jim unfiltered

On Pet Ownership

2011-08-27T07:02:00.000-07:00

Here's a thought experiment for you: If an animal inhabits your home, and you regard that animal as a pet -- that is, a creature you choose to shelter and care for because you enjoy its presence -- does that make you a "pet owner"?

Be careful how you answer, because that term -- "pet owner" -- really doesn't sit well with a lot of animal lovers.

So I learned in the most recent issue of Best Friends magazine, published by the Best Friends Animal Society. Prompted by the editors, quite a few readers wrote in to opine on what they think of the term "pet owner," and the responses were striking.

"'Pet' implies that animals are not individuals unto themselves, and 'owning' an animal reinforces the practice of treating companion animals as nothing more than objects to be bought and sold," contends Russel of San Francisco. Other readers said they prefer "companion, pet parent or animal lover" to pet owner. (And one lady wrote in to say that she and her husband, who are "childfree," dress their cat, throw her birthday parties and "talk to her like she's a person and we refer to ourselves as Mama and Daddy." This should start to give you a flavor for Best Friends' readership.)

And far be it from me to pass judgment on these folks. In my own, less effusive way, I think of myself as an animal lover too, so I can't complain about anyone who dotes on critters like this. I always had a cat and/or dog growing up, my "childfree" wife and I have a cat of our own now, and I've always been keen on animals in general, either wild or domesticated.

But the antipathy for the notion of "pet ownership" gives me pause. Not because some of these folks come across as slightly batty or over the top. (I mean really: birthday parties?) Somewhere, somebody is missing an important point, and it doesn't bode well for the animals.

Amid the stories about dogs and cats up for adoption, the profile of Best Friends' idyllic shelter operation in Utah, and the indignant denunciations of "pet ownership," this particular issue contains an in-depth article on Chicago's ongoing efforts to crack down on perpetrators of animal cruelty. It's equal parts dreary and encouraging, because enforcement of the city's anti-abuse laws are up markedly, but enforcement is just proof that some people hurt, neglect or wantonly kill domesticated animals.

It's a crime I've never understood, or wanted to understand. Better to cowardly pretend it doesn't happen, rather than picture some dumb, defenseless creature suffering. I'm sure it's the sort of thing that keep Best Friends readers awake at night, and in all likelihood reinforces their contempt for the idea of "owning" pets, as if they're just "things" or "possessions." That notion crops up repeatedly in the letters to the editor; that the very term "pet" relegates animals to the status of "commodities" or other inanimate property.

One young lady, who insists that her toy poodle is her "child" and her "best friend" dismisses the notion of owning the dog as vastly insufficient to express their relationship: "She is not a book, a computer or a cell phone...she is my child, and I am her parent."

But what if all this (completely earnest, well-meaning) insistence on seeing animals as essentially furry humans is part of the problem? These folks attribute human qualities like loyalty, affection and intelligence to their cats and dogs, and love them all the more for it. But apparently they don't ask whether the abusers, in a dark and twisted way, do the very same thing. If the perpetrators of animal cruelty see their pets as merely "possessions," why would they harm or destroy them? To put it another way: When did it last occur to you to intentionally damage a book, a computer or a cell phone that you own?

Answer: It didn't. These are inanimate objects, and assuming we purchased them, they represent some sort of value to us. By and large, they don't evoke feelings either of love or joy, anger or hatred.

As humans, we save those feelings for other humans, because they are "individuals unto themselves," not lifeless things. They elicit feelings within us, both positive and negative, as we interact with them. And those of us who love animals experience something similar in our relationships with cats, dogs and other domesticated creatures, which is why we keep them among us.

But it's not a one-way street. Really loving someone, human or otherwise, creates the possibility of also feeling anger, or contempt, or even hatred for that same being. I, for instance, love my cat. But when she awakens me before dawn, yowling insistently for food, when I'd rather be asleep, I won't pretend I'm not angry with her, or at least annoyed. What (dare I say it) pet owner can't identify with this fleeting emotion? It can feel outrageous; the cat KNOWS I want to sleep. She KNOWS it's early. She KNOWS I'll feed her soon. She's doing this ANYWAY! BAD CAT!

Except, not. She doesn't know any of those things, in the human sense of the word, which implies a moral understanding of right and wrong. She's just hungry and wants breakfast. She's not doing something wrong because she has no conception of "wrong." She's not human enough for that, and never will be.

So, dressing your cat up and baking her a birthday cake is all well and good, in itself, because it's merely hyper-affectionate. No doubt such a cat, though occasionally mortified at wearing a little kitty tutu, is well cared for.

But if you can swing too far to one extreme, and lavish love and affection at a human level on a non-human animal, someone else can go the other way, and savage an equally unwitting animal for its apparent disobedience, or defiance, or ill behavior. An "unreasonable" dog that barks incessantly might be beaten, or left out in the rain, because the owner has mistaken the behavior for something willful or conscious.

In such a case, attributing human impulses to the poor animal creates the illusion that some sort of reprisal is justified. We as a society punish human criminals, not just to prevent future crime, but because it makes us feel good. The criminal knew he acted wrongly; our outrage demands a commensurate punishment.

We do not, as a society, punish animals for wrongdoing, because we understand they lack the moral capacity to understand the concept of punishment. At best, we punish them to teach them not to do bad things in the future.

That is as it should be. No creature should suffer in ignorance, feeling only pain without understanding the reason for it. But to the extent that we allow ourselves to see pets as embodiments of our own best traits, we also run the risk that someone will project their distinctly human moral failings onto some poor, helpless animal, and act accordingly.

Reflections on Tuscon

2011-01-16T18:10:00.001-08:00

When I first heard that a gunman had killed six people in Tuscon last weekend, apparently as part of an attempt to assassinate an Arizona congresswoman, I had no intention of writing about it. The early news coverage was spotty, but the initial picture had all the familiar hallmarks of yet another senseless massacre, the kind that happens all too regularly in schools, offices and public places. To me, it was yet another reminder that the world is often a chaotic, tragic place, and that much of human existence is ruled by the random hand of fate. In short, it was not an event I wanted to dwell on.

But the response to the Arizona shootings from the media in general, and from the liberal commentariat in particular, was too polarizing to ignore. Within hours of the attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords that also resulted in six deaths, prominent left-wing pundits like Paul Krugman of The New York Times were announcing that the shooting was "probably political" (in Krugman's words) and that the shooter was acting on the "violent rhetoric" coming from conservative, anti-Obama politicians.

And even when the narrative of the attacks and the background of the shooter became better known, and when it became apparent that Jared Loughner in fact had no tangible connection to Rush Limbaugh or the Tea Party, or for that matter any discernible political motivations whatsoever, prominent opinion-shapers on the left refused to back peddle, insisting that a "climate of hate" (Krugman again) had somehow impelled Loughner to commit mass murder, even if he had no literal connection to any political movement or figure. In fact, even the mounting evidence that he was in fact mentally deranged has done little to dispel that foggy narrative.

It was a shameful episode: a case of naked political opportunism without the slightest whiff of factual evidence to back up the charge. Hopefully the reputations of those who engaged in the smear will be tarnished accordingly.

But no one needs me to catalog how unjustified the "blame conservatives" campaign was. The Internet is already full of repetitions, so I won't bother arguing what's already been proven, such as the complete lack of political motivation for the shooting evident in the mountain of reporting being done on Jared Loughner, based on his own Internet postings and eyewitness accounts of people who knew him for years. I won't bother demonstrating that the infamous map created by Sarah Palin's political action committee during the 2010 elections showing the Tuscon congressional district under a gunsight's cross hairs is standard election imagery employed by both Republicans and Democrats. I won't catalog the instances of liberal politicians using violent or martial (and harmless) metaphors equivalent to the right-wing "rhetoric" that allegedly led Loughner to kill six people.

I will, however, offer a few brief observations regarding last weekend's killings that I haven't heard elsewhere, and which I think bear noting. Make of them what you will.

The behavior of the Tuscon sheriff coordinating the response to the attack was completely unbecoming for a law enforcement official.

Within days of the shooting, Tuscon Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was neck-deep in the political controversy when he announced that "vitriol" coming from, specifically, Rush Limbaugh had something to do with Loughner's motivation for the shooting. That this particular opinion is stupid and baseless is too obvious to belabor further; but that it was announced by the chief law enforcement officer responsible for responding to the aftermath of the attack is disgusting.

As sheriff, this man's sole, and weighty, responsibility is to determine what happened at Saturday's attack, what laws were broken and by whom. It is one thing for a newspaper columnist to rashly assign blame for a killing for political purposes; it is something else entirely for a police official investigating the attack to do so. That Dupnik, a liberal and an avowed Rachel Maddow fan, couldn't refrain from interjecting his (completely groundless) opinion of the attack in the course of doing his very serious job is indicative that he is unfit for office. It is a reminder that government officials everywhere, whether elected or appointed, exercise considerable influence over the lives of the citizens they're supposed to serve, and that as such, they must be held accountable when they abuse their positions.

Many liberals have become hyper-sensitive to criticism after two years of defending Obama's unpopular legislative agenda.

For many of the left-wing commentators at The New York Times, the Washington Post and other bastions of liberal opinion, Loughner's rampage was just the latest in a growing list of politically tinged acts of violence supposedly fomented by the angry rhetoric emanating from the right. As proof, they invariably trot out the same set of examples to prove their point, including the 2009 murder of a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington by an elderly anti-semite (which I wrote about at the time), the nut who flew a small plane into an IRS building last year, again killing an innocent employee, and not least, the vandalism of Rep. Gifford's Tuscon office last year, during the height of the health care reform drama.

Somehow, these events constitute a pattern of violence motivated by conservative outlets. Yet the pundits connecting the dots never seem to mention that the Holocaust shooter, James von Brun, was a rabid, unbalanced anti-semite, and that anti-semitism plays no discernible role in the conservative opposition to Obama (who is supposed to be a Muslim anyway, according to crypto-conservative conspiracy theorists); that the IRS attacker had a personal feud with the agency over his own taxes and that his rambling manifesto criticized George W. Bush without mention of Obama; or that the petty vandalism at Gifford's office pales in comparison to the bullet fired through Republican Congressman Eric Cantor's office window in Richmond, also during the health care frenzy.

Details, details.

The sad, unsatisfying truth is that a small minority of people commit acts of violence for a whole host of often inscrutable reasons, and innocent people from all parts of society are liable to find themselves in the cross hairs. Attempting to shoehorn these chaotic, often inexplicable crimes into a coherent pattern of politically motivated violence that just happens to impugn your opponents is the tactic of a charlatan who cannot or will not evaluate each episode objectively.

The Arizona shooter is part of the tragedy.

Lost amid all the blame games is the man actually behind the killings, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner. Opinion writers of whatever political persuasion tended to give him short shrift when weighing in on what the attack really meant. Sure he was "deranged" or "ill" and his actions were "monstrous," but that's about all we heard about him from the people trying hardest to sum up his actions. Almost all of them wanted to move on the "real" lesson; Loughner himself has been almost a bit actor. (The straight journalists who have documented so much of Loughner's life have, by contrast, unearthed an enormous amount about the man.)

To me, this is perhaps the least-discussed aspect of the attack. While I'm no mental health professional and don't wish to speculate on his condition, it seems apparent from much news coverage that Loughner suffers from some type of mental illness that impelled him to commit murder. According to Internet postings he was deeply paranoid about the government controlling the minds of citizens through "grammar." He sufficiently frightened students and faculty at a local community college with his violent, offputting classroom comments that he was eventually kicked out. He posed weird, dark questions to online forums. He had a history of petty, drug-related brushes with the law. People who knew him for years before Saturday's attack described him as increasingly isolated and angry.

In short, he appears to have had problems that required some sort of treatment. And now it's too late for that, and for him. Whether Loughner is found guilty of first degree murder as a completely sane defendant, or some lesser charge resulting from clinical insanity, his chances of a normal life have been completely destroyed at age 22. Whether he's executed, or imprisoned, or committed to a psychiatric facility, he'll never be part of mainstream society and all its opportunities again.

And after the obvious tragedy of the people he killed and the loss for their families, this strikes me as the real pity of the Tuscon attacks. Judging from his voluminous comments and postings online, Loughner was a deeply unhappy person, burdened by the stigma of rejection by women, by employers, by the Army that wouldn't have him (all on understandable grounds, given his apparent condition). He posted discussion threads on an online gaming forum like "Talk, Talk, Talking about Rejection" and "Does anyone have aggression 24/7?"

It all reads like an ill young person making vague signals that he needed help, in the wrong place, to the wrong people. The right treatment might have gotten his problems under control in time to avoid last weekend's atrocity. That he didn't get that treatment doesn't appear to be anyone's fault; it only compounds the tragedy that took six lives and irreparably wasted a seventh.

The Road to Hell is Paved with TSA Body Scanners

2010-11-30T03:52:00.000-08:00

"How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?"
~Dwight David Eisenhower

I haven't taken a commercial flight in approximately forever, but even I know there's quite a flap at airports these days due to the installation of new "body scanner" machines that reveal boarding passengers in varying degrees of nudity, depending on the sensitivity of the scanner. And apparently, passengers who are apprehensive about undergoing such a revealing procedure (and the accompanying X-rays) haven't been thrilled by the Transportation Safety Administration's alternative: a pat-down by a same-sex TSA employee that outdoes many first dates for physical intimacy. Not long ago, one such aggrieved passenger summed up the opposition to the new rules for boarding an aircraft with his now-famous rallying cry, "Don't touch my junk."

Hence the protests, the "opt-out" movements and the resulting arguments playing out on blogs and newspapers' opinion pages everywhere. Criticisms of the scanners and pat-downs have largely boiled down to two main strands: that the high-tech imaging still doesn't prevent would-be terrorists from bringing dangerous substances onto airplanes; and/or, that the new security measures are invasive of personal privacy and in violation of the Constitution.

I'm sympathetic to both arguments, particularly the latter (which was recently laid out quite articulately by George Washington U. Professor Jeffrey Rosen). But I'm also sympathetic to the more nuanced observation, made by the New York Times' Ross Douthat, that opposition to new security measures often depends on one's support for or opposition to whichever political party is currently setting the agenda on national security. After all, good policy is good policy, whoever occupies the White House.

But I posit that there is a much simpler, much more elemental way to view the whole controversy, one that doesn't depend on upholding constitutional principles or staying loyal to your narrow political affiliation. The scanners and pat-downs are a mistake, for the simple reason that they seek to reinforce the idea that the government can do something that is patently impossible: methodically eliminating every conceivable method of committing violence. The longer that fallacy is official TSA policy, the more severe will be the public consternation when the next terrorist strikes.

Airport security in America is an utterly reactive enterprise. The hijackers on the 9/11 flights used simple box cutters to take over their airplanes; so now the TSA throws a fit if you happen to have a nail clipper in your carry-on bag. A few months later, a would-be terrorist tried to smuggle a bomb onto a flight in his shoe; so ever since, passengers must remove their shoes and send them through X-ray scanners. A few years later, a group of terrorists almost succeeded in smuggling explosive chemicals onto multiple flights and blowing them up mid-air; so now all liquids are treated as contraband and severely restricted (as I learned first-hand when Scottish security at Glasgow airport wouldn't let me bring half a bottle of blue Gatorade on my flight home three summers ago).

And now, because a Nigerian terrorist tried to blow up a plane last Christmas with a bomb sewn into his underwear, the TSA wants to see (or feel) what's inside your underwear. Is this starting to feel like the old arcade game Whack-a-Mole to anyone else yet?

When a pattern emerges, there are only two possibilities: the pattern will continue, or it won't. Either the TSA will continue trying to ban whatever method of attack the last terrorist used, with ever-greater intrusions into the privacy of air passengers, or they will be forced to draw the line somewhere, and admit they can't stop every form of attack.

Or in other words, either body imaging scanners will give way to body cavity searches after some enterprising jihadist inserts a bomb in some private bodily orifice; or the government's dedicated travel safety agency will have to admit there are some lines it cannot cross, some forms of attack it cannot prevent, and that there are no absolute guarantees of safety it can make. Neither is a particularly appealing prospect, but in the long run, those are the only plausible outcomes.

If today's security lines and procedures make travelers irritable and cranky, just wait until the day when a terrorist uses a previously unheard of method to blow up an airplane that TSA cannot or will not defend against. Irritation will quickly turn to widespread fear if the agency has to concede that the government security blanket has holes that can't be patched.

Not that I favor some sort of laissez-faire approach that abandons airport security entirely. While there are limits to the scrutiny the government can or should apply to passengers as they board airplanes, I see no reason to make the terrorists' lives easier by removing metal detectors or other sensible, unobtrusive measures. But we as a society ought to be able to distinguish between metal detectors that might reveal a harmless belt buckle or wedding ring in the process of screening for guns and knives, versus X-ray machines that reveal (and potentially, save, and disseminate) low-grade centerfolds of law-abiding travelers who already have enough reasons to resent the experience of flying in coach.

Someone Buy This Man a Shovel

2010-04-28T17:52:00.000-07:00

The most important thing I learned in 10th grade honors U.S. history wasn't the Marbury v. Madison Supreme Court ruling or the causes of the Civil War. It was the importance of always carrying a reliable bullshit shovel.

I will never forget the image of my teacher, the laconic, popular Mr. Chemerka, stopping the girl who would go on to become my graduating class's valedictorian in the middle of a long, vague, rambling attempt to answer a question that had caught her flat-footed. "Hold on a second," Mr. C interjected, "let me just get my bullshit shovel out." And, to much good-natured laughter (including from the future valedictorian), he pantomimed digging a hole with an imaginary spade.

And ever since, I've tried to apply the bullshit shovel test to every argument and opinion I run across, as a quick gauge of soundness and simple factual accuracy. Most of the time it works remarkably well, alerting me to certain statements and ideas that don't stand up to even cursory scrutiny. But when I read Tom Friedman's latest New York Times column today, I had a sea-captain-from-Jaws moment: "I think I'm going to need a bigger bullshit shovel."

In case you need a reminder, Tom Friedman writes a twice-weekly column for the Times lamenting the fact that he's not in charge of everything. He is obsessed with "green" technology, and he wishes the United States could be more like his idol, the People's Republic of China, so the federal government could impose his environmental vision on the country without little details like democratic governance getting in the way. When Obama was bailing out GM and Chrysler last year, Friedman wanted the money to come with strings, including a mandate that the companies converted all their models to hybrids, pronto. In 2008, he nearly wet himself when the Chinese put on a glamorous opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics, without bothering to wonder why the Chinese have such a hard time staging simple elections. (I had words for him on that occasion.)

(If you're starting to wonder why I even read the man's work, you have a fair point. It's sort of a ritualistic self-flagellation exercise, and probably indicative of some deep-seated sense of guilt I'm trying to exorcise. Maybe my friends and family need to stage an intervention.)

Today's column might just plumb a new low for Tom, something I would have considered physically impossible since whenever I last read him. Concerned that a bipartisan Senate plan to impose prices on carbon-based forms of energy could fall apart because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would rather pass a bill pandering to Hispanic voters in his home state of Nevada, Friedman frets that America will lose out to China in the race to claim "the next great global industry ... energy technology."

If you're confused, here's the CliffsNotes explanation:

China already builds a lot of renewable energy equipment, such as solar panels, wind turbines and electric motors for hybrid cars: stuff that's in high demand in places like Europe, where renewable energy production is mandated by government and encouraged through heavy subsidies. Friedman wants American companies to build all that cool stuff, but right now they generally don't, because the U.S. government doesn't punish conventional sources of energy like oil and coal and because renewable energy isn't cost-effective without some sort of carbon tax or cap-and-trade system to make fossil fuels more expensive. No climate bill in the Senate means no shiny new "green industry" in Detroit or Pittsburgh.

Now here's where the bullshit shovel is so desperately needed. Observe that Friedman first declares that renewable energy technology is "the next great global industry." And then observe that he says America needs to handicap conventional, carbon-based energy in order "to start really shifting the economy to clean-power innovations." In other words, wind and solar are the next big money-making business proposition, the trend that's going to revitalize American industry and create American jobs, so we're missing out if we don't get on board. But first we need to make renewables the next big money-making business proposition.

