READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Jack Bee, The Awesome Adventures of Pickle Boy – Book One.
Archive for 2013
September 12, 2013
JOE PAPPALARDO: NSA Data-Mining: How It Works.
TEA PARTY FAVORITE KATRINA PIERSON is running for Congress in Texas. She’s got my support.
VLADIMIR PUTIN — SQUISHY FLIP-FLOPPER?
Related: Vladimir Putin’s New York Times op-ed, annotated and fact-checked.
IT LOOKS LIKE SOMETHING FROM THE ALIEN MOVIES: The Lexus LF-NX’s angular styling is vaguely extraterrestrial.
MICHAEL BARONE: What Australia And Norway Have In Common. “Is there any common thread? I would suggest it’s the unpopularity of center-left policies which voters have had to live with. Australia’s Liberal party (it’s the center-right party) leader Tony Abbott promised to repeal the Labor government’s carbon tax. Norway’s Conservative party leader Ema Solberg has promised that her country needs more business-friendly policies in order to pay for its expensive welfare state. These center-right victories may hold lessons for American conservatives — and perhaps for American liberals as well. The latter might want to ponder whether they can continue to win if their policies prove unpopular in practice (Obamacare, anyone?).”
Related: Sean Trende on what Colorado’s recall results mean for Dems.
IRS SCANDAL FLASHBACK: Lois Lerner in February 2011: Tea Party is “Very Dangerous.” “Lois Lerner, anyone remember her? She’s still on the IRS payroll. Oh, and does anyone recall she claimed the targeting of the Tea Party and other conservative groups was the work of a couple of rogue agents in Cincinnati? Yeah, about that so-called phony scandal . . . .”
IN THE MAIL: Sustenance Through Starvation.
ROGER SIMON WELCOMES THE NEW YORK TIMES’ GREAT NEW COLUMNIST, Vladimir Putin. “For his next column, perhaps he can finally tell us what happened in Benghazi. Sadly, there’s a better chance he’ll do it than our own administration.”
TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 126.
INSTAVISION: I talk with Christina Hoff Sommers about the war against boys, and the future of education. Her book is The War Against Boys.
WAS SEVENTIES STAGFLATION really the fault of the Baby Boomers?
Steve Waldman suggested a few posts back that the Great Inflation was a reasonable response to the Baby Boomers entrance into the workforce. The economy could not absorb all of those workers at prevailing real wages and so real wages had to be driven down to maintain full employment. Folks attacked this argument from a number of levels, but I was somewhat sympathetic because I tend to think far little attention has been paid to the rapid increase in the work force due to the entrance of baby boomers and women. Economists are so sensitive to any argument against immigration they seem to forget that any growth model that I am aware of will predict a decline in per capita GDP if the population rises fast enough.
There isn’t enough capital to go around – buildings, equipment, roads, etc – and it is simply inefficient to try to build it all overnight. . . . Since you know the size of the workforce, if you simply assume that productivity grows at its long run trend then you can get a rough and ready estimate of potential GDP in real time. That is, of course, unless some weird event totally skews the path of productivity growth. Some event like say, the massive entrance of baby boomers and women into the workforce. So, in real time an analyst might see the labor force growing by 4.5%, tack on a 2% for productivity and say that the economy should be on average growing at a real rate of 6.5% per year.
So, if you see real growth rates stubbornly stuck in the same band around 5%, that had existed prior to the rapid expansion of the labor force then then natural conclusion is that the economy is operating under capacity.
Hmm. What about the effect of women flooding into the workforce? Does that make things better, or worse, in this analysis?
“SMART DIPLOMACY” BEARS MORE FRUIT: Anti-Americanism Spreads in Syrian Refugee Camps.
Over a million Syrians have fled the war over the past six months, bringing the total outside the country up to 2 million. Half of them are children. Whether or not the U.S. intervenes, that overall figure is expected to climb to over 3 million by year’s end. UNHCR officials describe it as the worst refugee crisis in 20 years.
“Why don’t Americans and your media pay attention to this crisis?” Ahmad Hasan, who worked as a taxi driver outside Aleppo until his family fled to Amman earlier this year, asked me. . . .
A strong undercurrent of anti-Americanism also is shaping young minds within the camp. Uprooted and uneducated young men sit idle, spreading rumors and videos of violence back home via social media sites — Zaatari has its own Facebook page — often devoid of context. Boredom and lack of education make for a potent cocktail. Kids I interviewed play a version of war, where one team is the Assad regime and the other is the FSA.
Such populations may be nurturing a new generation of angry Muslim youths who view the United States, and especially its president, as hypocritical at best, and enablers of Assad’s war crimes at worst.
“Everybody is against the Syrian people,” said a former lieutenant in the Syrian military I met in Zaatari, who defected to the opposition. He was sitting on a cot in a prefab caravan, surrounded by other Syrian men wounded in the war. “We’re giving our blood but for Obama that is not enough.”
After cursing the American president in Arabic, he continued, “Obama is ‘Hussein’ – son of Muslims. If he were a Christian he would support us. But he’s a Muslim.” He shakes his head and his eyes tear up. “It’s always Muslims against Muslims.”
