March 31, 2002
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Rules to Live By
1. Don't trust Arafat to keep a cease-fire
2. Don't ask the French to provide air support
3. Never, ever, upgrade to Microsoft XP
The blue screen of death has once again cast it's azure pall over my household.
Will I get some sort of purple heart when I log my 100th hour on the phone with tech support (from Bangolor), doing useless things like reseating the power cord and pressing the power button while the power cord is disconnected?
Honestly, only Microsoft could sell you software that crashes reliably when it's installing. Dell says its a known problem and Microsoft hasn't fixed it. Microsoft won't talk to me because I'm OEM Dell.
Finally, at what point can I sue?
March 30, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Just the other day, a
Just the other day, a girl in my office asked the classic question: "If we can send a man to the moon, why can't we cure the common cold?" Derek Lowe tells us why not. Aww, shucks, one of them practical reasons.
From the desk of Jane Galt:This is nifty: a website
This is nifty: a website that lets you plug in your zipcode and find out what demographic you and your neighbors are in.
From the desk of Jane Galt:What I’m Reading This
What I’m Reading This Week
The Vote : Bush, Gore, and the Supreme Court
Essays by law professors from both sides on the origin, justification, and ramifications of the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2000 elections
The best essays in this book are very good; the worst aren’t unreadable, but they tend to state a goal of proving something, wander from minor point to minor point without much direction, and then without warning declare Quod Erat Demonstrandum! and abruptly terminate themselves. The result is that one gathers a lot of small, telling points, but it’s hard to generate an over-arching philosophy about what did happen, or should have happened, from a single reading of this book.
The best essay in the bunch, as far as I’m concerned, is Cass Sunstein’s introduction, which provides a lucid summary of the relevant events, political and legal, which led up to the decision. Sunstein does not, in this essay, attempt to divine which side is right; rather, he concentrates on the sociology of the commentators. He makes the telling observation that it is possible to predict with almost perfect accuracy someone’s opinion on The Opinion simply by finding out who he voted for; it is a welcome grain of salt with which to take essays from both sides.
The conservatives, predictably, ignore the question of just who was harmed by the “equal protection” violations, want to gloss over the possible effects this decision may have on future elections, court opinions, and the legitimacy of the Court; the liberals, with equal predictability, deny that there is anything odd about changing the election rules after the fact, and dismiss the possibility of a constitutional crisis with an airy “Oh, well, that wouldn’t have happened” but offer nothing to back up their a priori assertion. The strongest points offered by both sides, with the exception of Richard Posner’s essay on the mechanics of a recount (which has been made redundant by the newspaper count) are their criticisms of the fallacies and strained construction of the other side. I’ll have to read the book at least once more before I can use it to eke out a workable theory of what went on.
So should you buy the book? Well, it’s slow going in some spots – legal writing is its own little world. But ultimately I think it’s valuable because it gives you an overview of how lawyers think about the case, rather than one person’s extensive interpretation (Alan Dershowitz, Richard Posner). The essayists have something of a dialogue going on between them, which allows you to ask and answer questions about legal constructions within the same book. And while the writers address specific points rather than the whole megillah, this is ultimately I think valuable, both because it keeps the book from degenerating into the kind of “I’m write, you’re wrong” argument that characterized much of the debate, and because it allows a deeper perspective on key issues that shaped the decision. Ultimately, I think the book could have been better. But I think it’s probably the best book out there for understanding the ongoing debate over the Court’s decision.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Here's to Fritz Schrank for
Here's to Fritz Schrank for proposing we take our sin taxes to the Big 7 instead of piddling around with booze and 'baccy.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Andrew Jackson's w*blog is odd,
Andrew Jackson's w*blog is odd, but interesting. But definitely odd.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Over at Protein Wisdom, Jeff
Over at Protein Wisdom, Jeff Goldstein has a brilliant post on why we can't just CAFE our way out of the Middle East:
In the 30-or-so years of CAFE standards, American fuel usage hasn't decreased one iota -- and in fact, oil imports as a share of U.S. consumption have risen from 35 to 59 percent in those three decades. All CAFE standards have succeeded in doing is making cars unsafe, and creating a morass of regulation that automakers circumvent (the Chrysler PT Cruiser is classified as a light truck, for Chrissakes!). . .. . . cheaper oil is directly responsible for our country's worldwide leadership in per capita productivity with regard to fuel consumption. You have an alternative you'd like to offer? Hydrogen and electricity are energy carriers, not energy sources; as such, they must first be generated from coal, nuclear, gas, hydro, or some other natural source before they can be converted into usable energy sources. Raw hydrogen must be produced, for instance, from natural gas or generated by the electrolysis of water. This leads us back to electricity (electrolysis, incidentally, is the most energy-intensive process of any fuel making alternative; you'd have to burn carbon fuels to manufacture it, making the advantage of conversion negligible at best). Nuclear power is the obvious solution -- a long-term, pollution-free source -- but I suspect you're not willing to go that route.