This is setting the proverbial cart so far in front of the horse it's not even funny. Here's a little nugget from all those economics classes Tom Friedman apparently never took: if there's a big, money-making opportunity out there, capitalists will pounce on it, in all their greedy, self-interested glory. They don't wait around for a green light from the government. But that only works if the business opportunity in question makes sense and adheres to the laws of physics. Creating artificial demand for wind turbines by suppressing cheaper alternatives like coal is akin to creating more jobs in the ditch-digging business by outlawing bulldozers, or boosting the glass industry by throwing rocks through windows.

None of which is to say that some form of carbon-limiting scheme doesn't make sense. I have some major reservations about the current state of climate change science, but if in fact global warming is a serious threat, I'm all in favor of reducing greenhouse gas emissions through some sort of government-imposed system. That will almost certainly include switching from cheap, economical fuels to expensive power generated by wind and solar.

But to hear the Tom Friedmans of the world proclaim that making this costly transition will actually make money is laughable, or it would be if it wasn't so intellectually insulting. Chinese solar panel factories aren't booming because the Chinese economy is "going green." On the contrary, China is now the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, and 80 percent of the electricity powering China's industrial revolution comes from ... coal. (The U.S. generates about 45 percent of its power from coal, if you were wondering.)

China builds lots of wind turbines and solar panels because the cost of production in Chinese factories is much lower than in the U.S. or Europe. China builds lots of batteries for hybrid cars because it has a near monopoly on the "rare earth" elements needed to build them, and is willing to permit the tremendous environmental devastation involved in rare-earth mining (devastation that has shuttered almost all U.S. rare-earth mines). China recently surpassed the U.S. as the largest auto market in the world, and it's the fastest-growing market for big, gas-guzzling luxury cars from companies like BMW. In short, China is "green" in the same sense that Ben Affleck is a perennial Oscar contender.

Does Anyone Know Jimmy Carter's E-mail Address?

2010-04-02T04:31:00.000-07:00

Because I have an article I'd really like to send him.

Last summer, when "tea party" protests of Obama's recently enacted health care legislation were still an emerging new phenomenon, the ex-president famously wrote off the protesters as crypto-racists unable to accept the fact of a black president. "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American," Carter intoned.

And since then, the liberal thought-police at The New York Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere have largely echoed that sentiment, comparing Capitol Hill protesters demonstrating on the night of the health bill's final passage to Nazi storm troopers or angry, Jim Crow segregationists threatening to lynch southern blacks in the face of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s.

It's gotten to the point where even I, despite never participating in a "tea party" rally, and despite my utter indifference to Obama's race, started questioning myself. "Maybe I just think I object to the health care bill because it's unconstitutional, because it will make health care worse, because it smacks of heavy-handed government and economic illiteracy. Maybe I really object to it because deep down, I'm a huge racist, Nazi skinhead and just didn't know it..."

But then I read this article by Reason Magazine's Michael Moynihan, and I snapped back to reality. "Phew," I said. "Never mind. It really is just a horrible, ugly, misguided piece of legislation after all."

ObamaCare and My Cognitive Dissonance Moment

2010-03-24T11:12:00.000-07:00

Liberals, rejoice; conservatives, despair: After what felt like an interminable, mind-numbing debate, Barack Obama's signature health reform bill is the law of the land. And sadly, we as a country are probably in for months and years of continuing debate, not to mention lawsuits challenging the law's constitutionality and entire political campaigns devoted to upholding or repealing the most significant piece of social engineering legislation of our time. What a dreary prospect.

It's been an exhausting national debate, not least because the various bills, the final law and the underlying issues are so complex and detailed. I've opposed the basic plan all along, on constitutional, philosophical and economic grounds. But now that it's passed, I'm not here to rehash those arguments yet again. Because, having followed the news coverage of congressional Democrats celebrating their legislative victory, I realized I have a much more basic problem with ObamaCare: It makes my head explode.

To elaborate on that a bit, I cannot reconcile the things I hear liberals say about this legislation with other things I hear liberals say about this legislation. For months now, I've been listening to Barack Obama, or Nancy Pelosi, or another Washington Democrat make certain claims about health care and health reform. I hear those claims, and I say "Uh huh...," and then Obama, or Pelosi, or Senator Whoever immediately goes on to conclude something that makes me go "Huh?" It's gotten to the point where no amount of aspirin can cure the headache this causes me.

And so, rather than delving into the minutia of the law, I humbly submit the following list of basic claims about health care reform that I, personally, cannot hold in my mind simultaneously without suffering severe cognitive dissonance. Or a massive stroke.

1) "The present health insurance system is dysfunctional (uh huh...). We need to make sure everyone in this country has health insurance! (huh?)

So health insurance is outrageously expensive, maddening to access and bad at actually doing the things it's supposed to do? And this is a reason to expand it to an additional 30 million people? This isn't evidence that it's a bad system that we should have gotten rid of years ago? This doesn't cause Democrats to pause and ask, "Hey, maybe the reasons the current system sucks for the people who have health insurance are related to the reasons other people don't have insurance at all"?

2) "Our country is facing a serious fiscal crisis due to the unfunded liabilities created by government entitlement programs. (uh huh...). So we need to create a new, bigger entitlement program! (huh?)

I know, it sounds crazy, but I didn't say it. Obama said it: "Make no mistake: health care reform is entitlement reform."

Previous entitlement programs, mostly Social Security and Medicare, are threatening to bankrupt our government, so we need to cut them and put the money into a new entitlement program that's available to more people? Once again, the first part of the statement sounds reasonable: the federal government's current unfunded liabilities (that is, the value of the future benefits it has promised to pay but won't have the funds to afford) is $43 trillion. Toss in the national debt of $12.5 trillion, projected future deficits and some other liabilities, and our country is in a $62.3 trillion hole.

Yet somehow, the solution to entitlement spending is ... entitlement spending? Despite a proven track record of previous entitlement programs growing far beyond our capacity to pay for them? I can just hear the earnest, liberal policy wonk going: "But this time it'll work...!"

(And in case you were wondering just how much money $62.3 trillion is, the total value of everything produced by our entire economy in 2009 was $14.2 trillion. In individualized terms, that would be equivalent to a worker earning $50,000 with debts of $219,366.)

3) This one might be my favorite: "We're going to force insurers to cover people with expensive health problems at the same cost as everyone else (uh huh...), and health insurance is going to become more affordable." (huh?!?)

This, in essence, is what Obama's plan boils down to: Somehow we're going to make sure that the people who need medical care the most are going to get it, while still making sure that insurers stop ripping off the rest of us by keeping costs under control. Both halves of that goal are perfectly noble in and of themselves, but they are what logicians call "mutually exclusive." You can have one, or the other, but not both together. Say, did somebody mention something about baking a cake, eating the cake, and then still having the cake?

I think there might be a 4) and a 5) somewhere on this list, but for the sake of my own (mental) health, I should probably stop there. Besides, I've got a cake to bake.

I Never Thought I'd Say This...

2010-03-23T12:17:00.001-07:00

...but for once in my life, I agree with Joe Biden.

After giving a little speech today at the White House signing ceremony for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the vice president turned to his boss, and said, into a live microphone, "Mr. President, this is a big fucking deal."

Chalk it up as yet another of Joe Biden's seemingly endless string of public gaffes (though it still doesn't top my all-time favorite).

Still, this one is worth noting, because today the veep got it right. When you enact a law that dramatically restructures 16 percent of the American economy, on a strict partisan vote, over the objections of public opinion polls everywhere, under the veil of a massive accounting gimmick and completely unrealistic policy assumptions, relying on a series of special deals for individual lawmakers, and you cement in place the worst aspects of a seriously dysfunctional health care system, and create the legal precedent that health care is an entitlement regardless of your ability to pay for it, it's a really big fucking deal.

You hit the nail on the head, Joe.

Bam!

2010-03-10T06:35:00.000-08:00

Just in case anyone was in need of a refresher on why Obamacare is a horrendous idea that will only exacerbate the problems with the American medical system rather than solving them, here it is.

Apparently it takes Democrats in Congress 2,000 pages to further undermine our health care system, but a columnist at humble little Reason Magazine can debunk their plan in about 600 words. I don't know whether that's comforting or terrifying.

ObamaCare: An Offer You Can't Refuse

2010-01-27T04:20:00.000-08:00

I happened to catch the president today on CNN, telling a townhall meeting of New Hampshire voters that the health care plan everybody loves to hate really isn't that controversial. New "exchanges" will allow the uninsured to buy health insurance, and new rules will bar insurance companies from denying coverage to those new customers, even if they have preexisting medical problems.

Sounds reasonable enough. And in return, the president assures us the government is simply going to "ask that everybody get health insurance." What a nice guy! How could we angry voters say no to a deal like that?

Except apparently, Obama's definition of "asking" differs from mine, because both health reform bills currently stuck in Congress require virtually everyone to buy health insurance, or face steadily escalating fines in coming years.

If this little nugget of coercion sounds familiar, you might be remembering it from the 2008 presidential campaign, when a candidate named Barack Obama criticized his chief Democratic rivals for supporting an "individual mandate" that would force all Americans to buy health insurance. According to candidate Obama, "A mandate means that in some fashion, everybody will be forced to buy health insurance. ... But I believe the problem is not that folks are trying to avoid getting health care. The problem is they can't afford it. And that's why my plan emphasizes lowering costs."

Flash forward a year, and President Obama has apparently had a change of heart, telling CBS news that "during the campaign I was opposed to this idea ... [but] I am now in favor of some sort of individual mandate as long as there's a hardship exemption."

I think it's fair to say that the term "flip-flop" will die with John Kerry, but still, that's quite a turnaround on an important issue. But hardly a surprise, since anyone remotely acquainted with basic economics can tell you that "universal" health insurance breaks down if you don't force healthy people to buy it and pay the insurance premiums that underwrite the medical costs of insuring the sick. Nobody right, left or center argues that simple fact.

Of course, quite a few conservatives and libertarians on the right argue that government has no business, or constitutional authority, to tell citizens to buy a stick of gum, let alone health insurance. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi neatly summed up the left's response to this objection recently when a reporter asked her if she believed the Constitution gives Congress the power to mandate health insurance, responding: "Are you serious? Are you serious?" Good comeback, Nance.

Since I'm already on record as opposing the mandate to buy insurance on constitutional grounds, and since Nancy Pelosi doesn't care what I think, I won't belabor the point further. However, the Obama-Pelosi mandate does entail one rather bizarre consequence that gets too little attention.

Health care, the president and his backers declare, should be a right for every American, and universal health insurance is the mechanism for upholding that right. But universal health insurance doesn't work without a universal mandate, so our participation in this plan will not be optional.

Ponder that for a moment. Because the rights enumerated in the Constitution -- the right to speak and worship freely, assemble peacefully, vote, etc. -- share an important similarity: in each case, the Constitution protects these rights by prohibiting the government from interfering with them. The Constitution says you can speak as you please, own a gun, and go to whatever church you want; but it makes no provision forcing you to do any of those things.

The newfound right to health insurance, if enacted, would become a first in our history: a right that cannot be refused. What you choose to do with every human right enshrined in the Constitution is your business; when it comes to Democratic health reform, you have the right to do what you're told.

Quick Hits

2010-01-21T09:18:00.000-08:00

I'm sure I'll have more to say about the recent upset election in Massachusetts, but for now, I offer you a quick rundown of my favorite left-wing reactions to - and explanations for - the sudden threat to their plan for "reforming" health care.

From The New York Times' editorial writers: "To our minds, it is not remotely a verdict on Mr. Obama’s presidency, nor does it amount to a national referendum on health care reform..."

No argument here. I fail to see how a Senate election in which 49 states' voters were ineligible to take part could possibly constitute a "national referendum." Note to Times editors: It doesn't count if you win an argument that nobody's having.

From Times op-ed writer Timothy Egan: "In famously well-educated Massachusetts, it cannot be said that the voters were stupid."

You know, as opposed to all those stupid states whose votes shouldn't count.

From University of Maryland Political Communications Professor Trevor Parry-Giles: "Other things intrude, like the Christmas Day terror attack, Haiti, anxieties about the economy."

Yeah, sometimes when a natural disaster strikes in some foreign country and inflicts terrible loss of life, I suddenly change party affiliations right before a crucial Senate election. It's the darnedest thing.

From Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, D-R.I.: "The problem isn't our message. It's the messaging of the message that's the problem."

Translation: I don't want to be in Congress either!

Wrong on Rights

2009-12-28T13:33:00.000-08:00

If, like me, you weren't quite able to drown your health care socialization sorrows in food and drink this holiday season, enjoy this small palate cleanser, courtesy of Reason.com's Jacob Sullum.

Amid the feckless rhetoric that has marked this fall's long, dispiriting slog toward some form of government health care "reform" ("Death panels!" "Evil insurance companies!"), it was rather refreshing to find a cogent, compact, philosophical challenge to the notion that health care is suddenly a "right" that "everyone" is entitled to. That assertion, as espoused by Barack Obama, Harry Reid, et al., represents the starting point for every left-wing argument in favor of government-run health insurance, and the key to understanding why mainstream liberals take genuine offense at the notion that the provision of medical care might have some connection with paying for said.

Without poaching on his argument too much, Sullum raises the basic objection that any opponent of government-provided health insurance ought to start with: That for much of human history, "health care" was non-existent. Only the technological advances and material prosperity achieved in the last few hundred years have made meaningful health care a possibility for some, let alone for all, of humanity. "Health care" would have meant nothing to a Stone Age mammoth hunter or a 15th Century Russian serf, because they lived in worlds incapable of providing it, at any price.

So how exactly, Sullum asks, can we assert a right to something that until relatively recently, did not exist? And if we can do that, what does this imply about our right to future goods that do not exist yet? Do I have a right to eternal life if scientists ever discover a way to achieve it? If so, do I have the right to force you to pay for it? Did I have these rights all along, without knowing it?

Anyway, read for yourself. It's a wonderful, if concise, commentary on the nature of "rights," and what constitutes a right. Two thousand years ago, men like Aristotle took great pains to weigh these questions and define their terms. Sadly, the men who rule us today do not burden themselves with such circumspection.

Roman Polanski, Empathy, and the Road to Moral Relativism

2009-10-03T16:18:00.000-07:00

As a small-time journalist who forever struggles to write gripping, effective lead sentences that grab my readers' attention, I have to express my admiration for Kate Harding of Salon.com for what might be the plainest, most direct lead I've ever read: "Roman Polanski raped a child."

Strong stuff, that.

In a week filled with far too many tortuous defenses of the 76-year-old French-Polish director who was recently taken into Swiss custody on a 32-year-old conviction of unlawful sex with a minor, and far too many histrionic diatribes stating the obvious -- that raping a 13-year-old girl is wrong -- Harding managed to cut right to the chase with almost Spartan clarity. But if I may, I'd like to back up a few steps, and look at the Polanski case in a slightly broader context that I've yet to encounter anywhere else.

But first, as a brief refresher for anyone who hasn't already been bombarded by this story, a timeline of events.

In 1977, acclaimed director Roman Polanski reportedly drugged and raped a 13-year-old female model during a photo shoot for Vogue magazine in Los Angeles. Polanski was brought up on six very serious felony charges, but eventually plead guilty to one lesser offense (sex with a minor) in return for a brief stint in a California psychiatric ward, which effectively served as his prison sentence. When Polanski got wind that the judge in the case, possibly at the behest of an uninvolved prosecutor, was planning to vacate the plea bargain and sentence Polanski to hard prison time on the strength of the written confession he had already signed, the director fled the country and took refuge in France. As a man of considerable wealth, Polanski has lived quite comfortably in his French and other European homes ever since, and has continued his directing career.

California prosecutors have made on-and-off attempts to persuade other countries to apprehend Polanski and extradite him to the U.S., but until last week in Zurich, those attempts failed.

Since his arrest last week, a bevy of Hollywood and European filmmakers, actors and artists have rallied to Polanski's defense, even signing a petition demanding his immediate release. Meanwhile, the nature of his past crime has united public opinion elsewhere in a way few controversies could. Liberals and conservatives alike have been near-universal in their condemnation, and their approval that a wealthy man who committed a despicable act three decades ago is finally going to face the consequences that his political and professional allies have shielded him from for so long. Kate Harding is merely the most succinct of his many, many critics.

The outrage is not shocking, but it is the defenses Polanski's allies have proffered that I believe deserve some examination. Most -- such as his advanced age, the artistic quality of his movies, and the fact that he was never accused of a repeat offense after the 1977 incident -- are completely insipid and may be dismissed as such. I hope we do not live in such a debased age that elderly rapists who only victimized one person and made a bunch of cool movies receive a get-out-of-jail free card.

Another defense -- that Polanski's case was so badly mishandled by the justice system that it would be unfair to prosecute him -- holds some merit. The cornerstone of the American legal system is supposed to be that all defendants receive a fair and impartial trial, which Polanski manifestly did not. However, the fact that he unlawfully skipped the country when he believed himself the target of a looming mistrial, instead of fighting the sentence through the established appeals process, considerably undermines this argument.

The defense I find most significant, if not most convincing, was articulated by the French Minister of Culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, in his protest of the Polanski arrest, when he said he "strongly regrets that a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already experienced so many of them." (Side question: Could any country other than France be pompous enough to have a "minister of culture?")

By "ordeals," Mitterand is referring to the undeniable personal tragedies Roman Polanski has suffered. Born in France between the world wars to a partially Jewish family, he lost his mother to a Nazi concentration camp, and only barely escaped from occupied France himself. Two decades later, Polanski's beloved wife, Susan Tate, was brutally murdered by the Manson crime family. She was eight and a half months pregnant at the time.

Mitterand and his fellow Polanski defenders are asking the world, in effect, to empathize with Roman Polanski. He has suffered enough, they say; let go of this 32-year-old crime, which even the victim wishes to move on from, already.

But liberal pundits, many of whom I've disagreed with on prior issues, are having none of this empathy argument. The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson put it thusly:

"In general, I agree with the European view that Americans tend to be prudish and hypocritical about sex. But a grown man drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl? That's not remotely a close call. It's wrong in any moral universe -- and deserves harsher punishment than three decades of gilded exile."

After cataloging the protests of various European artists, whose shrill tone and hyperbole almost defy belief, the liberal New York Times editorialized:

"But hold on a moment. After being indicted in 1977, didn’t Mr. Polanski, now 76, confess to having sex with a 13-year-old girl after plying her with Quaaludes and Champagne? Didn’t he flee the United States when the plea bargaining seemed to fall apart, raising the prospect of prison time? Isn’t there a warrant for his arrest?"

Good for the Post and the Times and other bastions of liberal opinion for such unequivocal insistence on black-and-white justice. I would venture to say few defendants can boast as much personal tragedy and suffering as Mr. Polanski, but many of the usual champions of moral relativism are saying: "Tough. Justice is blind."

And yet, only a few short months ago, many of those same liberal voices -- including the Times and the Post -- were staunchly defending the school of judicial thought that does take account of defendants' and plaintiffs' life experiences, and does incline judges to side with those whose life experiences arouse empathy. Among the qualities President Obama listed as his criteria for nominating justices to the Supreme Court, consider the following:

"We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be ... poor, or African American, or gay, or disabled, or old."

While we're at it, why not add "or a Holocaust survivor, or the widow of a murdered spouse" to the list? Surely those experiences rank among the most difficult and painful of human conditions.

So I merely hope that all the liberal editorial writers and pundits who embraced "empathy" as a judicial philosophy only a few months ago will take a moment to reflect on the inconsistency of refusing to apply it to Roman Polanski. Perhaps a few of them will concede that their ardent desire to see justice done in this particular case without regard for murky notions of mitigating circumstances ought to be the mindset that every judge brings to every case, every day.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Tea Party Protest

2009-09-18T17:51:00.000-07:00

In a week packed with grim and depressing news concerning a horrific murder at Yale and a string of ill-behaved celebrities making regrettable comments on national television, it is entirely possible that you didn't hear very much about the large, anti-Obama "tea party" rally that took place last Saturday in our nation's capital. Most major media outlets didn't exactly strain their personnel budgets to send extra reporters to the National Mall to chronicle something as boring as a demonstration against deficit spending and nationalized health care. (For the record, I was not in attendance myself; even I have better things to do on a Saturday.)

