slows – in part for the reasons that Cowen’s essay identifies, and in part for reasons that older populations simply innovate less. The general mean in innovation shifts, perhaps only slightly, but with impacts on the future.  How do you short that?  Go long on populations with lots of young people?  That assumes that they have not just youth and energy, but also education, societies that provide the coherence necessary for innovative ideas to pay off, and lots of other things … that almost none of them has.  The places that have lots of youth are not the places that have the other elements necessary for innovation to take hold and become sources of increase in the standard of living.

(Also, if this sounds like I think my Baby Boomer Generation is morally the most preening and objectively The Worst … yeah.)  [And this post should have been titled: Man-Corn, after that greatest of all coffee-table photo books.  ed.]

DOG BITES MAN, DEPT. OF: Greeks strike over austerity plan. Violently. Nationwide action brings most public services to a halt.

FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE YELLOW PAGES: “San Francisco may be 1st city to cut Yellow Pages:”

“Let your fingers do the walking” could be replaced with “let your finger do the clicking” in San Francisco. It’s poised to become the first U.S. city to restrict delivery of Yellow Pages business directories.

The Board of Supervisors cast a 10-1 first vote on Tuesday to ban unrequested home and business delivery of the hefty telephone directories. There will be a second reading and final vote next week.

The idea is to protect the environment, fight neighborhood blight and help the economy. And advocates say the Internet makes the directories unnecessary.

That last item may be so (12 years or so ago when we got our first cable modem, it seemed obvious that the Yellow Pages was suddenly superfluous) but that’s not the role of the government to decide. If I was the publisher of one of the city’s myriad free and/or alternative newspapers, I’d be worried.

Of course, if San Francisco actually does want to fight neighborhood blight, they’re really doing it wrong.

PRAY FOR HUCKABEE?: “PrayForHuckabee.com — a new website that Huckabee promoted on Wednesday through his official Facebook page — features a personal message from the 2008 Iowa caucuses winner as he mulls another White House bid.” Let’s just say I have some doubts that God appreciates being co-opted into anyone’s Presidential bid. And if He wants my advice, He will smite Huckabee’s presumption … by causing that the FEC shall inquire as to the monetized value of Divine intervention as a campaign contribution, even if in the form of an aw-shucks plea for Divine “guidance.” Unless, of course, Huckabee can produce a notarized affidavit that God has not coordinated with Huckabee’s campaign.

Update: I offer a biting (i.e., generated considerable hate mail) consideration of Huckabee and Romney on religion in the public square, but also what I think is an important argument over what should be in, and what should be out, concerning the religious views of candidates for public office.  From the Weekly Standard from the 2008 primaries, Mormons, Muslims, and Multiculturalism.

WHAT GOES UP MUST COME DOWN, DEPT. OF: And comes down fast.  From Strategypage (H/T Rand Simberg), on the problem of Libyan rebels firing scarce rounds into the air.  “All those bullets eventually return to earth, and people do get hurt.”

PALESTINIAN FLAG TO FLY AT CUNY COMMENCEMENT:

The City University of New York, which has already outraged Israel supporters with its decision to honor anti-Israel playwright Tony Kushner, will also be taking the unusual step of flying a Palestinian flag at the upcoming commencement for City College, a spokesperson for the university told me today.

“The City College flies all of the flags that are flown at the United Nations,” the Vice President for Communications Mary Lou Edmondson told me. “It has nothing to do with foreign policy.”

But there’s one problem—the United Nations doesn’t fly the Palestinian flag. It only flies the flags of its 192 member states.

Then what prompted the college’s decision? I’ve asked Edmonson to clarify her statement, and haven’t heard back yet. But it seems pretty obvious that politics did play a role. CUNY’s City College hasn’t flown the flag in previous years, and so this decision had to have been made recently. And with the Kushner debate still raging, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a no doubt the most volatile subject on campus.

Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, who’s been at the center of the Kushner controversy, said that the flag issue seemed to point to a double-standard at the university.

“I would think if we were going to fly the flags of aspiring nations, then we should certainly those of aspiring nations that have been in the mix even longer, like Tibet, like Kurdistan,” Wiesenfeld said. “In other words, whatever the policy is, it should be based on a consistency, but not a fashion of the moment.”

College inconsistency? I blame the pronouns.

UPDATE: More on CUNY at Maggie’s Farm.

JIM TREACHER: “Rupert Murdoch gets Barack’d again:”

At yet another fundraiser in El Paso [on Tuesday, Obama] let fly with the following canard about immigration: “One CEO had this to say about reform. ‘American ingenuity is a product of the openness and diversity of this society… Immigrants have made America great as the world leader in business, science, higher education and innovation.’ That’s Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, and an immigrant himself. I don’t know if you’re familiar with his views, but let’s just say he doesn’t have an Obama bumper sticker on his car.” There are only two minor problems with this. As TheDC’s Matthew Boyle notes: “Obama may have taken Murdoch’s comments a bit out of context, though. Murdoch legally immigrated to the United States and acquired U.S. citizenship in 1985. The immigrants Obama was trying to help with his ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ are in the U.S. illegally.” Details, details. The other problem is that in 2008, Murdoch advised his official biographer Michael Wolff to vote for Obama in the NY Democratic primary. Why? “He’ll sell more papers.” But hey, it’s not like he put it on a bumper sticker.

Of course, saying that Murdoch “doesn’t have an Obama bumper sticker on his car,” sort of implies that most in the news media do.

And why would anyone think that?

FORGET IT JAKE, IT’S ABBOTTABAD. (Or alternatively, insert Moe Green reference here): “In another interview, on Fox News (see video below) Inhofe told Shepard Smith, that Bin Laden’s skull did seem to be intact but the bullet had exploded inside, forcing ‘the brain to come back out of the eye socket.'”