Further, hydrogen comes married to other elements generally (as in methane gas or water). Most of today's fuel-cell technology relies on hydrogen extracted from methane, in a process that emits large quantities of greenhouse gases. Domestic sources of methane are too limited to serve any significant demand for automobiles. So we'd be forced to look for foreign sources -- sources found primarily in Russia and Iran, and in many Middle East nations. In other words, good-bye oil dependency, hello methane dependency!
. . . a gas tax -- is an expensive solution and does nothing to create the kind of 'energy independence' greens are always going on about. The EU, for instance, taxes gas up to $4 per gallon, and yet it still imports more than half its oil! . . . Besides, we do tax -- we just use backdoor taxes like the CAFE scheme.
. . . To suggest that Islamofascists flew planes into our buildings because of my SUV, then, is just plain silly. . . 'If there wasn't any oil in the Gulf region the United States would NEVER have gone to defend one Arab tribal group [...] against another . As a consequence we wouldn't now have thousands of troops and planes in Kuwait and S. Arabia. Bin Laden and his gang of Islamofascists wouldn't have decided that infidels were despoiling the holy cities of Medina and Mecca. And so on.' By the same logic, I could argue, 'If their weren't any Wahhabism in the Gulf region, the US would never have had to defend itself against Islamofascism, etc. For that matter, were there no Arabs, there'd be no Wahhabism...'
CAFE is useless at reducing our oil consumption, because the evidence is that households use a sort of straight-level budgeting process for gas consumption -- raise fuel efficiency, and people drive more until they're at the same oil consumption as before. Which is what has happened with cars in the US -- according to my energy guru, our gasoline consumption hasn't dropped at all since CAFE was introduced.
Second of all, you can't reduce Saudi income through ANWR either, except from the slight price pressure exerted by a new source in the market. That's because oil is a world market; whatever the price is on that market, domestic suppliers have to be paid the going market rate to prevent them from selling it elsewhere. That's also why we can't boycott Saudi oil; it wouldn't effect their income one bit.
The only way to hit the Saudis where it hurts is to convert to non-fossil fuels. And you know what that means, boys and girls -- Nuclear. Which is why we need to collectively sit on those NIMBY's in Nevada until they squeal for mercy. (I do sympathize. If they were going to put it in my backyard, I could probably find all sorts of reasonable-sounding arguments as to why they shouldn't. But the stuff's got to go somewhere.)
But I do think that Goldstein is wrong about the tax. It would be more effective than CAFE at reducing fuel consumption, because of the way that people budget purchases. People tend to put money in "baskets" in their head: this much for food, this much for laundry soap, etc. The CAFE tax goes into the price of the car, which is not, in most people's minds, in the same "basket" as gasoline purchases, so it doesn't influence their consumption. Moreover, it's a high fixed cost; there's no marginal cost to added mileage that would cause people to forgo that extra trip to the grocery store; quite the opposite, it makes the extra trip cheaper. In fact, it's about the stupidest way you could possibly imagine to reduce consumption. A tax would be much more effective.