And so, unless you live in the Washington area, it's even less likely that you heard much about an interesting little aftershock to the tea party that surfaced a few days later. Republican Congressman Kevin Brady of Texas, a prominent organizer of the event, had the temerity to criticize the Washington Metrorail system for not providing more train service to accommodate demonstrators protesting excessive government spending. If you noticed a strange, sputtering noise late Wednesday afternoon, it was probably half a million Washington liberals collectively choking on fury mingled with glee when the story broke.

In a letter to Metro, Brady had this to say:

“These individuals came all the way from Southeast Texas to protest the excessive spending and growing government intrusion by the 111th Congress and the new Obama administration,” These participants, whose tax dollars were used to create and maintain this public transit system, were frustrated and disappointed that our nation’s capital did not make a great effort to simply provide a basic level of transit for them.”

Washington liberals (perhaps it would be simpler and equally accurate to say "Washingtonians") promptly had a field day with this apparent hypocrisy concerning their subway system. Here's a tiny sample of the 690 or so comments on the Wall Street Journal's report of the story (all spellings quoted verbatim):

RealityCheck wrote: "... the Tea Party protesters were protesting against goverment spending and any sort of public good only to find out Public transit was lacking..IT’S NOT SARCASM IT’S IRONY"

MehNeh wrote: "Really teabaggers? Now you’re complaining that there wasn’t adequate government spending on public transit when you needed it? Grow up. Government isn’t some toy that you get to play with whenever you want and refuse to share with all the other kids."

urizon wrote: "It’s a typical right-wing tactic to defund a socialt service to the point where it becomes dysfunctional, and then complain about how government isn’t working."

And much, much more in the same vein. Meanwhile, every political conversation I've overheard in the past few days has followed the same basic script, tinged with the same barely contained joy that these so-called fiscal conservative protesters have inadvertently outed themselves as lovers of government who just won't pony up the tax dollars to pay for it.

But before you rush to join the hypocrisy-fest, I ask you only to consider a very quick thought experiment. Suppose for a moment that, after the protest, Rep. Brady had written a public letter to the Metro commissioner praising the excellent service Metro had provided for him and his fellow protesters, and thanking Metro for the extra train cars that were made available for the event.

Now try to imagine liberals' reaction.

Why, it would be ... wait for it ...

Almost exactly the same! Change a few words, and it would become "How DARE these so-called fiscal conservatives protest government spending and then turn around and sing the praises of a government service? Don't these idiots know where the money for Metro trains comes from!? What a bunch of hypocrites! They LOVE Metro, but they don't want to pay taxes to fund it!"

If you say something that invites intense criticism from opponents, and then you turn around and say the exact opposite, and receive the same exact criticism, that's when you know you just can't win. It's also when you know you're up against an opponent who decided you were wrong before you even opened your mouth.

The fact that the tea party rally was a protest against government spending on health insurance, not a protest of government spending on subways, evidently makes no difference to liberals who have suddenly lost their enthusiasm for mass protest movements. If you are unwilling to recognize the basic validity of opinions you do not share, why bother with facts?

Paging Dr. Adams

2009-09-08T17:11:00.000-07:00

Arguing in defense of a troop of British garrison soldiers on trial for firing into a crowd of violent Bostonians in 1770, a young and ambitious lawyer named John Adams famously reminded a hostile colonial jury that "facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." The soldiers had, Adams argued, acted in self defense when a mob of hundreds of taunting dock workers and teenagers assaulted a sentry with clubs and pelted his comrades with ice and oyster shells. Despite populist anger throughout the colonies, and newspaper headlines decrying a "Boston Massacre," Adams won the case, and the soldiers went free.

Two and a half centuries later, facts are still stubborn things. Somebody kindly remind liberal Democrats crusading for public health care.

In the wake of August's town hall protests and Barack Obama's collapsing job approval polls, his core constituency is sounding a bit rattled, as if they can't quite comprehend the sudden outburst of anger provoked by Congress' attempt to pass a trillion-dollar health care overhaul this summer.

November 2008 was the month of murky nostrums about that most meaningless of political rallying cries, change. August 2009 was the month those vague promises of change crystallized into tangible alterations to our society. The transition was sobering, and bewildering, for Democrats who interpreted their electoral victory as a mandate to enact radical reforms, rather than a warning of what happens to dominant political parties that stray too far from the American mainstream.

None of which is to say health care reform has run aground and foundered. With so much of his dwindling political capital invested in this fight, I expect Obama and his congressional allies will salvage some sort of reform, probably in the form of new regulation for the insurance industry, and maybe more. But liberals' cornerstone reform, a publicly run insurance plan open to all, is in actual doubt for the first time since Obama came to office. Democrats everywhere are waking up in cold sweats from nightmares that it's 1994 all over again, when another young, charismatic Democratic president's campaign for public health insurance failed and ushered in 12 years of Republican congressional majorities.

So I suppose certain liberals can be forgiven if at the moment their defenses of ObamaCare sound a little strained. But what I will not under any circumstances forgive are arguments in favor of a gradual government takeover of an entire industry that rest on completely false premises.

So far, my favorite such argument is, hands-down, that presented last Wednesday by Thomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal's token liberal op-ed writer (who never answered my e-mail from last year). Health care must be provided by government, Frank bluntly asserts, because health is a "public good," not some sort of individual condition controlled by individuals. After pointing out that many of the present problems with health care in this country stem from government meddling and (incredibly) using that as an argument for more government meddling, Frank lectures his readers thusly:

"One reason government got involved is that our ancestors understood something that escapes those who brag so loudly about their prudence at today's town-hall meetings: That health care is not an individual commodity to be bought and enjoyed like other products. That the health of each of us depends on the health of the rest of us, as epidemics from the Middle Ages to this year's flu have demonstrated."

To quote Kim Jong Il: "Oh reary?"

Because a quick trip to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells a different story. Per the "National Vital Statistics Report" for 2007, the 10 leading causes of death in America were:
1) heart disease
2) malignant neoplasms (aka cancer)
3) cerebrovascular disease (which leads to stroke, and is often caused by hypertension)
4) chronic lower respiratory disease (usually associated with smoking)
5) accidents
6) Alzheimer's Disease
7) diabetes
8) influenza and pneumonia
9) nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis
10) septicemia

I can't help but notice that not until number 8 on the list do you encounter a cause of death that can spread from one person to another, as implied by Frank's unsupported claim that "the health of each of us depends on the health of the rest of us." I also can't help noticing that the major causes of death are largely linked to lifestyle choices, and have no interpersonal properties whatsoever. You can't exactly catch my heart disease, whether or not a politician in Washington decrees that you must pay my medical bills.

I know full well such observations won't change the minds of collectivists like Thomas Frank, whose stated objective is the creation of a new entitlement that permanently yokes our physical health to the tender mercies of government. But I'm chalking this one up as a small victory for stubborn facts nonetheless.

How the West was Lost

2009-08-24T17:25:00.000-07:00

If you haven't heard, you may be forgiven for not knowing President Obama is on vacation in Martha's Vineyard at the moment, because it's neither newsworthy nor surprising. Whether you invoke the "elitist" card or not, Obama is a rich, progressive liberal, and everyone knows rich, progressive liberals like to vacation on exclusive New England beaches, among other posh locations. (And at $20 million, the resort the Obamas picked had better qualify as posh.)

What is worth noting is the token, middle-America destination Obama chose to breeze through prior to his real vacation in order to head off those inevitable charges of elitism and snobbery. As a sort of footnote to several "townhall" meetings in western states to discuss the inescapable health care debate, the first family made a quick stopover in the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone national parks. Quoth the LA Times:

"He'll spend the last week of August at a $20-million estate in one of the most private spots on the Vineyard. But this weekend, he'll balance out the imagery with a visit to Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon."

Normally I might not even take note of the POTUS' comings and goings, but as it happens, I just spent the last week in one of those non-elite vacation spots: Yellowstone National Park, and its sister, Grand Teton. And having returned suffused with admiration and love for the natural splendor that is Yellowstone, I can't help bristling at the notion that the supposed leader of this country regards the 2,900 miles between the coasts as little more than a good photo op before his "real" vacation.

Now, I have nothing against Martha's Vineyard, which I've never visited. I have no doubt it's a lovely beach, as are most of the beaches between Maine and Florida. But no one goes to the Vineyard for surf and sun, which are available elsewhere for cheaper; they go because they can go, because they can afford tens of thousands of dollars for a week in the high season, or because they can afford tens of millions of dollars for some of the country's most sought-after real estate. They go to be amongst like-minded folk, mostly celebrities and movie stars and other millionaires.

You most definitely do not go to Yellowstone for those reasons. You go there to experience the last great unspoiled temperate wilderness left on earth. You go to see grizzly bears and bison and other beasts that once roamed a whole continent but have since retreated to this last holdout. You go to see glacier-crowned mountains that jut a mile and a half straight up into a clear, unpolluted blue sky. Martha's Vineyard, I imagine, makes you feel special; Yellowstone, I know, makes you feel lucky.

But after a brief lifetime of traveling west to places like Yellowstone at every opportunity, I've realized not many of my east-coast ilk share that feeling. I grew up outside New York City, and I now reside outside Washington, and I've known more than my share of smart, affluent, worldly people. I went to school with them, and I work with them. And almost without exception, nobody ever understood my desire to see America west of the Appalachians. Kids I knew who went out west did so to ski because the snow was good, and that was about it. A few social studies teachers seemed pleasantly surprised I'd been to some of the places in our textbook.

The adults I work with now mostly express a certain enthusiasm that I just spent a week in Wyoming, but with one exception, they yearn to lounge at the beach or cavort through bohemian Europe. When the Cosmopolitan in Chief jets off to Manhattan or Paris for "date night" with his First Lady, they gush in approval tinged with envy.

So it was difficult for me, taking in a sweeping Wyoming vista or learning about the rich, bloody, tragic history of the west at the (incredibly good) Buffalo Bill museum in Cody, to consider how little so many Americans care to explore their own patrimony and past. Between the coasts lies a whole continent, as diverse and awesome as any other, ranging from burning desert, to old-growth rain forest, to rolling savannah, to ice-capped mountain ranges.

And within that array of landscapes, a thousand different human cultures lived and died over the course of a hundred centuries, culminating in a final blaze of glory and cruelty and sadness when a European culture arrived like a landslide and wiped them all out. William "Buffalo Bill" Cody played a starring role in that fleeting moment of history between 1865 and 1885 or so, when whites warred with Indians on the Great Plains, and no lesser personage than a prince of Imperial Russia traveled halfway around the world to witness Cody's performance in a wild, unique human drama that will never come again.

When the frontiers were closed, and the wars all settled in favor of white America, Cody, that slaughterer of the buffalo herds and rare friend of many Indian tribes, took his Wild West shows to civilized, worldly Europe, for what now seems like an amazing purpose: to satisfy the veracious desire of Europeans to experience the Old West, as presented by the man most singly responsible for bringing it to an end. Can you imagine, in the year 2009, European audiences, from kings and queens and prime ministers on down, paying good money to experience American culture? For that matter, do the coastal Americans who all too often eschew the interior of their country in favor of foreign lands even acknowledge such a thing as "American culture?" Isn't it all just flyover country full of Wal-Marts and strip malls and rednecks?

Perhaps I shouldn't complain that more easterners don't go west. After all, certain parking lots in Yellowstone were already sufficiently crowded with RVs bearing licence plates from Utah and Minnesota and Alabama that the charm of the place was threatened. But the west is vast, above all else. There's room to spare, discoveries to make, history to feel and freedom to roam: the same qualities that brought settlers there in the first place.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I know I'll be back.

The Case Against Public Health Insurance, in Five Minutes or Your Money Back

2009-06-26T13:14:00.000-07:00

Of the many problems of living within sight of the U.S. Capitol and the seat of federal power, perhaps the worst is the tendency for serious, philosophical public policy debates to turn into wonkish statistics battles and scare-mongering. And nowhere in this town of wonks, wags and pols is this phenomenon more egregious than the fight over health care reform, and whether to create a "public option" to reduce the ranks of the uninsured. Given that this argument concerns a fairly momentous crossroads for our country, it would be nice to hear the opposing sides make their cases in clear-cut, conceptual terms that everyone can understand and evaluate. Right?

But alas. Where we need simple, objective facts, we get bewildering, and often contradictory, statistics, which can be distorted in any number of ways. Where we need broad, guiding principles, we get anecdotal horror stories intended to curtail debate.

Liberal proponents trot out a sob story about some poor single mom in Iowa bankrupted by 80 jillion dollars in hospital bills because she didn't have insurance when a piano fell on her. Conservatives counter with the story of some poor old man in Canada who had to wait a decade for a routine hip replacement because his country's public health bureaucracy wouldn't approve the procedure. Then some pointy-headed accountants from the Congressional Budget Office butt in with their estimates of what government health care will cost if hospitals are reimbursed at the current Medicaid rates, or at Medicaid rates plus 8.95 percent, or...

And the problem is, none of these anecdotes are false. None of the statistics are bogus. But they exist as individual trees in a vast forest, forever obscuring our view of What Really Matters. We could use a Health Insurance 101 curriculum, to serve as a starting point and a reality check for the politicians in Congress who, even as you read this, are busy debating how much control the government should exert over your physical well-being. Since no such remedial class seems to exist, I humbly offer the following as food for thought.

What the hell is insurance, exactly? Anybody with an age in two digits and an IQ in three digits will haughtily tell you they know all about something so part and parcel of boring adulthood, but judging by the tenor of today's health insurance debate, I'm inclined to think many could use a refresher.

In plain economic terms, "insurance" is a means of lowering risk. You insure yourself against things you hope won't happen, such as car crashes, house fires and sudden death. Insurance allows people to protect themselves from unlikely, but unpredictable, events that could very well ruin them financially. And insurers provide this protection when they judge that the premiums their customers pay will outweigh the costs of cleaning up after the rare but disastrous events they promise to insure against.

This is why drivers pay hundreds of dollars per month for car insurance, and why people with beach-front property pay thousands of dollars per year for hurricane insurance: They know a crash or a storm is unlikely, but they acknowledge that such things do happen. Insurers apply the exact same analysis: They'd rather not have to pay a claim, but they know they will have to sometimes. When the crash or the storm doesn't happen, everyone's happy.

The key here is that insurance is something that both you and your insurer hope you'll never need. Drivers with car insurance don't run red lights at 120 miles per hour, because they know insurance won't do them much good if they're dead. Thus arises another important feature of insurance: It should encourage people to avoid doing stupid things. This is the reason good drivers pay less for car insurance, and why nonsmokers pay less for life insurance. Insurers reward their customers in return for acting responsibly and lowering the risk of events the insurer doesn't want to pay for.

Then there's health insurance, which throws these basic principles out the window. In most employer-sponsored plans, each participant pays the same monthly premium, regardless of their likely health care costs. And in the current government-run health insurance programs (i.e., Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP), beneficiaries receive coverage soley based on their age or economic status. In both cases, the insurer gives the insured no financial incentive to do the unpleasant things that minimize health costs, such as exercising, eating well or avoiding smoking. It should not be surprising that people respond by not doing these things. Meanwhile, health care costs explode.

So we have a health care system in which people ruin their health, because they have been given a blank check to do so. The negative effects of Marlboroughs, Big Macs and La-Z-Boy recliners are small, incremental, and difficult to see, so many Americans indulge in one or more of them with reckless abandon. When they need to see a doctor because of a lifestyle-related condition (think lung cancer, heart disease, Type II diabetes), they incur only a fraction of the cost, if they have insurance (with the notable exception of bogus policies that don't cover what they're supposed to cover).

Economically, this makes no sense. Consumers don't see the true costs of their purchases, because doctors, hospitals and pharmacies send the bills to a third party, the insurance company (or the government). Of course, many Americans understand the effects of smoking, junk food and sloth; they avoid these things, and thereby support their less-conscientious co-workers and neighbors. Insurance companies actually compete for healthy customers, because they offset the unhealthy customers, who pay the same rates but need lots of costly care.

Unfortunately, the healthy still need insurance, to do what insurance is supposed to do: avoid the costs of unpredictable disasters, such as getting run over by a bus and needing expensive surgery. In the process, they pick up the tab for the avoidable expenses regularly incurred by the people who eat too much, drink too much and smoke too much. This is nothing more than a legalized protection racket that preys on anyone who pays more in premiums than they receive in needed health care.

Somehow, health insurance has morphed from "protection against things I try to avoid anyway" to "the way I get someone else to pay for the consequences of my bad decisions." Remember this as liberals in Congress, along with our president, lobby to expand this perverse system further and put government more fully in charge of it.

Dude, Where's My Objectivity?

2009-06-12T08:47:00.000-07:00

Last week, an 88-year-old anti-semite made headlines by walking into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum with a rifle, apparently intent on violently protesting a museum dedicated to an event he maintains didn't happen, and ended up gunning down a black museum guard who challenged him at the door. Given the short-term memory of the media, I imagine the news cycle will linger on this ugly story for another day or two, and then move on to the next episode of public bloodshed, be it airline crash, school shooting or another such tragedy.

For me, the impact of the shooting will linger a bit longer, if for no other reason than its proximity to my office building in Washington. I pass the Holocaust Museum every morning and evening; the day after the attack, I saw the FBI trucks and agents fanned out around the taped-off building, presumably performing post-shooting ballistics analysis, to figure out exactly where each shot was fired, and more chillingly, perhaps checking for bombs (the shooter, James von Brunn, apparently had drawn up a list of other "targets" in the DC area shortly before his attack).

The natural reaction to this fizzled attempt at mass murder, the one I've heard most people express, is simple disgust: disgust at an angry, demented old man brimming with racial hatred taking the life of a young security guard with a wife and son, whom acquaintances roundly described as a class-act, and doing so in a place created to preserve the memory of millions of other victims of that same hatred.

But for a certain, enlightened, moralizing faction of the left-wing punditry, this isn't enough. Von Brunn's lunacy can't be abominated in isolation; rather, it must be seen in a larger context. For you see, this ugly episode is the product of the "hate" spewed by right-wing ideologues in the media. Sound like cheap political opportunism? Judge for yourself.

Intones the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson:

"What we don't know is whether all the blast-furnace rhetoric coming from the right is giving validation and encouragement to some confused, angry man or woman with a rifle or a truck full of fertilizer -- the next 'lone wolf,' preparing to howl."

Quoth The New York Times' Paul Krugman, who deviated from his usual columns extolling the virtues of Keynesian economics and massive government deficits with this sermon on political ethics:

"Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment."

Both these and other liberal pontificators have seized on a recent report from the Department of Homeland Security, warning that domestic terrorist groups motivated by neo-Nazism and other charming fringe dogmas pose a real threat. Further, DHS noted that the election of an African-American president is sure to rile this motley claque, potentially leading to more violence.

So along comes octogenarian loon von Brunn, hot on the heels of the murder of noted Kansas abortionist George Tiller only a few weeks ago, and now the Paul Krugmans of the world are connecting the dots and tracing them back to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and other perfidious sources of murder-inducing rhetoric. Writing in this week's Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank (who failed to return my e-mail to him on an unrelated column) even goes so far as to suggest that "maybe [certain pro-lifers] deserved some of the blame for [Tiller's] murder," because they had the audacity to protest and condemn his practice of performing late-term abortions that almost no other doctor in the country will touch, thereby inciting a crazed gunman to take him out.

That such arguments imply a bizarre transfer of responsibility for acts of violence from the people who actually commit them to the politically influential right-wing media outlets that Krugman, et al, detest is bad enough. But there is a larger issue at play here: namely, the left's utter myopia regarding extremist, irrational language creeping into political discourse. And as if he knew all about my humble little blog and wanted to give me a helping hand, Times columnist Frank Rich kindly bloviated on this very issue last Sunday, perfectly demonstrating the one-way street that he and his ilk apparently live on. In regard to an obscure Michigan Republican party figure who has criticized Obama as a fascist, Rich huffily announced:

"He didn’t seem to grasp that 'fascism' is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find 'bad' because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler."

Really, Frank? We shouldn't "slur" a sitting president by likening him to Hitler? Then where exactly were you when liberal protesters routinely toted "Bush = Hitler" placards at anti-war rallies? For that matter, where were any of these champions of fair-minded, dispassionate political discourse for the last eight years, when Bush was accused of letting 9/11 happen to serve as a pretext for war in the Middle East, or when Bush was accused of botching the post-Katrina rescue operations in New Orleans because he "doesn't like black people"? Or how about the 10 billion other mindless rants spewed by the left blaming Bush for anything that happened to make them unhappy?