It’s sad that there are so many racists in Syria.
UPDATE: Joe Klein: Obama’s ‘Damaged His Office and Weakened the Nation.’ Yeah, pretty much.
MICKEY KAUS: Krugman And The “Sneer Gap:” Turn Around A Column In Half An Hour Using This One Weird Trick. “Executive Summary: Cohn analyzes, helpfully. Krugman sneers–inaccurately, it turns out. But at least he didn’t do this in a column claiming that Democrats are superior ‘wonks’ because Republicans have a ‘near-complete lack of expertise on anything substantive.’ … Oh wait.”
ED MORRISSEY: Preparing for War on the Mainland over Obamacare. “After being stymied on his Syria strategy, the White House probably welcomes the opportunity to return to domestic politics, but Obama has credibility issues here as well. With less than three weeks to go before the Affordable Care Act exchanges officially open for business, the wheels continue to come off the Obamacare wagon.”
WELL, IT’S NOT LIKE WE’D CUT ADMINISTRATORS. THAT WOULD BE MADNESS! With signs mounting that the law school predicament is not a blip, administrators are looking to address their biggest fixed cost — the full-time faculty.
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Also, today only: Save Up to 70% on Clore Jump Starters and Power Packs. I have one of these portable jump-starters, and it’s very handy.
SPYING FALLOUT: Feds Fight To Prevent NSA Disclosures In Criminal Cases.
SMART DIPLOMACY: Democratic senator says he almost vomited after reading Vladimir Putin’s op-ed. “The reality is, I worry when someone who came up to the KGB tells us what is in our national interests an what is not.”
Related: Michael Barone: Obama’s wing-it diplomacy undermines US credibility.
UPDATE: Flashback Video Open Thread: Team Lightbringer Mocks Romney for Saying Russia Is Our Foe.
ANOTHER UPDATE: 10 Reasons Why It’s Now Worse.
Yes, Obama’s an even bigger laughingstock than he was on Monday, which is saying something. It would be funny, if it weren’t bad for the country.
MORE: I thought my optics joke below was pretty good, but IowaHawk surpasses me with math humor: Obama’s “calculus” turns out to be a big steaming natural log.
IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR “RAPE CULTURE,” YOU MIGHT WANT TO LOOK outside the United States.
HIGHER EDUCATION: Undercutting Academic Freedom In The Name Of “Civility.”
SO WHAT’S THIS, PIVOT NUMBER 18? Obama signals shift back to economic focus. “The White House is signaling it wants to shift back to the economy after two weeks in which the Syrian crisis has dominated President Obama’s schedule and workload. Obama will be ‘focusing’ on issues related to the economy in the coming weeks, White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday at his daily briefing.”
Two thoughts: (1) So nothing about Syria is solved, he just wants to shift focus because Putin has been eathing his lunch; and (2) He can focus, but he can’t focus “like a laser beam” because laser beams are coherent.
SMART DIPLOMACY UPDATE: Will Syria Be the Next Iraq? History has a way of surprising us.
As in Iraq two decades ago, in Syria today all the major powers (including Russia, grudgingly) acknowledge a grave problem. But for varying reasons, none are prepared to take the kind of action that would be most expedient to solve it, namely toppling the Damascus regime by force. There are reasonable arguments that the costs and risks of such action make it an imprudent course. Even if one comes down on the other side of that question, such action is not in the cards anytime soon, for the political will to support it is lacking both in the U.S. and the “international community.”
Thus the practical objective of any U.N. resolution is to make a symbolic show of world disapproval for the Syrian regime’s actions while fulfilling the immediate political necessity of deferring any military action. Assuming the permanent Security Council members can come up with a way of finessing their differences in a compromise resolution, its effect will be to lock in the status quo–and Bashar Assad’s regime–until circumstances change.
With respect to Iraq, the circumstances did eventually change. An exogenous event–the massive terrorist attack against America 12 years ago today–made U.S. leaders and voters far more inclined toward decisive action. The U.N. resolutions helped set the stage, as Saddam’s history of defying them provided the casus belli. The Russians and French didn’t agree on that last point, but their objections were futile. American determination to remove Saddam was sufficient to get it done.
Could that history repeat itself? At this juncture it seems highly implausible. But then how plausible would the events of 2002-03 have seemed from the perspective of, say, 1998, when Congress enacted the Iraq liberation Act, which ostensibly made regime change official U.S. policy?
Our point here is not to argue that such an eventual outcome in Syria is likely or even desirable, merely to point out that history has a way of surprising us, so that one should be cautious about projecting current trends and attitudes into the future. If you have a time machine, try this experiment: Set it for February 1989, just after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Tell a dozen random people then that in 12½ years the U.S. and its allies will stage their own full-scale invasion of Afghanistan. Return to the present and let us know how they reacted to that prediction.
Read the whole thing.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Only 16% of the 420K students in the CA State University system graduate within 4 years. The system also has more administrators than it has faculty.