But it would cripple the US economy in the short and medium term. My macro professor argued convincingly that the stagflation of the 70's was brought to you by the sharp contraction in the oil supply, which lowered productivity by a considerable percentage.
Now, there are some environmental activists who understand the full implications of what they’re doing when they essentially lobby to block all forms of energy except impractical ones like wind power (Yes, it is impractical – if we tried to switch to wind power on a widespread basis, we wouldn’t have any room left for the houses and factories the wind is supposed to power.) or currently infeasible ones like solar power (Minnesota. Winter. You’re heating the house how? Oh, with the backup wind farms powered by the blizzard. Try again: you have to take the wind towers down if the wind goes much above 30 m.p.h.). Most, however, are animated by ignorance. Some have a very dim knowledge of how either the economy, or the alternative energy sources they are proposing, work; this leads them first to swallow any unworkable proposal made by Nader or Chomsky without question, then eventually, with enough peer reinforcement, to spin their own fantasy worlds based on the “science” and “economics” found in Greenpeace pamphlets.
Others nurture fantasies about a bucolic paradise without factories. This is because they appreciate neither the vast amount of technology required to produce their “organic” lifestyles, nor for the squalor experienced by the colorful natives they admire.
Those who claim that they can live simply based on their propensity for going out into the woods for months at a time, do not realize, or have chosen to forget, that their packs, tents, sleeping bags, rock-climbing ropes, parkas, boots, and too many other pieces of equipment to name, are made from petroleum derivatives.
They do not know that coal, no longer easily accessible near the surface as it was in the days of our Bronze Age forbears, is needed to smelt the iron to make the shovel, plow, hoe, bridle bits, scythe, knives, etc with which they plan to return to the land.
They have never experienced food insufficiency as a permanent fear, rather than an occasional inconvenience at the end of the month.
They think that the patriarchy is some sort of bizarre aberration with which every society was mysteriously afflicted, instead of the natural result of an economic and technological condition in which brute strength is more important than brains.
They are unaware that they can’t get penicillin from any old bread mold.
They do not know anyone with a dead baby, so they think they’d be okay with half the children in their community dying before the age of five.
They do not know anyone who has died in childbirth, so they think that they could handle 1/10-1/4 of the women in the community dying in same.
They have very few friends who have died young, so they think that they could accept an average lifespan of 30.
They don’t know how short 30 years is; or they don’t think that they would be affected.
They do not know that those Afghani kids on TV are blond because their body lacks the nutrients to produce their natural hair coloring.
They have never had body lice or intestinal parasites.
They have never seen a wound infected with maggots.
They have never seen leprosy or festering abscesses or sores that do not heal.
They have never seen an arm or a leg swollen with gangrene.
They have never seen a child waste its life away with diarrhea.
They have never seen a cold turn fatal.
They have never seen someone biting on a rag to keep from screaming while the saw bites into their leg.
They have never seen how white a woman’s body is when she’s exsanguinated by a post-partum hemorrhage.
In short, they’ve created a fantasy world in which the rivers and fields are pristine, and edited out the enormous human misery that accompanied this condition historically. Or they’ve made up some plausible sounding scheme and are demanding we implement it without bothering to figure out what the actual effects would be – and get angry when we do find out, and the effects aren’t what they’d imagined. And they want us to base our economic policy on this fairyland.
Well, that was a bit of a digression. But I feel better now. There’s really nothing like bile and spleen for perking up one’s morning, hmm?