I didn't vote for George Bush. Nor do I listen to a minute of Rush Limbaugh, or watch a minute of Fox News, largely because I don't care for sensationalized news; but last I checked, none of these blowhards has harmed anybody, or called for the harming of anyone. Meanwhile, liberal audiences guffaw at Wanda Sykes' cheerful hope for Rush's kidneys to fail, rap artists glorify urban gang violence, and liberals in Congress drag bankers into show-trials and browbeat them on national television for supposedly wrecking the economy to arouse populist anger. The Times doesn't bat an eye. Apparently all speech is free, but only right-wing speech can be condemned as hateful or inflammatory.

The left's sudden rediscovery that nasty political rhetoric is, well, nasty, reminds me distinctly of the last time we had a Democrat in the White House whom Republicans dared to attack. I will never forget watching a clip of Alec Baldwin on the Conan O'Brien show in 1998, at the height of the impeachment frenzy resulting from Bill Clinton's dalliance with a White House intern. Working himself into a genuine lather, warm, fuzzy liberal Baldwin ranted in regard to Republican Henry Hyde, the Representative who led the impeachment hearings in the House:

"If we were living in another country, what we, all of us together, would go down to Washington and stone Henry Hyde to death, stone him to death, stone him to death! Then we would go to their house and we'd kill the family, kill the children."

Not to be outdone, alleged comedian Chris Rock announced, in 1999, "If Clinton would pardon me, I would whip [Independent Counsel Ken] Starr's ass right now. I will get a crew from Brooklyn and we will stomp him."

Apparently, liberals are authorized to call for acts of violence against specific politicians; they are permitted to traffic in nonsensical conspiracy theories and histrionic accusations of sitting presidents; and when their party wins an election, they acquire the moral authority to abjure these self-same antics as "hateful." Thus can an unhinged old man's act of violence be hung around the neck of anyone who dares to oppose the new administration's agenda. A new syllogism is emerging: "If you're not part of the Obama solution, you're part of the problem."

iPod, Real Headphones Obviate Need for Bus Suicide

2009-06-01T07:06:00.000-07:00

When it comes to technological gizmos, I'm not much of an enthusiast. I have a computer with Internet because modern life is too inconvenient to navigate without one; I have a cellphone, grudgingly, because it's the cheapest way I can make and get the calls I need; and I will sooner take up scrimshaw than shackle myself with a goddamned Blackberry or iPhone like every other DC office chattel who cherishes these electronic yokes.

But when Apple came out with its teeny, tiny iPod shuffle a couple years ago, I caved. Something the size of a matchbook that can hold a dozen albums worth of music? For $79? Where do I sign up?

So I put in my order before the new shuffle even came out. And for a while, I loved the novelty of so much music in such a handy little device. But then physical reality reasserted itself.

Because the ear pieces that come standard with an iPod almost negate the very concept of music as a pleasurable experience. They emit a tinny, buzzy tone, with no bass, and not very much treble either. Apparently Apple developed them to produce frequencies that only dogs can hear, except when you turn the volume up all the way, when they become all too audible to human ears. I heard that when water-boarding was outlawed at Guantanamo, the CIA switched over to interrogating terrorists by forcing them to listen to Kelly Clarkson on a maxed out iPod Touch with standard Apple ear buds.

And -- here the fault is mine -- I have never owned a decent pair of real headphones to pair with something like my oh-so-carryable iPod. This was a glaring oversight on my part, which I only very recently rectified with a pair of low-end Sony studio-quality phones, for the princely sum of $25. And suddenly, my iPod is worth owning. Not a moment too soon, either; if I hadn't dropped that $25 at Best Buy and dug my iPod out of storage this morning, I would not be here right now now to tell you about it. I would have killed myself while waiting for the 8:14 express bus to work this morning.

I ride the same bus to and from work every day, especially now that I've moved to an apartment located conveniently across the street from the bus stop. Because this is an express line with only a handful of buses during morning and evening rush hour, you tend to see the same faces every day. And mostly these faces belong to placid, mild-mannered commuters such as myself, who really like the fact that the bus requires half the time that the Metro ride would take, for about ten cents extra. We are mostly a quiet, unobtrusive lot. We smile and nod to one another; the more gregarious even carry on quiet conversations. In short, a bunch of decent office-bound creatures trying to get to and from our boring jobs as humanely as possible.

All of us, except one strident, shrill, oblivious wretch of a middle-aged woman who sometimes rides my bus. Without putting too fine a point on it, I hate this woman with unabashed passion. She is, without question, the most horrid human being I encounter in my day-to-day life, bar none.

She is the sort of person who must complain, loudly, about EVERYTHING, to ANYBODY who happens to be within earshot, myself included. If I encounter her at the bus stop in the summer, she tries to bitch to me about how hot it is; in the winter, how cold it is. She has demanded of me no fewer than 11 million times, in her harsh, nasal voice, "Are you waiting for the 11Y!?" You would think, after seeing me get on the 11Y bus 11 million times after seeing me waiting at a bus stop that says "11Y" she might put two and two together, but apparently she is too oblivious and self-centered to remember another human being for more than three consecutive seconds. On one of these occasions, after I affirmed that, Yes, just like every other 10,999,999 times you've asked me this, I am in fact waiting for the 11Y, she had the temerity to intone, in her sniveling, needy way, "It should come soon, right?" To which I calmly responded, "I'm sorry, but how in the name of Zeus' butthole do I know where, in this city of 45,000 motor vehicles, when accidents and presidential motorcades routinely stop traffic, the bus is?"

Last Friday after work, this woman, whom for convenience' sale I'll call Satan, clambered on to my bus just as I was thinking "Yes, Satan must have gotten the 5:05 today!" And for five solid minutes, she proceeded to badger the driver, and every single passenger, as to "Which bus this is." As in, "Is this the 5:05, or the 5:25, or the 5:40?" Never mind that this was the 5:25, right on time. Never mind that this woman rides these buses every day of her hideous life and should know the schedule. Never mind that the schedule is conveniently posted online. Never mind that SHE'S ALREADY ON THE BUS, WHICH IS ALL THAT MATTERS! For reasons of her own obsessive edification, Satan must know, NOW, which particular bus she is on, and she will not rest until she has withered the soul of every single occupant with her insipid prattle.

Suffice to say, this is not the sort of person whom Anton Chigurh would have offered a coin flip before deciding whether to kill her with his cattle gun.

So you can well imagine my reaction this morning, when who should saunter up to the stop, but Satan in all her frazzled, Monday morning glory. And when she proceeded to commence telling a fellow rider about some infraction that some occupant of her condo building had committed in the building's laundry room, in painstaking detail (among her other charming qualities, this woman despises everyone), I started reaching for my cyanide pill. On a beautiful Monday morning such as this, with the sun shining, the cool breeze blowing, and a long day of cubicle time ahead of me, this outpouring of petty, strident bile was just too much to bear. I was just putting the finishing mental touches on my epitaph, when I remembered: "My headphones! My iPod! Salvation!" Moments later, the soothing, dulcet tones of "Anything But This" blared in my ears, obliterating all other sound. And so I could go on living.

Thank you, Apple. Thank you, Sony.

And lest anyone think the hot, blinding rage Satan inspires in me is just a sign of what a crank I am, I received the following e-mail from my girlfriend, who rides the bus every morning with me, while I was writing this:

"That lady is horrible. Having had to listen/observe her nonsense for 25 minutes, I can say that I hate her. I left my stupid Ipod in my drawer here and I'm still mad at myself for it."

Judicial Nomination Guide: The Obama Calculus

2009-05-29T10:36:00.000-07:00

Note: The following is meant purely as a helpful guide to selecting nominees to the highest court in the land. A minimum of 10 points is required before you can declare a winning nominee.

If the candidate you are considering came from very humble economic origins, but went on to attend Ivy League universities, add two points.

If the candidate you are considering grew up in a single-parent household, add two points.

If the candidate's ethnicity coincides with an important ethnic demographic within your political party, add three points.

If the candidate possesses significant experience in the legal profession, add three points.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor's score of 10 points (2+2+3+3) thus qualifies her for nomination to the Supreme Court. Of course, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas also would score a 10 according to this rubric, as Kimberly Strassel notes in today's Wall Street Journal:

"Justice Thomas ... lost his father, and was raised by his mother in a rural Georgia town, in a shack without running water, until he was sent to his grandfather. The same Justice Thomas who had to work every day after school, though he was not allowed to study at the Savannah Public Library because he was black. The same Justice Thomas who became the first in his family to go to college and receive a law degree from Yale."

But then-candidate Obama had the following to say about Thomas last year:

"I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas. I don't think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation."

But bear in mind one final rule of the nomination calculus:

If the candidate in question satisfies all of the foregoing criteria but happens to believe that justice should be administered blindly, without "empathy" for particular litigants, based only on strict and narrow interpretations of the Constitution, subtract 11 points.

Thoughts on Bill Bryson

2009-04-09T17:05:00.000-07:00

This is apropos of nothing in particular, except that I just finished what I believe may be the last book by humorist-cum-travel writer Bill Bryson that I'd never read, except for one. And since the man has been entertaining me off and on for a goodly portion of my reading life, I feel like some sort of summing up is in order, if only for my own satisfaction.

Beginning with his account of a rambling trip around the Australian outback ("In a Sunburnt Country"), I've followed Bryson across three continents, plus an entire journey dedicated to Great Britain, and another that traversed much of the Appalachian Trail.

But he's considerably more than just a travel writer; perhaps his best work is "A Brief History of Nearly Everything," an ambitious and, overall, hugely successful attempt by a scientific layman to recount the history of almost all major scientific knowledge for a layperson audience, interspersed with biographical sketches of all the great, often bizarre, thinkers who made the most momentous contributions to science. (My personal favorite is his account of Sir Isaac Newton, who probed the bones in his skull behind his eyeball with a sharp knife with clinical detachment, but suffered no pain.)

I read Bryson's works largely out of order, but there's no particular reason not to do that. His account of a whirlwind tour across Europe from northernmost Scandanavia to Istanbul ("Neither Here nor There") was written a decade before the much more popular "A Walk in the Woods," but no matter. If anything, I've enjoyed picking up the various threads of an interesting man's life at different, haphazard intervals, skipping forwards and backwards in time. At any age and on any subject, Bryson is an engaging writer, and since he'd completed most of his work before I became aware of him, I've had the luxury of picking and choosing from a wide repertoire.

But whatever his subject matter, I ultimately read Bill Bryson because the man is a hoot. He has the wonderful ability both to find his way into absurd situations, particularly when traveling, and to appreciate the humor in those situations, even when at his own expense. For instance, in one memorable passage of his European tale, he blunders into an exorbitantly priced hotel in Gothenberg, but because he's too embarrassed to simply walk out upon hearing the outrageous rates, tries to seize on some supposed deficiency of the hotel as an excuse to find it unacceptable. Grilling the desk clerk, he inquires, "'I assume it has a private bath and color TV?'
'Of course.'
'Free shower cap?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Assortment of complimentary bath gels and unguents in a little wicker basket by the sink?'
'Certainly, sir.'
'Sewing kit? Trouser press?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Hair dryer?'
'Yes, sir.'
I played my trump card. 'Magic-wipe disposable shoe sponge?'
'Yes, sir.'
Shit."

Stymied, he took the room.

But this wouldn't be Jim Unfiltered if I didn't have bones to pick, and even a writer I enjoy as much as Bill Bryson has a flaw or two.

Actually, Bryson' s flaws really are few and far between, and I write this humble criticism largely as a genuflection to a writer I admire a great deal. But I will say this: After reading a small stack of his travel books, I cannot help but grow weary of a fair constantly stream of griping about the expensiveness of the hotels he stays in and the restaurants where he dines. Granted, in a pure travel guide, notes about logistical costs of a given destination figure prominently; vacations are always an exercise in cost/benefit analysis, and so readers need a Fodors or similar guidebook to plan ahead.

But Bryson isn't Fodors. He doesn't write to advise readers where to stay or what restaurant to avoid. He writes to describe the places he visits, so that a job-bound reader with no prospect of going on his own grand tour of Europe can at least get a flavor of the experience and understand why it's worthwhile. So to have a very amusing writer forever interrupting his own amusing narrative with complaints about the high costs of traveling wears a bit thin after a while. To be able to travel widely and then get complete strangers to pay to read your descriptions afterwards is something of a luxury, one that Bryson doesn't seem to fully appreciate. At some point reading "Neither Here nor There" on a commuter train on the way to my office cubicle, I remember thinking, "Yes, too bad you had to buy all those expensive beers in Copenhagen before flying off to Italy. I feel for you."

Occasionally, this lack of awareness translates into a certain political myopia. Bryson forever laments the demise of old, medieval architecture in Europe and its replacement by ugly modernity. While I sympathize on aesthetic grounds, I can't help but notice a certain latent, "There ought to be a law against things I don't like" sort of authoritarianism lurking between the lines. For a man clearly well-versed in history, he doesn't seem to have gathered that human beings have been building things and tearing them down to build new things for about as long as we've been walking on our hind legs.

And it was with a certain amount of shock that I read this commentary on the fall of Communism in Europe, at the end of his chapter on Bulgaria, which he visited in 1990:

"[I]t seemed strange to me that in all the words written about the fall of Iron Curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment. I know that communism never worked, and I would have disliked living under it myself, but nonetheless it seemed there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self-interest and greed."

An intelligent, learned man ought to know better than to call the Soviet empire, which killed or impoverished countless millions, a "noble experiment."

But I'll forgive him these foibles, because for the most part, Bill Bryson is a lively, hugely informative writer with a great eye for detail and at least one good laugh per page. It is with real sadness that I realize how the bulk of his writing is no longer new to me, though rereading most of it will probably prove a solid consolation.

In Which I Defeat Lyndon LaRouche by Default

2009-04-08T16:54:00.000-07:00

Perhaps this anecdote is amusing. Or maybe it's just lurid.

Yesterday afternoon found me not at work, but at the Virginia Motor Vehicles service center in Alexandria, replacing my drivers license after an unfortunate mishap permanently separated me from my wallet. Though I rushed in 40 minutes before closing time with visions of stony-faced, callous DMV staffers explaining in excruciating detail why my seven alternate forms of identification were insufficient to replace my license, I met with the pleasant surprise of actually receiving a new one with astonishing speed and efficiency. Government bureaucracies everywhere, take note: The Alexandria, VA DMV has shown you the way.

So, walking out, I can perhaps be forgiven for feeling light-hearted, a tad giddy, and even charitable. Charitable enough that when a middle-aged man in geeky aviator glasses who was handing out some sort of political pamphlet outside the DMV exit collared me and launched into his inevitable diatribe against somebody or other, I indulged him and listened.

Try as I might, I can't help feeling sorry for these people, whom you see all too often in the DC area; they're just so earnest and dedicated, they'll actually attempt to get perfect strangers to join their righteous cause. They just have a certain lonely, pathetic air about them that makes it difficult to not feel a slight twinge of pity. And this particular speciman had clearly been standing there all day in the cold wind with no success.

About 20 seconds into his canned speech, I gathered that the guy was raising money for Lyndon LaRouche. The same Lyndon LaRouche who's been running for president in every election since before I was born; the same Lyndon LaRouche who espouses an ambiguous blend of FDR-style big government but has incurred accusations of anti-semitism, Soviet-backed treason and all sorts of other weird charges. Prior to yesterday, I knew the following about LaRouche: He's a perennial feature of fringe American politics, he's sort of a crank with a cult following, and he's not to be taken seriously.

So I listened politely for five minutes, nodded sympatheticly, and even accepted a profferred sheaf of LaRouche screeds. But when the punchline came -- "How much would you like to donate?" -- I had to demur. Sorry, I said, but I just don't think LaRouche's political positions mesh with mine very well (though apparently we both think western civilization is in mortal danger at the moment).

And that's when my interlocutor lost the argument I didn't know I was having. In a classic case of Godwin's law, he called me a Nazi, thus, according to one popular formulation of the law, forfeiting any claim to a reasonable position by virtue of rhetorical name-calling. And all because I disagreed with his, and Lyndon LaRouche's, ardent demand for a new New Deal, which apparently anyone who's not a Nazi knows is exactly what our country needs right now. Had he accused me of KKK membership, I would have been no less astounded.

Perhaps he was just a coherent lunatic whom I made the mistake of listening to. Or perhaps there is a running tide of political polarization sweeping this country, one that teaches people to reflexively hate any opponent without regard for rational thought, and this was merely the first wave lapping at my feet. Optimist that I am, I'm going to assume the former. At least until my socks feel wet.

Thoughts on Mumbai

2008-12-03T18:53:00.000-08:00

Of all the holidays we in the U.S. celebrate, can any of them compare to Thanksgiving for pure hedonism? The historical significance of the occasion notwithstanding, for most people, Thanksgiving is a great excuse to have a long weekend, eat and drink to extreme excess, and then hit the malls for the frenzied start of the Christmas shopping season.

This year, Thanksgiving was no different, except for a jarring reminder from the other side of the world that life is not necessarily as comfortable and safe as the holidays usually make us feel. While a few hundred million Americans blissfully overate and then retired to their sofas to watch some mediocre football, a handful of armed militants -- all of them likely Muslims from Pakistan -- went on a killing spree in Mumbai and murdered almost 200 civilians before police finally killed or captured them.

While disturbing, the sad truth is that events such as this one aren't totally unsurprising. But that's all the more reason to reflect at some length on the Mumbai killings; they were not the first, and they will not be the last. And I see no reason why the next bloodbath can't take place in New York, or Omaha, or Richmond.

Probably the most obvious, visceral question to ask when an atrocity like this happens is: Why? Why would 10 young men infiltrate a foreign city and proceed to murder scores of innocent people they never met before? For that matter, why did two dozen young men hijack airplanes and crash them into skyscrapers? The latter is the question shocked Americans asked after 9/11, and except for the specific numbers, locations and means of assault, it's the same question many more people are asking now.

Unfortunately, the answer isn't obvious, at least to me. If it was pure homicidal mania, I could understand, to the extent that insanity can be understood at all. But I'm fairly certain these young Pakistani guys who shot tourists for being American, or Jewish, or just shot people for the sake of shooting them weren't insane in the clinical sense. Neither were the 9/11 hijackers. The stock answer that I think most Americans would give, then, boils down to "They just hate us." No doubt they do, but it takes more than pure hate to motivate a normal human being to commit mass murder.

So the conclusion I have to draw is that there was some sort of point to this carnage, that these terrorists were trying to accomplish something beyond the bloodshed they wrought. What that might be, I don't profess to know. Inflame tensions between India and Pakistan -- both technically American allies -- to force the U.S. to come down on Pakistan and wreck the ongoing campaign against the Taliban in that country? Force India to consider negotiating the status of the predominantly Muslim state of Kashmir? Something entirely different? I don't know.

The "why" matters, but it's elusive. Equally important though is the more pragmatic question: How do we respond to such barbarism? I won't claim to know that either, but I do know how not to react. To figure this out, all I had to do was read The New York Times' editorial on the killings, which demonstrated just how dangerous the road to political correctness can be. The Times does not ask why the Mumbai attackers did what they did, but rather, The Times asks why the Indian government allowed them to do it:

"How can their government have ignored the warning signs? A 2007 report to Parliament warned that the country’s shores were poorly protected — and some or all of the attackers arrived by boat. Why weren’t the police and the army better prepared to respond?"

Implicit in these questions is the attitude that, like hurricanes and earthquakes, terrorist attacks just happen. And because they happen, governments -- including the Indian government -- have a responsibility to respond to them as effectively as possible. The culpability of the terrorists for their actions is completely absent, as if they're just as mindless as Hurricane Katrina.

Do we really live in such a debased age that a major newspaper like The New York Times can't muster some genuine horror, and anger, that armed savages took advantage of a free, open society to commit murder? To put it bluntly, where's the outrage?

Mumbai symbolizes much that modern liberalism claims to value: multiculturalism, freedom of religion, democracy, commerce, tolerance, and on a basic level, the freedom to come and go as one pleases. All of this was exploited and attacked by a small group of people who prefer an unfree, intolerant, bigoted society, but liberal bastions like The Times can't bring themselves to acknowledge this clash, because doing so comes dangerously close to passing judgment on a culture. So in the name of cultural sensitivity, fanatical Islamism must be treated as a sort of natural disaster, with no blame to assign, except for the negligent governments that don't get out of the path of the storm.