March 29, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Department of Uban Legends It
Department of Uban Legends
It may not mean anything, but I suddenly saw more Army people milling around the site today, some on guard duty. Could just be routine -- or it could mean that the powers-that-be are anticipating a meltdown in the Middle East. I won't guess which is the truth without more data. From the desk of Jane Galt:What I learned from Professor
What I learned from Professor Krugman this week
Valuable insights from a professional economistMany people are spending time making fun of Paul Krugman's latest column just because it serves as an extended whine about how all the boys on the right are meeeaaannnnn. They're missing the point. This column represents a radical new way of looking at things that I feel no trepidation in saying could transform the field of Economics as we know it. In just 500 short words, Krugman has swept away some of the most basic tenets of his profession, revealing a daring new methodology that, if it becomes widespread, could liberate us all. I've pulled out four of the most revolutionary insights -- but don't stop there. Read it yourself, and be amazed.
Insight #1: You Can Always Tell in Advance Which Capital Investments Will Pay Off
Which is why central planning works so well. Consider this incisive analysis of the Whitewater investigation:
The group's efforts managed to turn Whitewater — a $200,000 money-losing investment — into a byword for scandal, even though an eight-year, $73 million investigation never did find any evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons.
It's outrageous, isn't it? I think we should pass a law saying that no one's allowed to invest any money in anything unless they have a 100% guarantee that the investment will pay off.
Insight #2: Highly Localized Samples are Representative
. . . for some reason there is a level of anger and hatred on the right that has at best a faint echo in the anti-globalization left, and none at all in mainstream liberalism. Indeed, the liberals I know generally seem unwilling to face up to the nastiness of contemporary politics.
Now, when I was doing boring old marketing surveys, I wasn't allowed to just survey my friends to produce an answer because my stupid professor thought that they shared too many characteristics like being upper middle class professionals in their late twenties who were enrolled at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Clearly, he wasn't in tune with the latest research. I don't know what Krugman's methodology is for drawing sweeping generalizations about the entire population of the US based entirely on conversations with his friends, but boy, I can't wait to get my hands on it! I could kill an entire year's product planning over beers and cheese fries at Jimmy O'Brien's!
Insight #3: Extremely Small Samples are Representative
I wish they'd told me about this in statistics!
It's also true that in the nature of things, billionaires are more likely to be right-wing than left-wing fanatics. When billionaires do support more or less liberal causes, they usually try to help the world, not take over the U.S. political system. Not to put too fine a point on it: While George Soros was spending lavishly to promote democracy abroad, Mr. Scaife was spending lavishly to undermine it at home.
According to Forbes, there are 497 billionaires in the world . . . yet Krugman was able to completely describe the behavior of the population with a sample size of just 2, just .4% of the total population -- and no worries about the reliability of samples smaller than 50, either! Using this radical new technique, I will finally be able to complete my dissertation: All People Named Paul Are Good Economists but Bad Liars: A Case Study.
Insight #4: You don't need any boring old numbers to make your case
In my economics classes, my professors were appallingly obsessed with numerical proofs of my statements. Just let me say something obvious, like "most people own a computer", and they'd want me to go waste time digging up the actual number of people who had a computer, and divide it by the number of people, all so I could tell them something I already know. Too bad I never took a class from Krugman.
Slate's Tim Noah, whom I normally agree with, says that Mr. Brock tells us nothing new: "We know . . . that an appallingly well-financed hard right was obsessed with smearing Clinton." But who are "we"? Most people don't know that — and anyway, he shouldn't speak in the past tense; an appallingly well-financed hard right is still in the business of smearing anyone who disagrees with its agenda, and too many journalists still allow themselves to be used.
I have no idea how Krugman knows what "most people" know, or don't know. I don't know whether he has personally spoken with "most people", or has a Brookings study on the matter, or whether he just took a statistically valid sample by asking his mother-in-law and her cleaning lady. But I don't care, because I'm so freed by the prospect that I can get away from all that tedious calculation simply by using precise terms like "most" that I don't even want to know how he performs that voodoo that he do so well. I just want to turn this article into one of my econ professors and demand a couple of retroactive A's.