Seven years ago, when the 9/11 attacks finally woke Americans up to the fact that Al Qaeda had been at war with their country for years, the outrage wasn't lacking. Almost to a man, the country was shocked and justly furious that someone could commit that sort of wanton violence. Have we really changed so much since then? When only 170 people are killed instead of 3,000, do we take it in stride, especially when it happened in a different hemisphere?

The issue of how to respond to this and future attacks is indeed complicated, with no clear course of action in sight. But the immediate, gut-level reaction is, or ought to be, very simple. Reality dictates that cities in India, America and elsewhere develop strategies for responding to terror, but the fact that they have to should never stop appalling us.

Government 4.0

2008-11-22T05:43:00.000-08:00

File this one under "aimless musings."

Having recently read an op-ed by David Brooks extolling the academic credentials of President-Elect Obama's metastasizing administration got me to thinking of something a good (and fellow-libertarian) friend of mine observed not too long ago about the Republican Party with George Bush at the helm. In essence, he noted that one of the most troubling aspects of Bush-style Republicanism is a certain repudiation of all things intellectual, in favor of governance by determination alone. I don't recall the exact circumstances, but didn't Bush famously sneer at a reporter as an "egghead" when he worked some passable French into a question he posed at a presidential press conference a while back?

Even if apocryphal, the image makes for good symbolism. The hallmark of Bush's tenure has been the attitude that government policy, especially foreign policy, ought to be forceful, direct and unwavering. Decisive action is a virtue, whereas long-winded theorizing and analysis, replete with all those annoying "What if" questions, is a hindrance to getting things done.

So not surprisingly, the largely liberal intellectual establishment is cheering Barack Obama for all the smart, academically polished people with whom he is populating his cabinet and administration. As Brooks notes with approval, virtually all of his supporting cast hails from hallowed Ivy League universities, with even an Oxford grad thrown in for good measure. As Brooks says, "This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs."

So why can't my inner geek get excited, after eight years of get-er-done governance?

It's not because I doubt that Obama, his advisers and his future cabinet members are intelligent people (how intelligent is a different story). Much as I believe that degrees from Yale, Harvard and their ilk can be overrated and overblown, I still harbor ample respect for a collection of people who could hack it at institutions where my application would have been used for scratch paper by admissions officers.

So I guess my unease has more to do with the limits of intelligence itself, and the difference between intelligence and wisdom. Because these days especially, with the economy in a worsening recession, there are calls from all sides for the new administration to "do something" to make it all better. As I noted in an earlier post, liberal columnist Bob Herbert wants a "tough" and "very, very smart" plan to save the Detroit Big Three automakers. Twit though he is, at least Herbert has the humility not to try to write that plan himself. Instead, he wants the smart kids to do it. And therein lies my worry.

I believe there are essentially two ways to view what's happening in our present economy. There is the enlightened liberal position that government must take certain actions to bring us out of this recession; and there is the competing position, that try though it might, the government can't save the day, and that we as a country are best off simply weathering the storm. The first view is predicated on the notion that if you get enough "very, very smart" people together in a room and tell them to solve a problem, they'll drink a lot of caffeine, stay up very late, and eventually find the solution. The second position is rooted in a much more pragmatic world-view, in which bad things sometimes happen and there's nothing anyone can do to change that.

Consider the implications of the "we can fix it" position: If it's possible for a government of very smart, very earnest people to design and implement policies that can end a recession, doesn't that imply that bad economic times can actually be warded off before they arrive? More simply, if it's possible to fix something that's broken, shouldn't it logically follow that the damage can be averted in the first place? If so, that would imply that, in theory, recessions are all avoidable.

I'm sorry, but I'm just too much of an empiricist to buy this Utopian vision. If life has taught me nothing else, it's that bad things sometimes happen. And just because there are comprehensible causes of those bad things, this does not mean we can head them off at the pass. After this recession, a lot of economists will no doubt study the factors that gave birth to it and get the postmortem right; however, this does not in any way imply that anybody can solve the problem in the present tense.

But do Barack Obama and his advisers know this? After all, we are talking about a group of people who are accustomed to succeeding at mental challenges, and the mindset that engenders does not lend itself to intellectual humility. Years spent integrating Taylor series and receiving high marks on term papers at the most prestigious universities in the world can go a long way toward convincing an intelligent person that there's nothing he doesn't know or can't figure out. And with the pro-Obama press clamoring for his administration to get to work "fixing" the economy, we are already hearing assurances that they have all the answers.

Such confidence frightens me. Consider: In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt took office and appointed "whiz kid" technocrats to combat the Great Depression. His administration was nothing if not energetic and well-intentioned, but six years later, the country was still mired in depression. Can Obama's Ivy Leaguers succeed where they failed? Or will they approach today's crisis with the humility that comes from recognizing their limitations as imperfect human beings?

Or more abstractly, have they considered the possibility that this is not a test, and there are no right answers?

Champions of Failure

2008-11-15T17:30:00.000-08:00

I tried to have a pleasant, relaxing Saturday. I really, really tried. All was going well, up until about two minutes ago, when I read this op-ed in today's New York Times by Bob Herbert. And that's when my heretofore enjoyable day went completely off the rails. Just knowing that perhaps the most influential newspaper in the country employs someone as intellectually threadbare and vapid as Bob Herbert to write a twice-weekly opinion column fills me with despair.

To get right to it: In case you live under a rock, America's automakers, which have been on the decline for years due to high costs and a reputation for making bad cars, are now seriously flirting with actual bankruptcy. Particularly GM, which announced just recently that it is losing money at the rate of about $2 billion a month. At this pace, the company projects that it could be out of cash and in bankruptcy court by early in 2009. So naturally, GM is doing what every troubled business enterprise does these days: Demand a federal bailout. In GM's case, such a bailout would come in the form of a $25 billion (for starters) loan from the government.

It now appears that Democrats lack the support to pass such a loan, until the new Congress convenes in January, so at least for the time being, this latest transfer of losses from the private sector to the taxpayers is on hold. And much to the chagrin of Bob Herbert, who, as usual, knows just how our economy ought to be structured. Sniffs Herbert:

"If G.M., which is on life support, or Ford or Chrysler were to go bankrupt, the reverberations would kill the jobs of entire armies of American workers. It would undermine the standard of living of hundreds of thousands of families and shutter the entrances of untold numbers of small and intermediate businesses."

To stave off this potential economic nightmare, Herbert would have the federal government step in to instruct GM, which has been in the business of selling automobiles for exactly 100 years, on how to build cars people actually want. The Treasury would open its bottomless pockets yet again to lend GM however many billions it needs, but with conditions. In Herbert's own words: "That means dragging the industry (kicking and screaming, no doubt) into the 21st century by insisting on ironclad commitments to design and develop vehicles that make sense economically and that serve the nation’s long-term energy security requirements." (Italics mine.)

Is the man serious? In a single sentence, he proposes that the government force a for-profit company to operate profitably, AND serve the "nation's long-term energy security requirements." Does he really believe that GM's management hasn't been trying to make money all this time, and that a government-appointed technocrat will succeed where a once-mighty industrial giant has failed? Earth to Bob Herbert: If a group of people who've spent their entire careers trying to make money building and selling cars can no longer do it, the federal government is not going to lead them back to profitability.

And how about that "serve the nation" business? Is Mr. Herbert aware that the political system in which government coerces nominally private companies into "serving the nation" by building what the government decrees is called "fascism"?

So, allow me to offer a competing analysis (a very short one, I promise) of GM's woes: GM is a massive company with too many brands, too many dealerships, too many employees and prohibitively costly labor agreements. GM workers earn, between wages, pension and health care benefits, upwards of $70 an hour, whereas nonunionized workers at Japanese car plants located in the U.S. make considerably less (though by no means poorhouse wages). In recent years, GM, like the other two Detroit car makers, has depended heavily on SUV and truck sales to stay afloat, and demand for those highly profitable vehicles is evaporating.

In other words, GM's problems are structural, long-term problems that cannot be fixed by anything short of a major overhaul. And this is exactly what bankruptcy is designed to promote. Bankruptcy would allow GM to renegotiate the impossibly high wages it pays employees, sell off production facilities and entire brands to eliminate dead weight, and begin the painful process of scaling itself back down to a manageable-sized company that can compete with foreign rivals. Bankruptcy does NOT mean that all of a sudden, poof, no more GM, as Bob Herbert implies with all his doomsday scenarios. In recent years, US Airways, United Airlines and Delta all declared bankruptcy; surely he's noticed that those companies still exist today, right?

And really, what alternative to bankruptcy can Herbert offer? Well, here it is, in his own words: "The government should craft a rescue plan that is both tough and very, very smart." So let me see if I have this straight, Bob: Your plan is for someone else to come up with a good plan?

Good plan.

A Bear Market for Liberty?

2008-10-28T17:34:00.000-07:00

As I was reminded by a random commenter on a recent blog post, there is no shortage of people in this country with irrational and absurd notions as to how our society and its economy "ought" to be structured. And as a rule of thumb, I try not to pay them much heed. One of the greatest things about this great country of ours is that everybody has the constitutional right to say whatever they please, without fear of legal retribution. But the unspoken corollary to that freedom is that no one is obligated to listen, thank God.

However, when influential people with irrational and absurd notions of how our economy "ought" to be structured have certain powerful congressmen nodding in agreement, I tend to sit up and take note. And such is the case right now. Lost in all the sound and fury over the looming election and the plunging economy is a proposal -- currently winning some powerful converts on Capitol Hill -- that would fundamentally alter the way most Americans save and invest for their retirement years.

Economist Teresa Ghilarducci of the New School for Social Research has lately been promoting a plan to scrap the current system of allowing workers to shelter a portion of their income from taxes by investing it in a 401(k) or company-sponsored pension plan, and replace it with a government-run system in which all workers must participate by contributing at least 5 percent of their paycheck. In return, they'd receive an annual tax credit of $600, and a "guaranteed" return on their retirement savings of 3 percent, adjusted for inflation. Are we having fun yet?

The rationale for this not-so-subtle abrogation of personal freedom and choice is multifaceted, and deserving of at least a little consideration. First and foremost, such a plan would end the "subsidy" that 401(k) and pension plan contributions receive by virtue of their tax-exempt status. Ms. Ghilarducci -- who apparently cannot sleep at night knowing that somewhere, someone is not paying taxes on some of their income -- claims that this tax exemption costs the federal government $80 billion in lost revenue each year. (Just for context, this figure represents about 2.5 percent of the current federal budget.)

But more important than the added tax revenue, the Ghilarducci plan would "guarantee" an after-inflation return of 3 percent on workers' accounts, to guard against plummets in the stock market, such as the current one that's got so many workers nervous about their pensions and 401(k)'s these days. In a comment that deserves serious consideration for "Most Fatuous Statement of the Century," Ghilarducci notes that, "These last three weeks people are learning their 401(k) plans can go down." Who knew!

So, rather than allowing workers to choose whether and to what degree to participate in a company-sponsored retirement plan, and in the case of 401(k)'s, to choose what type and risk-level of assets to invest in, Teresa Ghilarducci would like to make that choice for you. Or rather, she'd like to abolish choice and turn your retirement fate over to the Social Security Administration. To make good on that guaranteed 3 percent return her plan promises, the government would invest workers' money in the only asset that can plausibly guarantee any level of return: government bonds!

So what sets this particular know-it-all economist apart from all the other self-proclaimed geniuses who would like to be running our lives? Well, in this case, a federal audience. George Miller of California and Jim McDermott of Washington, both Democrats in the House of Representatives, invited Ms. Ghilarducci to pitch her plan to their respective committees, and apparently they both like what they heard. McDermott's press secretary said the idea "Certainly is intriguing." No legislation is pending, but with both houses of Congress and the presidency all but certain to be in Democratic hands this January, there's really no need to rush.

And just think of it! Hundreds of millions of workers becoming more dependent on the federal government for their basic quality of life! Trillions of dollars currently locked up in pensions and 401(k)'s that will suddenly become available to finance the trillion-dollar annual deficits the government is expected to run starting next year! What isn't there for a big-government liberal to love?

To be sure, the last couple of months have served as a wake-up call to anyone who thought that investing in the stock market is a can't-miss proposition. Unfortunately, this is leading quite a few people to the very worst conclusion; namely, that the unavoidable risk that comes with any aspect of human existence serves as a justification to banish risk by government fiat, and that personal responsibility is trumped by promises of security.

"What people want from their pensions is guaranteed income for life,"Ghilarducci says. Actually, there is no end to what people probably want. As my favorite high school teacher taught me long ago, economics is the study of allocating finite resources among infinite desires. Unfortunately, modern liberalism has degenerated into the business of denying the former by pandering to the latter.

Post script: I employed a 401(k) calculator to determine whether a 25-year-old worker with zero savings and an income of $50,000 per year would be better off with a guaranteed return of 3 percent above inflation or the average stock market return of 7 percent above inflation, aided by the standard 50 percent match that most companies offer on employees' first 6 percent of income. The score after 35 years: $859,086.47 for the 401(k) and $286,927.89 for Ms. Ghilarducci.

Airbrushing a Crisis

2008-10-15T17:13:00.000-07:00

"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."
~Eric Blair, aka George Orwell

I don't believe I'm going out on a limb in saying that there are at present a number of troubling and unsettling currents permeating the media and the national consciousness in general. Read any newspaper, watch any news program, or talk to anybody even remotely abreast of current events, and you're likely to encounter a competing host of negative sentiments: unease, or perhaps outright fear, over the state of our teetering economy and still-falling stock markets; apprehension about the upcoming presidential election and what the outcome will mean for all of us; and in general, a certain dread as to what the immediate and distant future will bring to a country that already believes itself to be on the wrong track. And marching in lockstep with the advancing malaise comes a growing interest in blame: blame for our present woes, and the parties who deserve it.

Liberal politicians and influential opinion-shapers didn't have to look very far for the villain responsible for failing banks and plunging 401(k) portfolios. Free-market capitalism has been caught red-handed, they announce;all those misguided theories about deregulated markets and laissez-faire economics have delivered us unto the brink of disaster and now deserve the intellectual equivalent of euthanasia. Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post makes the case for the prosecution with as much self-assured rectitude as the most zealous Marxist: "What exactly do economic conservatives believe now that their god is dead? What's become of the glories of privatized Social Security? Of the merits of 401(k)s vs. defined-benefit pensions?"

His prose might border on the florid, but Meyerson is representative of the entire political Left, which has already delivered a guilty verdict in the case against capitalism. Wealthy Wall Street hucksters, the popular narrative runs, spent years trafficking in shoddy mortgage-backed investments they either didn't understood, or understood to be junk, eager only to cash in before the bottom fell out. And now, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down a tidy 6,000 points or so since last year, the bottom has well and truly fallen out. The agreed-upon catalyst in this version of the story -- the recent collapse of the housing market -- was all that was required to bring the whole shaky edifice down.

It all makes for compelling op-ed pieces, and it almost certainly guarantees that the liberal intelligentsia's political champion will ascend to the presidency this fall, but something is missing. Lost in all the recriminations over who's to blame and the ominous rumbles about nationalizing banks is a question that isn't being asked. Why exactly did the housing market, which had been red-hot for so many years, start to crater recently? And why were there so many of these so-called "toxic" mortgage-backed securities for Wall Street vandals to dabble in? The answer calls the popular narrative vilifying capitalism into question, and might spread the blame around a bit more evenly.

In 1999, long before anyone had heard of "collateralized debt obligations" or "asset-backed securities" or any of the other wreckage that litters today's financial landscape, The New York Times printed a brief article that today sounds stunning, and even chilling, in its prediction of things to come. It's short, it's comprehensible, and I implore anyone interested in understanding today's crisis to read it.

The upshot: that government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac deliberately steered billions of dollars in mortgage financing to risky borrowers, with potentially ruinous implications: "In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's." And one Peter Wallison, of the unabashedly free-market American Enterprise Institute, anticipated the consequences with remarkably acuity: ''From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us ... If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.'' Nine years later, Fannie and Freddie failed, the government had to bail them out, and taxpayers are left with the bill.

I offer this quick trip back in time not as a categorical refutation of the charges that unchecked, capitalist greed is at the root of all our troubles, but simply as a reason to stop and think. Anyone who tries to sell you a quick and easy explanation of an economic recession or a financial crisis, with well-defined villains and heroes, is offering a false bill of goods. Times such as these call for honest historical inquiry into the roots of the problem, not political witch trials seeking scapegoats. A decade ago, at least a few prescient observers saw the seeds of today's crisis taking root, and they discerned the unmistakable influence of government at work in the sewing. Consider this the next time you hear some demagogue of the Left try to take ownership of the past while doling out damnation in the present.

Turn On, Tune In, Bail Out

2008-10-01T07:28:00.000-07:00

I started this blog principally because I figured it would allow me to pontificate on a wide range of subjects, unfettered by any sort of self-avowed focus or specialty. But now I'm worried that it's rapidly devolving into a simple vehicle for defaming Thomas Friedman of The New York Times opinion page. I swear, when I started out, I had a broader, more diverse mission in mind. But the man leaves me little choice.

Writing in today's Times, Friedman does an absolutely brilliant job of distilling all the myth, posturing and outright stupidity swirling around the ongoing financial crisis into one compact, easy-to-read trope on the need for a massive government bailout of Wall Street. By all means, read his argument in its entirety. But here's all you really need to hear:

"I’ve been frightened for my country only a few times in my life: In 1962, when, even as a boy of 9, I followed the tension of the Cuban missile crisis; in 1963, with the assassination of J.F.K.; on Sept. 11, 2001; and on Monday, when the House Republicans brought down the bipartisan rescue package.

"But this moment is the scariest of all for me because the previous three were all driven by real or potential attacks on the U.S. system by outsiders. This time, we are doing it to ourselves. This time, it’s our own failure to regulate our own financial system and to legislate the proper remedy that is doing us in."

In recent weeks, I've heard much foolishness and scare-mongering spouted about the current credit freeze-up and the concomitant panic on Wall Street, but for sheer idiocy, Mr. Friedman takes the cake. In what appears to be utter seriousness, he announces that the Cuban missile crisis, the JFK assassination and September 11 all pale in comparison to the recent convulsions in the financial sector. Just as a quick history refresher, he is talking about, respectively, the closest we ever came to full-scale war with a nuclear super-power, the public murder of the leader of the free world, and an unprecedented terrorist attack that killed 3,000 people and changed our way of life.

In case you were seeking anecdotal evidence of this country's staggering intellectual decline, look no further. That a man who could say something so patently stupid is paid to write a weekly column for the most prestigious newspaper in the country speaks volumes. But I wasn't looking for proof of what I already know, that Thomas Friedman is a boob. I read his column regularly, out of a certain morbid fascination, so he can no longer surprise me. I highlight his piece only because it provides such an excellent example of everything wrong with the popular analysis of the "crisis" on Wall Street, and with the solution to that crisis being championed by a political elite that claims to know what's best for the economy.

For the sake of context, here's the condensed version of how we supposedly came to the brink of this financial Waterloo, and the remedy we're told we must enact: Over the past several years, various banks and other financial institutions invested huge amounts of money in new-fangled assets consisting of many home mortgages "bundled" together. They turned out to be a risky investment, but because the government failed to regulate the buying and selling of these assets, an investment bubble was permitted to grow, and when the housing market started going south a couple years ago, the bubble burst. So now we must allow the government to spend $700 billion buying up those risky investments so banks will regain the confidence to start lending again. If we fail to do this, we risk a complete halt to lending, which will send the economy into a deep recession.

But some people aren't convinced of the veracity of this narrative, as evidenced by the House of Representatives' vote against the bailout this past Monday, which evoked shrieks from Thomas Friedman's ilk, accusing the House Republicans that voted against the bill of betraying the country in its time of great need (but not the House Democrats who voted against, curiously). Dissenting Republicans said, in effect, that they simply cannot spend this massive sum of public money on a bailout for a financial industry that did so much to bring on its own destruction, and that government has no authority to influence the economy on this scale. Two days later, I'm still waiting to hear a cogent, rational refutation of this argument.

Instead, all I hear is grand-standing and more fear-mongering from backers of the bailout, who scream ever louder that failing to act will bring about a second Great Depression. For evidence, they point to Monday's collapse in the stock market, which immediately followed the no-vote in the House. How's that for specious reasoning? "We promised markets that we'd fix this mess for them, and then we didn't fix it, and the markets dropped! That's why we have to fix the mess!"

This is the best example yet of what economists call "moral hazard," the notion that if you provide individuals or companies with the incentive to behave badly, they will do so. By announcing that the government can and will fix this huge mess, banks and other firms can shunt all responsibility onto the government. Rather than absorb losses, declare bankruptcy or sell out to solvent institutions, they can simply wait around for the government to cure their financial problems. With a blank check in the offing, none of them will resume normal lending until that check clears, and so the self-fulfilling prophecy of a crisis comes to fruition.

Such counter-productive incentives have motivated every stage of this ongoing situation, from the creation of two government-backed entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- designed to encourage loans to many people who shouldn't have qualified for them -- to the absurdly low interest rates the Federal Reserve fostered after the last recession to encourage more lending than was healthy, to previous government bailouts of individual firms, which sent the message that if you incur big losses, the feds will take the hit for you. To make a long story short: If you encourage individuals and companies to borrow and lend more money than they have, you will eventually provoke a lending crisis.

But as Thomas Friedman makes abundantly clear, the past doesn't matter. Don't ask how we got to this situation in the first place; don't ask whether a really big bailout will succeed where smaller ones simply made the situation worse; and don't question the assumption that the present problem is always the worst problem ever. Simply yell your nostrums louder, and keep scaring people with doomsday predictions until you get your way.

As every high school civics student knows, it's illegal to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater. But there are no such restrictions on doing it from the editorial pages of an august newspaper.

When Green Means "Stop"

2008-09-24T16:57:00.000-07:00

In case my humble little blog happens to be inaugurating your return to the Internet after a very long coma, I have a heads-up for you: There's a presidential election in less than six weeks. For everyone else, this is probably not news, considering the permanent news cycle the modern media operates on to feed Americans' insatiable appetite for political punditry. And if you've so much as glanced at a newspaper, a political talk show or any of the three billion Web sites where jerks like me profess to have something important to say, you already can sense that this election promises to be close, hard-fought and nasty. True believers on the left have turned the Obama campaign into a cult following while his detractors hate him enough to rally around former beauty pageant runner-up Sarah Palin, the anti-Obama if ever there was one, as our country takes another step down the dark path of complete political polarization.

But is all the divisiveness really justified? Are the two candidates so night-and-day, so black-and-white that battle lines must be drawn all across our fractured union? Because at least on one issue, Obama and McCain share a great deal of common ground: the trifling little flap over global warming.

While they differ on certain details, Obama and McCain both favor implementation of a cap-and-trade system to gradually reduce U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases to levels consistent with what scientists claim are necessary to ward off the specter of global warming. (In a cap-and-trade regimen, the "right" to emit greenhouse gases is effectively rationed, and over time, the rations become smaller, requiring increasing cuts in emissions.) So whoever wins in November, it's a safe bet that there's going to be a radical overhaul of how our energy sector supplies the electricity that does so much to distinguish our society from the Stone Age.

Which ought to cause everyone a fair amount of concern, because it's already apparent how difficult this green remedy will be to implement, for the very simple reason that clean energy does not grow on trees, so the more of it we are required to produce, the greater the challenge will become. In an excellent piece of reporting today, The New York Times runs down the major reasons why coal, the dirtiest fuel for power plants and the biggest single cause of CO2 emissions in this country, is so central to our present economy, and why so few viable alternatives to coal are available. Nuclear plants? No emissions, but expensive and time-consuming to build. Oil? Too expensive to compete with coal, not especially green. Natural gas? Much cleaner, but in short supply.

So one might be forgiven for celebrating a little bit at the news that lots of utility companies and venture capitalists are rushing to build power plants that turn free, abundant sunshine into clean electricity. In the very next article on this page, The Times reports the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has received applications to build enough solar power plants to replace 70 (!) coal-burning plants across the country, particularly in southern California. If you're looking for a solution to the climate crisis that environmentalists have been scaring us with for years, this looks like a pretty good one: a renewable energy source with no emissions and builders lining up to get cracking. Huzzah!

But wait. I don't know if The Times deliberately places these stories side by side for the sake of irony, but there's a sickening amount of it. Because the real story of these solar saviors is the tremendous opposition to them being mounted by local environmentalist groups who fear that, among other ecological calamities, the Mojave ground squirrel and the desert tortoise might be displaced by all the mirrors and photo-voltaic cells.

Let that sink in for a moment. Amid the deafening clamor for solutions to what is being billed as a crisis that could do incalculable damage to the entire globe, a crisis that has sufficiently galvanized public opinion that both presidential candidates call for sweeping solutions, a tiny little cadre of the environmentalist movement is saying, "Not on my jojoba farm, and not if the Mojave ground squirrel and I have anything to say about it." In response to state regulators and utilities who are desperate to find energy sources to meet California's stringent renewable energy quotas, these squirrel activists want to keep "big solar" out, presumably so they can continue communing with the Earth Spirit in their unspoiled desert Eden.

Their solution? Build little solar panels somewhere else, on someone else's roof, through government subsidies paid for by someone else. (The Times notes, in excellent "just the facts, ma'am" style, that it will take a century for small, inefficient rooftop solar panels to provide enough electricity to meet the state's renewable quota coming up in 2010.) It's almost comical, except that this little farce in the desert serves as an excellent harbinger of just how acrimonious cap-and-trade might turn out, in no small part because certain elements of the green movement are completely intolerant of any human activity that sullies any small corner of the world's ecosystem. These high priests of the biosphere have effectively decreed that energy must be clean and have zero impact on all the species and habitats they hold dear. Any proposal that falls short of this lofty standard is rejected on the grounds of sacrilege.

And lest I start to sound like a villain in a "Captain Planet" episode, I ought to mention that I have no particular beef with the Mojave ground squirrels, and that I'd rather they go on about their squirrelish affairs in peace. But I see no reason why they can't, considering that companies that lease acres in the desert for erecting solar panels have to purchase three times as much acreage for conservation purposes. I ask only that certain environmentalists get serious about this looming climate crisis they dread so much, and recognize that the solution they've championed is going to be costly for everyone. Physics only offers us a limited array of solutions to combat global warming, and they all come with a price tag. Even the Mojave ground squirrel needs to pitch in.

Safety First! (And Last, and Always)

2008-09-10T08:14:00.000-07:00

I realize that it's become almost a cliche to bemoan the machinations of safety nazis, those crusading do-gooders who wish to see every action, substance or thought deemed unhealthy or dangerous banned by government fiat. Serious social commentators and stand-up comedians alike have been seizing on nanny-state rules like mandatory bike helmets and the hysteria over second-hand smoke for years, and it's become a tired routine. Meanwhile, the protect-yourself-from-yourself movement advances apace. The freedom to smoke a cigarette in a bar is rapidly disappearing, and in places like New York City, mentally sound, responsible adults can no longer choose whether to eat food cooked with trans fats, because the city has thoughtfully made the choice for them by banning trans fats in all restaurants.

That being said, a new call to further suppress individual freedom in the name of safety has recently come to my attention, quite by chance. It is neither a genuinely new nor different idea; sadly, it's only too representative of the creeping mindset that people must be coerced into doing what's best for them. I highlight it only because it provides such an astonishingly frank glimpse into a philosophical quagmire afflicting modern society, and its logical consequences.

In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, Kent Sepkowitz illustrates why medical professionals should not be permitted to make transportation policy. If you're the impatient type, allow me to summarize his argument: Thousands of people die in automobile accidents every year, and many of those accidents are the result of speeding, and since motorists continue to speed in spite of preventive measures like speeding tickets, new cars should be physically prevented from exceeding 75 miles per hour by the installation of speed-governing technology.

Of course, one could write for pages about possible flaws in the soundness and validity of this argument. One could, for instance, point out that in Germany, the rate of vehicle fatalities on the notorious autobahn (much of which has no speed limit), as measured in deaths per billion kilometers driven, is substantially lower than on other German roads with slower traffic speeds. Or one could note that in 2007, Utah and Vermont recorded the exact same number of deaths per 100 million miles driven (1.11), despite the fact that Utah's highway speed limit is 75 mph, whereas Vermonters are limited to 65 mph. Or one could simply pose a hypothetical question: Which is more dangerous, driving 60 mph on a quiet residential street where the posted limit is 25, or driving 80 mph on a deserted interstate highway?

These are all reasonable technical objections, but they all miss the point, because none reveals the philosophical problem with Sepkowitz's proposal. To argue about the empirical evidence is to concede that government mandates are an acceptable substitute for individual responsibility. Driving a motor vehicle, whether limited by a speed governor or not, will always be a potentially dangerous activity, and there is no end to the ways in which an irresponsible person can kill himself and others while doing it. To argue that individual human beings cannot be trusted to sufficiently value their own lives, and therefore must be physically restrained from endangering themselves, exhibits condescension bordering on outright contempt for humanity's capacity to make free and rational choices.

Some people will inevitably make the wrong choices; drive for an hour on any major highway and I guarantee you'll see someone driving like a maniac, imperiling his own life and the lives of those around him. But there are only two ways to interpret this observation. You can conclude that human beings are fallible creatures who sometimes do very stupid things, accept that this is part of the human condition, and strive to avoid those poor choices in your own life. Or you can draw the Kent Sepkowitz conclusion: that because some human beings will make poor choices and do stupid things, choice must be revoked by law.

Of course, adopting the latter conclusion carries certain logical requirements. If, for instance, overly fast cars must be taken away from drivers who cannot be trusted to drive them safely, then a whole range of dangerous actions should also succumb to the same standard. Off the top of my head, I can think of quite a few obvious hazards we must not permit people to run: smoking (any where at any time), drinking (too much potential for excessive consumption), contact sports and mountain biking (too many broken bones if not enjoyed safely), motorcycles (too little utilitarian value to balance the physical risks), sky-diving and bungee-jumping (for obvious reasons). It's a long and disparate list of perils, united only by the common trait that, if conducted recklessly, they can all lead to death.

Where does it end? Honestly, I have no idea. But when you adopt the tautological position that the objective of life is first and foremost to preserve and extend life, this is the road you find yourself going down. Presumably at no more than 75 mph.

A Bridge Too Far

2008-09-04T12:01:00.000-07:00

As if the presidential campaign hasn't dragged on long enough already, polarizing a divided country and exhausting anyone who cares about more important stuff (like, for instance, the start of the NFL regular season tonight), Sarah Palin's nomination for vice president has flung yet more fuel on the mindless partisan fire. And yet, her sudden elevation to national prominence serves a useful purpose by illustrating something that I'm sure neither party intended or appreciates: In the campaign for the modern presidency, "experience" does not necessarily qualify anyone for the presidency.

Obama supporters, weary after months of defending a presidential candidate with a scant few years in office as a do-nothing senator, are visibly relieved to be able to point fingers at Alaska's new governor and former beauty pageant runner-up and clamor "Well what about her?" If that's the best they've got -- that their opponent's running mate is about as politically green as their presidential candidate -- then the Obama camp is pushing on a string. Nobody who hasn't already made up his or her mind to vote for Obama is going to buy this ridiculous lowest-common-denominator tack.

But rather than wade into the comically vicious argument over whether Barack Obama's experience as a "community organizer" outweighs Sarah Palin's experience as the mayor of a town of fewer than 10,000 residents, I'll simply cut to the chase. No amount of experience can ever prepare any human being to be President of the United States in the year 2009, because the government that president will preside over has grown well beyond the bounds of its founders' intent, or the ability of any one person to direct. No one takes the oath of office and hits the ground running on the first day. At best, they're quick learners who can keep mistakes to a minimum and remember their fallible human nature.

However, you will not hear such prosaic realism from either campaign. Modern politics is plagued by the cherished belief that, in theory, government is almost Jovian in its ability to solve societal problems and make people happy. Almost no one, Republican or Democrat, has the humility to acknowledge that this isn't so. So modern politics is reduced to a maddening, endless squabble over what type and how much government will deliver us to the promised land of civil bliss. George Bush believes that with the proper mix of shock-and-awe firepower and "nation-building," hotbeds of radical Islam can be converted into solid-citizen democracies that love America. Hillary Clinton believes that if she just stays up late enough crunching the numbers, she can keep everyone in America healthy and insured. More ambiguously, Barack Obama seems to believe that he can ordain a new American economy powered by not-yet-existent-but-soon clean energy sources.

Whatever the particular issue, those in power tend to make the same fatal mistake: They wrongly assume that, with just a little more power, they really can cut this or that Gordian knot, and in the process, cement their legacy in the pantheon of great leaders. So they all try to tell average voters they have the "experience" to wield the awesome power the federal government already possesses. And consider the far-reaching extent of that power. The American president has the greatest say in disposing of trillions of tax dollars each year. The American president can enact spending and regulatory policies that throw sand in the gears of the global economy. The American president can launch wars that cost thousands of lives, with or without justification.

So exactly what sort of experience prepares you for the closest any one human can come to playing God? No other role even comes within an order of magnitude of the influence the president exerts. Even prominent senators such as McCain and Biden, who've strode the corridors of power in Washington for decades, are utter pikers compared to whoever occupies the Oval Office. The leap from any previous position to president cannot be measured, in years of "experience" or any other metric. To ascend to the presidency is to go off the charts.

But don't tell that to the professional wonks trying to shape this election, for whom this is largely a pissing contest over who's got more bullet points on his presidential resume. They start with the assumption that government really can cure all our ills, and thus conclude there must be a "right man (or woman)" for the job, and then work backward from that conclusion to arrive, conveniently, at their party's ticket. It is not exactly forbidden to suggest that government is not the answer, but only because you need not forbid an idea that no one holds.

Trig-Induced

2008-09-03T20:59:00.000-07:00

Let me just say from the outset that this post is almost certainly futile and pointless. But I feel compelled to write it anyway.

Tonight, I watched Alaska governor Sarah Palin accept the Republican nomination for vice president. I watched because, like everyone else, I don't really know much about her, except that, unlike most presidential elections, her presence on the ticket might really decide the outcome. Even if the office of vice presidency isn't any more significant than a warm pitcher of spit, it'll be monumental if she ends up playing king-maker.

But about two minutes into her speech, my interest in her was eclipsed by an arresting image on screen, when she introduced her infant son, Trig, who was born with Down Syndrome. I am generally no more moved by other people's babies than the next young man is, but this particular one really made me sit up and take note, for two reasons. First, asleep in his father's arms, he looked as innocent and peaceful as any other sleeping baby. And second, only about one in five unborn children diagnosed with Down Syndrome is permitted to come into existence in this age of genetic diagnosis. The other 80 percent are aborted.

I am by no means a pro-life crusader. I have been fairly ambivalent about abortion for most of my adult life, and I try at all costs to avoid the running argument over its moral validity, largely because the vitriol that any objection to abortion-on-demand arouses in self-described feminists has often cowed me into silence. I simply don't want to bring that sort of wrath down on my head for daring to inject a "Well, maybe..." into a discussion, because there is no room for maybes.

Notable female figures on the political left are almost unanimous in their scorn for Sarah Palin, and it's no secret why. NOW Chairwoman Kim Gandy is quite representative in her dismissal: "Gov. Palin may be the second woman vice-presidential candidate on a major party ticket, but she is not the right woman. Sadly, she is a woman who opposes women's rights, just like John McCain." You simply have to realize that "women's rights" is equivalent to legal abortion.

But seeing that baby, blessedly oblivious to the incredible hoopla surrounding him, I couldn't help thinking, "Why the hell shouldn't he exist?"

It's a question that deserves an answer. The pro-choice arguments usually deal with the health of the mother, or the severe physical, emotional and financial burdens that child birth indisputably place on the mother. But when four-fifths of unborn babies who exhibit a fairly moderate disability are deemed unworthy of continued existence, another factor is clearly at work. Are people with Down Syndrome so irredeemably defective or undesirable that society is better off without them? And if so, what other defects should disqualify a baby from being born? Is this not, as George Will suggested in a 2005 Washington Post column, "eugenics by abortion"?

I pose these questions not to suggest that abortion ought to be outlawed, but simply to express a long-frustrated desire: That we as a society might be able to debate the issue without being shouted down by the zero-sum zealots, on either side, who label any questioning of their position as the foulest heresy. After seeing Trig Palin and realizing how atypical his existence is, I'd simply like to have a more thoughtful, open debate. One in which both sides come with the attitude that perhaps they don't necessarily own the moral high ground and won't hurl invective at each other for disagreeing. Wouldn't our country be better off for it?

Back to the Future?

2008-08-27T10:33:00.000-07:00

Mark Twain famously remarked that "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Pithy and insightful, to be sure, but after reading an op-ed in today's New York Times, I suddenly think he's wrong. History really does seem to repeat itself.

After a much-ballyhooed junket of western journalists to the new Soviet Union in 1921, American reporter Lincoln Steffens famously remarked, "I've seen the future, and it works." The trip was a highly choreographed tour of the new country, designed to show left-leaning journalists the technologically advanced and prosperous USSR. The staggering bloodshed that characterized the country at that time -- the mass arrests, the secret police interrogation stations, the summary executions of tens of thousands of innocent people -- were conveniently hidden from Steffens and his credulous colleagues, who obligingly returned home and gushed about what they'd seen. (And from what I understand, Steffens filed the story that contains the now-famous phrase before the tour even arrived in the Soviet Union, which is utterly fitting.)

Decades later, we know better: 1921 was merely part of the unfolding drama that culminated in the 30s with the mass-starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants and the sprawl of the gulags. Steffens was certainly half-right: 1921 was a watershed year, pointing to a future that did in fact come to pass. But it was a dark future, ruled by totalitarian decree, where human life counted for little.

So you would think that, in 2008, when a massive, communist country puts on a dazzling display of state pageantry for all the world to see, western journalists wouldn't make the same exact mistake they made in 1921. But you would be wrong.

For behold Thomas Friedman of The New York Times and his slavish adoration for the fanfare of the Beijing Olympics: "China did not build the magnificent $43 billion infrastructure for these games, or put on the unparalleled opening and closing ceremonies, simply by the dumb luck of discovering oil. No, it was the culmination of seven years of national investment, planning, concentrated state power, national mobilization and hard work."

Frankly, I'd be more impressed if the Chinese could put on a meaningful democratic election, or refrain from censoring the Internet, or pull their troops out of Tibet. Not Mr. Friedman though; he was just so taken with all those amazing dancers and drummers and bullet trains, he simply couldn't be bothered about niggling details like human rights abuses.

Just look at the alleged Chinese virtues he chooses to praise: Planning. National investment. Concentrated state power. The same warm and fuzzy virtues that every monster since Lenin and Hitler has worshiped at the altar of human sacrifice. But weren't those fireworks just gorgeous!

Behold the power of ideology to trump rational thought or factual analysis. With seven years and $43 billion, the Chinese managed to create an amazing spectacle and Friedman goes all weak at the knees with sycophantic adulation. But in the same breath, he laments the time and resources America has devoted to preventing a repetition of the 9/11 attacks. Thanks to all that "concentrated state power," China has a whole lot of shiny new public infrastructure for its wealthiest cities, while rickety old America is falling apart.

Well, let's see. Just this past spring, a powerful earthquake struck rural, western China and killed about 70,000 people, largely because of poor-quality construction. Hurricane Katrina, by contrast, left about 1,800 dead. Three years later, the latter is still cited as proof of the woeful neglect of American infrastructure, while an exponentially more devastating catastrophe merited about a week of obligatory news coverage. But for twits like Thomas Friedman, the happy afterglow of the Olympics is what counts.

Why? What is it about the highly choreographed spectacle of thousands of anonymous dancers and drummers and other performers putting on a glittery party that so delights the Thomas Friedmans of the world? Is it the prospect of the faceless masses, each dressed exactly alike, marching in lock-step for the glorification of their country? Do they look at soldiers goose-stepping as they present the Olympic flag and see something good there?

I can't decide if the closing sentence of this op-ed is consciously echoing Lincoln Steffens 85 years later, or if it's just a sick coincidence: "I never want to tell my girls — and I’m sure Obama feels the same about his — that they have to go to China to see the future." Friedman frets that we'd better start teaching our children Mandarin. I would posit that we need to start teaching our children history.

Acura, Common Sense Refute Gas Crisis

2008-08-18T07:25:00.000-07:00

These days, griping over high gas prices is ubiquitous, and that griping leads to ever more hand-wringing, which in turn translates into a mountain of punditry regarding various "solutions" to this "crisis." SUV owners wail into every available microphone about $4 gas, Green Peace screams for Exxon executives' blood, and a never-ending procession of self-appointed experts bombards the Internet and opinion pages with their pet solutions for easing Americans' "pain at the pump." Frankly, I'm finding it all a little bit tiresome, so yesterday I conducted an experiment that might just render all the complaining and crack-pot schemes moot. It was a very low-tech experiment. I slowed down a little.

For my low-tech experiment, I selected a stretch of US-50 West from Cambridge, Maryland (where my ailing grandfather lives) to Alexandria, Virginia, where I live. My primary piece of equipment for this experiment was the odometer on my 2006 Acura RSX, which the EPA claims will get 31 mpg in "normal" highway driving. In a previous test on this same route, I divided my miles driven by the exact quantity of gas I burned and obtained mileage of 36.5 without really making any effort to save gas. So this time, I made an effort, and got some interesting results.

Over 93 miles, I used 2.34 gallons of regular unleaded, which works out to 39.75 mpg. After hitting the "equals" button on my calculator, my first thought was, "And why is there a gas crisis in this country?"

I should note here that my car possesses no technological wizardry to enhance fuel efficiency. It's powered by a 2.0 liter, inline-four engine, mated to a five-speed automatic transmission. No hybrid engine, no regenerative braking. It's just a smallish car (2,800 pounds), with a smallish, efficient engine.

And all I did to wring the extra miles from each gallon was to drive a bit slower, and crack my windows instead of run the air conditioner. When the speed limit was 55, I drove 55. When the speed limit increased to 65 on the western shore of Maryland, I drove 60. When I got stuck in horrendous traffic thanks to the hordes of families returning from Ocean City and other beaches, I let the engine idle in neutral. Approaching red lights, I coasted. Taking off from green lights, I went easy on the go pedal and kept my engine revs low. Not exactly the sort of stuff that will win me a Nobel prize for physics.

So, cruising at a leisurely pace in the right-hand lane, I saw near-hybrid mileage with some pretty stodgy technology. I can only imagine what a small car with a more frugal engine and a more advanced transmission (or a manual) could do, especially without the traffic jams; I bet a Mini Cooper, a Yaris or an entry-level Civic would probably have cracked 45 mpg, and maybe even threatened 50.

But tooling along in the slow lane, watching 5,000-pound SUVs zoom by at 75 mph, I realized that cars like mine and drivers like me are in the minority. All whining and recriminations aside, the average American drives a big, heavy car with a big, inefficient engine, and drives it very inefficiently, which goes a long way toward explaining why we as a country consume about 20 million barrels of crude oil every day. So now more than ever, I'm sick to death of hearing about this "fuel crisis" and the need for radical new technology and heavy-handed government mandates to "rescue" us from expensive oil. We don't need salvation; we just need a little high school physics and an end to the piggish "bigger is better and I'm entitled to what's better" mindset that's shaped the auto market for the last 20 years.

I'm about the last person in the world who'd advocate for energy rationing, or restrictions on the cars consumers buy, or any of the other command-and-control solutions that green warriors secretly venerate, because as with so many alleged "crises," I know the solution will be worse. But I'll be the first to tell an aggrieved motorist who's complaining how expensive it is to tow his 30-foot boat with his V-8 pickup that in economics, as in physics, you reap what you sow.

"Brother, you asked for it."

2008-07-30T17:36:00.000-07:00

I'm no foreign policy expert, and I wouldn't even call myself especially informed when it comes to the state of the outside world. So I'm really in no position to offer any keen or prescient views on the situation in Iraq. But I think it's safe to say that things must have gotten better there lately, because suddenly the defining issue in the 2008 presidential campaign -- what arguably proved the difference in the Democratic primary, since there really were no other substantive differences between the two candidates -- has suddenly taken a back seat to that perennial hobgoblin of presidential elections, the economy. Stories about the sectarian carnage on the streets of Baghdad (or lack thereof) are relegated to the inside pages, read only by the most die-hard wonks, while every nightly network newscast features oppressive segments cataloging the high price of pretty much everything everybody wants to buy, and most of all, gasoline.

Every night, average Joe Sixpick earnestly, drearily informs the cameras that it's getting harder and harder to fill up, that the family vacation to the beach is on hold now, and that he's just about fed up with it. Sound familiar?

High gas prices are the story de jour, and increasingly, the loudest talking point in the upcoming election. John McCain knows it; witness his recent TV ads blaming Barack Obama for record-high gas prices. (I believe the phrase "energy crisis" is in there somewhere.) And Barack Obama knows it; he lost little time firing back at McCain, blaming him for failing to increase government fuel economy standards during his 30 years in the Senate.

Allow me, if I may, to summarize the gas-price drama, as I understand it: Gas used to be real cheap and that was great, but now all of a sudden, it's real expensive, and that's bad, because lots of people are driving trucks and SUVs that get bad mileage and so it's suddenly real important to buy cars that get good mileage. Right?

So now, everybody wants good mileage. Every car company does everything it can to play up its models' great fuel economy (even when it's not so great); Priuses are selling faster than Toyota can build them; and gas-guzzling SUVs are rusting on dealers' lots for want of buyers. And then there's the furor, just getting started in earnest, about ethanol, and how best to make it, and how high the government's CAFE standards should rise, and how fast.

But wait a minute. Lost in all the debate is a question I never hear asked: Why did it make sense, back in the Good Old Days of Cheap Gas, for everybody to drive 5,000-pound trucks and SUVs? Were gas stations giving the stuff away back then? Were oil wells gushing crude oil like 10,000 Old Faithfuls? Put more directly: Did it make sense up until recently to waste a finite natural resource for no good reason?

A quick trip back to the Good Old Days of Cheap Gas yields some interesting observations. "Cheap" is a subjective term, but I doubt anyone would disagree that back in 2003, when a gallon of regular unleaded cost $1.59 on average (per the Department of Energy), I doubt anyone would disagree that that was indeed cheap. So what cars were people buying back in that halcyon era, when George Bush was actually popular and the Iraq War looked so fresh and promising? Edmonds lists the top-ten best-sellers for '03, with the Ford F-150 pickup truck leading the way, followed by the Chevy Silverado and the Dodge Ram pickups. The lowly, gas-sipping Honda Civic, by comparison, ranks eighth, barely registering a third of F-150 sales.

Now, a quick trip over to www.fueleconomy.gov, which reports that an '03 F-150, in V-6 trim (versus the less efficient V-8) clocks 15 MPG. The 2003 Civic, equipped with an automatic, variable-ratio transmission (that is to say, not the most efficient model available) averages 32 MPG.

Now imagine yourself a prospective car buyer in 2003, facing $1.59 gas and a choice between 15 MPG and 32 MPG. And suppose you expect to drive 12,000 miles a year for the next five years, and you assume, stupidly, that the price of gas will never change, i.e., you'll continue living in the blissful era of cheap gas forever. Setting aside the obvious price differential between the truck and the car, and any insurance premium differences (ceteris paribus, if you like Latin), then you'd do your math and expect to pay $1,272 per year to fuel your F-150, and $596.25 if you opt for the Civic, for a difference of $675.75, in 2003-era dollars.

To make a long story short, unless you were a contractor who hauled around two-by-fours all day for his living, or lived at the end of a long, dirt road, buying the most popular vehicle in America was a really stupid decision. That's $675.75 you were giving away, EVERY YEAR. Just for the purposes of illustration, an annual savings of $675.75, beginning in 2003 and invested in the S&P 500 stock market (which averaged about 7.4 percent returns per year during this period), works out to a grand total, in 2008 dollars, of $4,203 by the end of 2008, assuming the stock market simply did nothing for the rest of this year. (Disclaimer: These calculations actually performed on the back of an envelop.)

So, in 2003, operating under a set of extremely conservative and unlikely assumptions, your former self would have foregone quite a tidy little sum of present-day dollars. Of course, more realistic assumptions -- namely, that gas prices might very well go up -- would only have widened the gap. And yet, 845,586 F-150s flew off the lot that year, along with a host of other big, gas-guzzling trucks. And five years later, most of them are still probably in service (even given Ford's notoriously lousy build quality). So the next time I see Joe Sixpack being interviewed at his local gas station in front of his pickup, I wish the local news correspondent would ask, "So five years ago, what made you do something so patently stupid even before gas doubled?" I'm curious to hear the answer.

You Know What They Say About Cake...

2008-07-16T15:45:00.000-07:00

Remember about 18 months ago when a very prominent cartoon caused an enormous uproar, which ultimately revealed more about the subject matter of the cartoon than its actual creator? Some obscure Danish cartoonist dared to depict Mohamed with a bomb on his head instead of a turban, and the Muslim world exploded, literally and figuratively. Death threats were issued, embassies were bombed, retractions were demanded. And anyone with half a brain and a shred of decency inwardly went "Well, that says an awful lot."

And this week, the phenomenon repeated itself, though without any death threats or bombings (yet). But the indignation pyrotechnics were spectacular, and very, very revealing. The New Yorker magazine, a noted bastion of reaction and bigotry, had the temerity to run a cover featuring Barrack Obama and wife Michelle in the guise of, respectively, a Muslim fundamentalist and a guerrilla warfare radical, both of them anti-American to the core. The second it hit the Internet, you could practically hear Obama Nation's collective inhalation, the gasping prelude to the torrent of moral outrage about to be loosed.

Of course, this was meant purely as satire, to lampoon the allegedly paranoid fear of the Obamas among right-wingers. Thus, The New Yorker printed a patently absurd image designed to ridicule the idea that Obama's presidential aspirations are somehow sinister and terrifying. I believe this is an example of a relatively new tack in politics called "sarcasm."

But a whole bunch of indignant liberals aren't laughing. Why not? Because all those rubes out there in Middle America might not GET IT. They might think he really IS a Muslim (heck, some of them already think just that). How dare The New Yorker publish a cartoon that could give people the wrong idea about their beloved, unassailable, manna-from-Heaven candidate? Free speech is all well and good, but in such an important election, are we really going to trust their television-addled brains to interpret the joke correctly?

Think I'm being melodramatic? Just read this analysis of why The New Yorker cover is actually really, really bad. Most revealing quote: "[V]isually-based racial, religious and character-based framing does carry cognitive weight across a spectrum of higher- and lower-level reasoning, and, more than anything, it gains strength and veracity through repetition." All those lower-reasoning voters out there might just take it the wrong way!

At play here is a very obvious hypocrisy. Either this cartoon has no basis in reality whatsoever, it's completely absurd and therefore laughable, or it isn't. If it is a pure inversion of the truth, why all the angst about the damage it might do? When in the same breath the liberal, blogging community announces that the Obamas bear absolutely no resemblance to this caricature (which was the artist's point all along) BUT this cartoon shouldn't have been printed because it could give people the wrong idea, the liberal blogging community doth protest too much.

A Relic From '06

2008-07-10T17:36:00.000-07:00

A couple years ago, in a very rare fit of (unwarranted) confidence in my abilities as a writer, I submitted something for a DC political humor Web site's open submission contest. I promptly did not win.

I believe the assignment was to write George Bush's post-presidency cover letter, when he'd hypothetically be applying for a new job and describing his accomplishments as president. I recently discovered my submission in a folder I rarely open, and lest it sit on my hard drive forever gathering electronic dust, here it is. (In light of recent events in the '08 presidential campaign, it sounds a bit dated now. My apologies.)

Dear Sir (or possibly Madam - but hopefully Sir):

Eight years and two narrowly unsuccessful impeachment trials ago, I made a promise when I took office: that I would govern as a uniter, not a divider. And today, I can say with confidence that that promise has been fulfilled. American women are united by the renewed trust in their own bushes which I’ve inspired; Europe is firmly united against American intransigence (which I assume is French for “intrepid leadership”). Heck, I even reunited Dick Cheney with his beloved Girls Gone Wild: Spring Break DVD, which Lynn hid from him back in ‘02. All this while pursuing Al Quaeda on every continent (including their Antarctic stronghold) and winning a solid 60 percent of the preemptive wars I’ve launched. Last time I checked, that was a passing grade at both Harvard and Yale.

But don’t let my shrewd foreign policy overshadow my impressive domestic accomplishments. The prescription drug plan I engineered gives America’s seniors access to a health system at least as complicated as Finland’s, and possibly as good as Nicaragua’s. Meanwhile, the No Child Left Behind Act aims to ensure a bright future for our children by requiring a highly qualified teacher and a fully functional mechanical bull in every classroom in the nation by the year 2014. Critics say these bold initiatives are nothing but unfunded mandates that will bankrupt the country. I say: That’s Hillary’s problem now. Have fun crunching those budget numbers, Madam President.

And finally, allow me to remind you that, as far as surviving ex-presidents go, I’m probably your best bet. Bill’s doing his philanthropy work (or is it philandering work? He told me which one it was, but I can never keep ‘em straight); Jimmy’s busy with the peanut harvest; Gerry’s a good guy, but a little too brainy; and between you and me, dad can’t keep awake for more than about forty-five minutes at a stretch. Also, I’ve been hearing rumors lately that Ronny’s dead. But that’s probably just our liberally biased media talking.

Sincerely,

Pres. George Walker Bush

Decline of the West, as Measured in Skyscrapers

2008-07-10T12:04:00.000-07:00

Since today is a fairly slow day, I was able to indulge in one of my favorite pastimes: Scanning the "news" headlines on MSN.com after signing out of Hotmail. Call it a slightly sick fascination, but there's just something irresistible about the junk content I see routinely splashed on this and other quasi-news sites, because I get the feeling that more and more people get their information, and worse, their opinions from such outlets. Sometimes it's pure fluff, and thus, non-threatening; the other day, I saw a headline that asked "Can You Rent a Beehive?" Stupid, to be sure, but also pretty innocuous.

But then, there's the stupid stuff with the potential to poison innocent minds. Today I found just such a whopper. In this very, very ominous survey of America's continuing fall from greatness, we're told various countries that you've probably never even heard of before are zooming past the U.S. on the world's economic totem pole. Among my favorite indicators cited as proof of our national decline:

1) In the most recent Forbes survey of billionaires, Russia (Russia!) ran the U.S. a close second, with 87 citizens with net worths of 10 figures.

Well, let's see. Eighty-seven Russian tycoons with ties to the state-dominated oil industry have cashed in on record oil prices and become billionaires. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization reports 1.6 million HIV cases in Russia (an increase of 150 percent since 2001), a national per-capita income approximately one-fourth that of the U.S., and an average life expectancy roughly 10 years shorter. But what does any of that matter, so long as a tiny plutocracy enjoys virtually all of the country's alleged prosperity? (For now, anyway. Most of that wealth is the result of oil revenues, and Russia's aging oil fields are in major decline.)

2) Toyota is threatening to displace GM as the largest auto manufacturer in the world, thanks to its vehicles' superior gas mileage.

There's no denying that Toyota is a well-run company, and GM has been a basket case lately. But as the Wall Street Journal reported this morning, both are struggling in the North American market these days, and that largely spells the difference between profit and loss. Patriotic "Buy American!" sentiment to the contrary, Toyota is having the same problems as GM; namely, trying to switch from making big, inefficient SUVs to small cars. For years, SUVs were huge money-makers for GM, and foreign competitors like Toyota did their best to get in on the action. Now the Toyota plants that build its trucks and SUVs are largely idle, and the company is scrambling to ramp up production of the thrifty fuel-sippers that people actually want to buy. (Go into a Toyota dealership to buy a Prius and they'll be happy to put you on the three-month waiting list for one.)

3) London is competing with New York City to be the world's financial capital.

Gee, talk about lightning from a clear blue sky! Back-water, podunk London, the city that once administered a quarter of the world's surface and dominated global commerce for centuries is suddenly a financial powerhouse? Get out of here! Worrying that the City is becoming as important as New York in the banking and financing arena is like worrying that Pepsi sells almost as much cola as Coke: the planet is big enough for the both of them.

4) The world's tallest building is in Taiwan.

What!?

The common thread that seems to string all these stupid assertions together is an obsession with superlatives. "Oh no, they almost have more billionaires than we do! Their banks might become bigger than ours! Their tallest skyscraper is taller than our tallest skyscraper!" The rational response to each is: Who cares? None of these things measures the quality of life here versus abroad, and none even constitutes a significant economic indicator. If this is how the "average American" decides how he feels about his country, it's no wonder opinion polls consistently report that people think we're in trouble, even when they consistently say they feel good about their own economic situation.

A Letter to Thomas Frank (from the archives)

2008-07-02T11:29:00.000-07:00

This morning, I happened to read the following op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, and it struck close enough to home that I couldn't help but send the author the following reply:

FIGHTING WORDS
By THOMAS FRANK

The Tragic Irony of Beltway Libertarianism
May 21, 2008; Page A17

Consider the poor Washington libertarian. Everywhere else in America his type is an exotic species, a coffee-shop heretic who quotes from "Atlas Shrugged" and steers every conversation toward Ron Paul or gold. Take him or leave him, he doesn't care. He is his own master.

Not so the Beltway variety. Here, in the very home of the taxing, regulating leviathan, the libertarian is such a commonplace and unremarkable bird that no one gives him a second glance. Here he is a factotum of the establishment, a tiny voice in a vast choir assembled by business and its tax-exempt front groups to sing the virtues of the entrepreneur.

And therein lies his dilemma. Almost by definition, our young libertarian's job is to celebrate the profit motive from the offices of a not-for-profit organization. He is subsidized, in other words, to hymn the unsubsidized way of life. Rugged individualism may be his creed, but a rugged individual he ain't.

This is more than just an abstract problem, as I discovered last week at a panel discussion hosted by America's Future Foundation, one of the lesser libertarian nonprofits in the city. The questions that night were whether nonprofit work constituted a "real job" and if moving to the private sector was "selling out" – ideas well known to any liberal do-gooder.

The audience of young professionals learned about the need to find a job that you loved. It heard the inevitable complaint that "there are plenty of people who are choosing for-profit over nonprofit" when their heart tells them to do the opposite. A panelist asked the audience to imagine a foundation worker saying to his boss, "I love what I do, but in the end I've got a wife and three kids, and we live in McLean, and the mortgage is through the roof, and my commute sucks, or whatever, I need a little bit more cash," only to have his employer turn him down.

These plaints sounded so familiar that I felt like suggesting that everyone there hop out and grab a copy of Daniel Brook's fine but distinctly unlibertarian 2007 book "The Trap." By skewing society's rewards so lopsidedly to the top in the country's richest cities, Mr. Brook writes, the tax-reducing, market-minded economic policies of the last few decades have priced all sorts of high-minded occupations to the bottom of the middle class: teaching, the arts, and, of course, nonprofit work.

Many of the people Mr. Brook talks to in such cities haven't given up on these pursuits because they're "sellouts"; they've given up because they want proper health care or decent housing or good schools for their kids.

In traditional sellout theory there is always some grand cause or principle that is being exchanged for immediate gain – artistic independence, for example, or the fate of the panda, trembling piteously before the onrushing bulldozers of modernity.

But what is it that libertarians are selling when they accept the fat paychecks of corporate America? The noble principle of self interest? The utopia of the market itself? Will the workings of supply and demand really seize up if some young Ayn Randette chooses to forsake, say, the Cato Institute and instead help ExxonMobil pile up the pelf?

Fortunately, there were a few plainspoken men of the market present at the gathering to set things straight. Capitalists were the world's real heroes, they reminded us, delivering value to the public and seeing that value quantified precisely by the numbers on the balance sheet. That was reality. the idea that "there's something special about nonprofits," scoffed one forthright fellow – "well, that's crap. Nonprofits are an artifice of the law, and what's special about them is not that they do different things or that they are organized in a special way, it's that they don't pay taxes."

Personally, I would take this hard line one step further: Selling out is not a threat to the market order; selling out is how the market gets its way. Just look at the city in which all these remarks were made. Private-sector Washington is one of the wealthiest places in America. Public-service Washington lags considerably behind. The chance of ditching the one for the other is what accounts for everything from the power of K Street to the infamous "revolving door," by which a public servant takes a cushy corporate job after engineering some extravagant government favor for the corporation in question – or its clients.

The libertarian nonprofits that line the city's streets often serve merely to rationalize this operation after the fact, giving a pious shine to the policies that are made in this unholy manner.

To their credit, the nonprofit libertarians I watched the other night did not ask for sympathy. Their own doctrine won't permit it. Having spent years urging lawmakers to wreck the social order that once made occupations like theirs tenable, they will cling stubbornly to their free-market idol all the way down.

Mr Frank,

As a young libertarian working in Washington (albeit at a for-profit publishing company) who just read your Wall Street Journal column of May 21, I feel the need to proffer an alternative to your conclusion that libertarians toiling away in nonprofit advocacy organizations to defend capitalism are mindlessly working against their own self-interest because they are prisoners of their flawed ideology. Correct me if I've misconstrued your position, but I believe your closing paragraph is quite unambiguous:

"To their credit, the nonprofit libertarians I watched the other night did not ask for sympathy. Their own doctrine won't permit it. Having spent years urging lawmakers to wreck the social order that once made occupations like theirs tenable, they will cling stubbornly to their free-market idol all the way down."

Instead of concluding that these poor saps are too blind to even know what's good for them, I would posit that they're principled people who care more about promoting their beliefs than they do about pulling down big salaries. Furthermore, I would suggest that they are responsible adults who chose their line of work despite knowing that they'll never get rich in the nonprofit sector, and that like responsible adults, they accept the consequences of their own choices in life. They do not demand that they and their "high-minded" (to use your own phrase) peers somehow "deserve" more money than their employers are willing to pay them.

So the next time you grace the opinion page of the Journal with your leftist cant, please at least try to formulate some sort of philosophical argument, or attempt to refute one of the core arguments of your opponents, rather than simply writing them off as hapless stooges who don't even have the sense to seek out the best paycheck. Not everyone is as obsessed with wealth as you seem to be.

And if somewhere in the political machinations of our nation's capital - where lawmakers are busy handing out millions in subsidies to wealthy farmers, billions for a senseless war in the Middle East, and trillions in future entitlement obligations like Social Security - you can detect the sinister influence of free-market libertarianism, I implore you to seek psychiatric help.

Respectfully,
Jim Patterson, 25, Alexandria, Va

On first looking into Kos' blog (from the archive)

2008-07-02T11:28:00.000-07:00

On my daily stop at NFL.com today, I was reminded of something very sad: the start of the regular NFL season is still an interminable four and a half months away. In the meantime, I'm left with nothing better than politics, an utterly inadequate substitute. But play the hand you're dealt, I've always said.

So, Barack Obama. Last week he said something kind of dumb. I'm sure everyone's already heard it, so I won't quote him. You know the soundbite I mean, the one where he told wealthy San Francisco liberals what they already know: that blue-collar, "heartland" Americans are a bunch of podunk rubes who love guns, hate immigrants, go to church instead of college and don't even have the sense to vote in their own economic self-interest. If you have the misfortune to be exposed to as much news, punditry and water-cooler bull sessions as I am, you've already heard the big outcry, both from the Hillary Camp and John McCain Land. Suddenly Obama, heretofore the healer of all our woes, the uniter of all our differences, sounds a tad condescending, even "elitist."

Elitism from a Harvard-educated lawyer worth millions of dollars? No! I for one refuse to believe it.

So I'm bored with this story, except for one seldom-mentioned aspect. I hear Obama supporters defending his remarks, explaining that they were "poorly phrased" but "fundamentally true," and I can't help but chuckle. Because I know that somewhere, deep down in their psyche (or maybe not so deeply buried), they're going, "What's the big deal? He's right! They ARE just a bunch of podunk rubes." Most of them won't admit to it on TV or in print, but I decided to look elsewhere for confirmation. And I found it, in the Daily Kos.

Sure, I had to search a bit. This was my first trip to Kos (surprise!), and frankly, I was unprepared for the all-out internecine party warfare being fought out there in the blogosphere. I don't know how many people are posting on that site, but judging by the frequent updates and the never-ending string of verbal sniping at Hillary Clinton (sorry, couldn't resist), I quickly figured out that this is ground zero for the Hillary/Obama battle. Mentions of "bittergate" weren't hard to find, but practically every one emphasized what a non-story this is, and ended by exulting that Obama's remarks haven't hurt him in the Pennsylvania polls. More than a few bloggers seemed to be hyperventilating over how unworthy of mention this story is, because it's just the latest futile attempt by the Hillary campaign to find a chink in the Obama armor.

But finally I found what I was looking for. A blogger named "Asinus Asinum Fricat," who appears to be some sort of European correspondent for Kos, summed up the "bitter" fracas thusly:

I suppose I am an elitist since I care about our planet, as does the Senator from Illinois. ... Ignore the clamoring repukes [sic], elect Obama and get on with it. We are all elitists and proud to be!"

So now I get it. It's GOOD to be an elitist, as long as you're part of the MORAL elite. Remarks like this one, coupled with Kos' oft-repeated declaration that the "bitter" story is "nonsense" and mud-slinging, dovetail pretty neatly with what I assumed from the beginning.

But what I really learned from my first foray into the world of Kos is that this country is a dreadful mess. The present recession is worse than anyone realizes, nobody has any money, because it's all going to "the top," nobody's got health insurance (except one or two Kos bloggers) and if Democratic Congressman Edward Markey is to be believed, the planet is going to be "cooked" because of global warming by the year 2025. (I didn't realize Markey had a degree in climatology; guess I didn't read his Web biography carefully enough.)

Bottom line: This place sucks, and I had no idea. I was under the general impression that we live in the most prosperous, democratic country in the world, at the most prosperous and democratic moment in that country's history. But now that I think about it, maybe I should be bitter too!

God I can't wait until football starts. This country will be so much better off come September. Once they get old enough, I propose a Peyton/Eli Manning presidential ticket to bridge the AFC/NFC divide and bring in a lot of those bitter blue-collar midwesterners. The Manning brothers are good ol' boys from Louisiana, and unlike Hillary, they don't have to fake a heartland accent.

I'd Be for it, if I Wasn't Against it (from the archives)

2008-07-02T11:22:00.000-07:00

Reading a blog entry in the Wall Street Journal today reminded me just how much I loathe Sex and the City. Because wsj.com remains a subscription-based site in this era of free news, I can't link to the blog, so I'll just steal a little copyrighted material:

"The HBO series Sex and the City ended in 2004. But now with the upcoming release of the “Sex and the City” movie, the show is coming under scrutiny for its influence on the shopping, partying and dating habits of young women.

Starring Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw, the series chronicled the loves and lives of four very fashionable friends in New York. Were Juggle [the name of the blog in question] writers fans? In the immortal words of Mr. Big: “Abso- $#@&* - lutely!” But BusinessWeek columnist Lindsey Gerdes writes recently that the characters’ preoccupation with men is bad for young career women who still look to Carrie Bradshaw as a role model. She also points out that in newer shows like Cashmere Mafia and Lipstick Jungle, the basis for women’s career success is unrealistic, “predicated on the ability to navigate an exciting web of power struggles and sexually charged innuendos. All in stilettos!”

But really, how much influence do such shows actually have on young women? Ask Julia Allison, a 27-year-old relationship columnist and Sex and the City fan profiled last weekend by the New York Times. The article says that her devotion to the show was in part why she moved to New York City after college. She also keeps up with habits of Carrie Bradshaw, dancing at celebrity-rich clubs, throwing parties and collecting trendy shoes. The problem is that the lifestyle portrayed in the show is difficult to afford; for example, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side — where Carrie lived as a single professional on the show - - is $2,448 per month. (Indeed, Ms. Allison says even with a six-figure income, she lives in a tiny studio.)"

Now, when I loathe something, I want to know why. And from the very few episodes (or snippets of episodes) I've actually seen, I've never been able to rationally explain my deep-seated detestation of this show. It just seemed that whenever it intruded upon my otherwise calm and tranquil mind, waves of hot, blinding rage would well up from deep within me, until I had to scream and leave the room. But why? The answer always eluded me, but this blog post, and especially the comments that fans of the show posted in reply, have finally shed some light on the source of my aversion.

But first, a disclaimer: I have heard it said many times by female fans that SATC appeals to women because it connects with women, that it depicts situations and relationships that "every woman can relate to." I have no idea whether this is true, and clearly, I'm not equipped to judge such statements. So I will avoid that nebulously impenetrable aspect of the show entirely. I can only say that the idea of a television show geared to a female audience doesn't bother me as a concept, and that I'm quite sure it's something else about SATC that makes my blood boil.

Again, based on my very limited exposure (never voluntary), my impression has always been that a certain materialism permeates SATC characters' lives. They all live in a chic part of Manhattan (the Upper East Side...?), they all dress fabulously and spend heavily on clothes, and shopping appears to be a fairly routine pastime. And yet, I can't recall seeing any of them doing much work to support such a lifestyle. From what I've gathered, Sarah Jessica Parker's character lives in a pricey, spacious one-bedroom, in a city with the highest rents in the country, and manages to do so by writing a weekly column that takes up about five minutes of her weekly routine. A mite implausible, but I'll set that aside.

What I didn't appreciate, until I read some comments on this blog entry, was just how important this lavish lifestyle is to many fans, particularly younger ones. Witness this Boston University student's gushing:

"Are people in college still obsessed with “Sex and the City”? ABSOLUTELY. Almost all of my friends watch the show, and many of them have the entire series on DVD. Granted, I go to school at Boston University, where many girls are Carrie-obsessed, driven, type A’s planning to move to New York, but I would venture to say that the show influences many college students’ decisions to live a very glamorous lifestyle and move to NYC after college. That’s where I’ll be headed!"

A TV sitcom influencing college students' decisions about where to live after college? Fascinating! But read on:

"Many of my friends who are graduating this year are going to New York and have no intention of giving up that lifestyle. Most would probably rather live in a shoe box and have no furniture than stop buying clothes, shoes, cocktails, and Hamptons summer shares. All of them plan on going out every weekend to chic night clubs, and will probably go out for drinks after work many nights a week.

So, do I feel pressure to live this lifestyle? No, but who wouldn’t want to? When “Sex and the City” came out, it let all of my friends have a small glimpse of the most glamorous lifestyle they’d ever seen. There is no pressure to buy tons of shoes and $12 cocktails–everyone just WANTS to!"

Of the 197 comments posted on this blog, many were in the same vein. Others, from older women who are fans of the show, express considerable surprise at how many young women, who were literally girls when SATC first aired, have become such huge fans. But the more I think about this, the less surprised I am, because there are striking parallels between SATC and college life. From what I can (or choose) to recall of my college experience, those four years are a time of epic sloth for many people. While there are plenty of aspiring engineers and doctors and yes, even some diligent, studious liberal arts types, college is a period of astonishing leisure. It's really the only period of one's life when it's acceptable, even popular, to stay up to all hours, drink like a fish, and generally while away mountains of free time. There's no nine-to-five job to be late for, no house to keep up, no kids to take care of. All in all, it's got to be the most self-indulgent, laziest period of many people's lives.

And suddenly along comes this hit TV show that shows, what? Young, attractive people wasting time and having fun! They shop on Fifth Ave, they meet for coffee, they gossip, they dish, they pick up men at bars. It's really not so very different from what's undoubtedly going on right now at a thousand college campuses. But the clothes, the digs, the food, the drinks on SATC? Way nicer. So, same great lifestyle, better stuff.

Aside from the material excess, the aspect of SATC I found most striking was, quite honestly, the sex. More specifically, that it takes on sex as one of its core subject matters. And not just in the way that so many sitcoms dance around it, substituting innuendo for detail and leaving much to the viewer's imagination. For a sitcom to depict sex with jokes that trail off suggestively or scenes in which the lights fade out, followed by canned laugh tracks or titillated "oohs!" from the nonexistent audience is standard. For a sitcom to actually show sex, and write dialog that goes into the gory details of sex, is fairly unprecedented (and obviously, a cable network like HBO can take a lot more liberties than Fox or NBC).

And as far as it goes, I find such earthiness refreshing. We live in a fairly prudish country; for anyone who doubts it, just consider the media's obsession with pop stars like Britney Spears behaving naughtily. So to see a show that deals with something so real, so everyday (and oftentimes, so funny) in a very unsqueamish way can be a breath of fresh air. After all, real people have sex and talk about it, so why can't TV resemble reality?

But SATC goes well beyond realist depictions of sex. Aside from shoe shopping, the women on the show seem to positively live for sex, and for sex with whoever strikes their fancy that particular week. And I object, not on grounds of decency or anything like that, but on the grounds that such a normal, everyday human affair has been elevated to a sort of sport, to be pursued for pure self-gratification. That some people undoubtedly do approach sex this way is not my point; my point is that it's not an approach that ought to be glorified, because ultimately, it's empty and vain.

I believe that last clause is a pretty good summation of SATC, at least to the extent that it can be understood by a man such as myself. The lifestyles portrayed evince a certain egotistic impulse to gratify whatever physical desire happens to rule at any given moment. At bottom, all I can see is material excess and selfish indulgence, conveniently untethered from the constraints of economic or social reality. That such qualities are the stuff of many a human fantasy is old news. But to see them dressed up and passed off as "witty" or "smart" entertainment strikes me as oppressively, almost viciously insipid.

God I can't wait for the movie.

Newspeak, Resurrected (from the archives)

2008-07-02T11:18:00.000-07:00

"A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don't like it."

~Eric Blair

I know this is old news now, but I think it's ominous and disturbing enough to merit a few words anyway. By "it," I mean Hillary Clinton's debunked account of her trip to Bosnia 12 years ago; specifically, her claim that her entourage came under gunfire shortly after landing at the airport. I won't bother quoting; I'll let her speak for herself:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=TKe2rBbGGEA&feature=related

Within hours of making this outrageous claim, which should have struck anyone with a brain as spurious simply on the grounds that the Secret Service probably doesn't allow First Ladies into combat zones, everyone knew the truth, that there was no "sniper fire," that Clinton in fact was welcomed with a brief ceremony, and even received a poem from a little Bosnian girl, right on the tarmac. Once the video of the event in question surfaced on YouTube, reporters pounced, and asked her how her story could be squared with the facts. Her response: She misspoke. She didn't remember correctly.

Now, I've never come under gunfire in my life. The closest thing I've experienced is being shot at with paintballs, and even that was frightening enough that I remember it quite vividly, seven years later. So I think it's safe to assume that dodging real bullets leaves a very strong impression on one's memory, especially for a civilian with no military or police training. No doubt pretty much everyone familiar with this story has already come to this conclusion on their own. It's simply impossible to believe that someone could misremember such an experience and truly believe their false memory, unless that person is mentally ill, in the clinical sense.

So which is it, a horrendous lie or dementia? I choose to believe the former. Faced with the prospect of losing out to an upstart senator from Illinois named Obama, Clinton's doing everything she can to highlight her superior "experience." Having watched the video a few times now, I can't help but see this as completely premeditated, just one of the gritty anecdotes that a battle-tested old hand like Hillary can toss off with studied nonchalance as proof that she's been around the block, and the world, during her long "experience" in public life. Except for the truth part, that is.

But that a politician named Clinton could tell a lie to further his or her political career hardly comes as a shocker. The real story is the reaction to the lie. Obama supporters, many of them liberal Democrats who voted for Bill Clinton in the 90s and (until recently) tacitly accepted the Hillary succession, are outraged, and rightly so. That anger has been building for months -- witness the reaction to Bill's race-baiting after he insinuated that Obama only won South Carolina because he's black, that he's just another Jesse Jackson -- but this latest gaffe has really opened the floodgates. For the first time in literally decades, Democratic voters have a viable presidential candidate who's not a Clinton, and many of them want to see the aggregated Bill/Hillary scandals and baggage banished to political oblivion so that they can get on with electing an infinitely more palatable, honest candidate.

Meanwhile, Jay Leno, et al, must have been delighted that such a can't-miss joke landed in their lap. The sheer absurdity of the lie has a comedic dimension, and plenty of people are laughing. Such unambiguously ludicrous claims don't come along very often, and when they do, they invite plenty of ridicule.

But I'm not laughing. Of course it's anathema to Obama voters, and of course it's absurd; both reactions miss the point. Here we have a serious contender for the highest office in the land who apparently thinks she can say anything she wants, regardless of its veracity, and then dismiss it as "misspeaking" when she gets caught. And she's not some lunatic, fringe candidate; though behind by a hundred-some delegates, Hillary is still alive. With convincing wins in the remaining primaries, she could conceivably cajole or browbeat enough super delegates into voting for her to capture the nomination. She still has literally millions of supporters, people who apparently aren't troubled by her naked disdain for the truth. So the question I've been asking myself all week is: What are these people thinking?

Just watch the video. Watch Hillary's adviser try to explain away the lie; watch the guy from Politico hem and haw about whether this was a lie or not; watch Chelsea outright defend the lie. Just what exactly is going on here? If Hillary went on TV and announced that two plus two equals five, would any of these people admit she's a liar? To her legions of voters and supporters, what would actually give them pause, make them change their vote? After all, they have a perfectly good candidate who espouses the same basic positions as Hillary, and he's much more likely to win the election in November. They have an out, a very good one, but they're not exercising it. Watch one of her campaign rallies and see how enthusiastic her backers remain. I see it, and my mind hits a brick wall.

Lest I sound completely naive, I do realize that politicians play fast and loose with the truth as a matter of course. I imagine there're some honest politicians somewhere in this country, people who've been elected to office without compromising their integrity, but I can't name one offhand. So I'm not suddenly shocked and appalled that Hillary LIED about something. What does shock me is the brutal honesty with which she admitted to having lied ("I misspoke") and then, in the same breath, announced that doing so is acceptable ("It proves I'm human"). Evidently she regards objective reality as a concept to be dispensed with when doing so suits her purposes. And evidently a lot of people don't disagree with her.

Am I the only one who finds this frightening?

This statement is a lie: Discuss (from the archives)

2008-07-02T11:16:00.000-07:00

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, commenting on the economic "stimulus" package that Congress and President Bush are apparently close to signing into law:

"I can't say that I'm totally pleased with the package, but I do know that it will help stimulate the economy. But if it does not, then there will be more to come."

Translation: "I know that doing A will make B happen. But if doing A doesn't make B happen, then we'll do more of A."

This is why politicians should not screw around with the economy. Not only do they not understand the most basic economic principles, they apparently have no concept of formal logic.

Sanity Check (from the archives)

2008-07-02T11:10:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, I come across something so completely stupid that I just can't let it go without saying something. Today, while signing out of my old-school hotmail account, I noticed a headline on MSN.com (the default site where you get dumped when you sign out) that proclaimed, in scary red font: "The Middle Class Crunch." Below were a bunch of equally dire sub-titles: "How to Fix: Fill in the Blank Perceived Problem With Our Country." Out of morbid curiosity, I clicked on "How to Fix: America's Energy Woes." Here's the opening paragraph:

"Everybody says this country needs a Sputnik-style challenge to get us motivated again. But Americans already face such a challenge in climate change and an energy crunch - and they threaten us far more dramatically than the Soviet space program ever did."

First of all, everybody says that? I don't. Nor have I heard anyone ever say anything so stupid (until today). When trotting out an argument espousing fundamental policy changes, it's always good to start with an erroneous, meaningless statement.

But the next sentence is even better. The "energy crunch" and global warming pose a greater danger to our country than the Sputnik space program that led directly to the nuclear arms race, when thousands of Soviet ICBMs were targeted on our cities and school children practiced duck-and-cover drills to prepare for nuclear holocaust? Just how in the name of bugger-all could anyone possibly say something so ignorant? I'm literally angry just thinking about the magnitude of stupidity and generational egoism on display here. "Oh no, poor us! Gas costs four dollars a gallon and ice is melting! We have things so much tougher than anyone before us ever did! My latte has too much foam! Wahhhhhhhhhhh!!!"

If the people reading this nonsense would ever bother to crack a history book, they'd quickly realize just how good life is today, and how much worse it used to be. Not to say that everything today is perfect, but considering that 40 years ago, we were literally afraid of being vaporized within minutes, four-dollar gas and global warming sound like manageable challenges.