Thank you, Mr. Krugman. For Economics students everywhere. We are in your debt, sir . . . Deeply, deeply in your debt.
From the desk of Jane Galt:You know, if Eric Altermann
You know, if Eric Altermann wants to tell the world that there's a cabal of devious Jews controlling the media, why doesn't he have the balls to come right out and say it, instead of printing this stupid list?
From the desk of Jane Galt:What I'm Reading this Week
What I'm Reading this Week
What with everything that's been going on in the Middle East, I'm reviewing a book out of turn. (The review of The Vote will come later today). It's not a book that I'm reading; it's a book I own, and would be reading if it weren't currently buried in a box deep in the dark recesses of a storage locker in Yonkers. It's Nelson DeMille's By the Rivers of Babylon and it may be the best modern thriller about the Middle East.
The book concerns a planeload of Israelis kidnapped on their way to a peace conference and forced down near Babylon. The plot is superbly paced, and the ways in which lightly armed passengers contrive to do battle with the terrorists who have kidnapped them provide a riveting backbone to the novel, but they are not its meat.
I love this book. I rarely re-read action novels, but this one is so compelling that it's earned a permenent spot on my bookshelf; I've re-read it at least a half-a-dozen times. The characters are both deft and deep, neither sinners nor saints and certainly not the cartoon superheroes who populate so many novels of this genre; but DeMille manages to achieve this without casting away the moral dimensions, no mean feat in a novel about war. The novel explores complex issues of war, peace, and personal responsibility without turning into a sermon with a cast.
The best thing about the novel, though are its evocation of the history of the Middle East and the ways in which ancient history plays out there still. The writing of these pieces is extraordinarily fine, from the history of the Babylonian Captivity, to the return of Jews today. Possibly the most frightening thing about the novel is that it was written about twenty five years ago, yet aside from a couple of slight historical anomalies (the age of holocaust survivors; some technical details about airplanes) you would never know it. This may offer a clue as to the future of peace in the Middle East.
Anyway, HIGHLY recommend it. It gets a coveted five star rating and an order to everyone who hasn't read it to go out and buy it today.
March 28, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Charles Dodgson blasts Bloomberg for
Charles Dodgson blasts Bloomberg for admitting that the poor get incinerators in their neighborhoods, while the rich don't.
"The fact of the matter is that where you tend to site things - unfortunately - it tends to be in areas that are also in proximity to people who are just starting their ways up the economic ladder," he said.People, that is, who aren't as far up the economic ladder as Kira Kerkorian, who at the age of four, could have had $50,000 a month, or $600,000 a year, in child support (the figure in Lisa's divorce settlement, which she could have had for the asking). Which, like the incincerator, is once again a useful gut check on the glories of American egalitarianism.
Well. . . like most things that sound dreadful, it's more complicated that it appears.
First of all, at least in New York, a lot of the incinerators and power plants and other facilities that enrage the activist groups were there before the poor people. The poor people are there because the power plants drive land values low enough so that they can afford to live there.
Second of all, New York is facing a $4.8 billion budget deficit. Siting an incinerator on Park Avenue, would, as Bloomberg says in the article Dodgson cites, drain the city coffers of money that's used to provide services to those aforementioned poor people.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:The Purpose of The Milosevic Trial
What is the purpose of the Milosevic Trial?
Before you respond, I've been reading Beyond The Mountains of the Damned. I don't need any further convincing as to the brutality he sponsored. That's not my question.
It's not really a trial. The purpose isn't to discover guilt or innocence, the purpose is to show the extent of guilt.
The court proceedings did not bring him to this "trial", bombing did. Only the vanquished get "tried".
I think there is substantial value to extensive inquiries into the depth of brutality in Kosovo and elsewhere. The Nuremberg trials certainly provided an exceptional historic record. History must record the wars in the former Yugoslavia as well. But I'm not sure that a trial, which to me means law enforcement and punishment, is the correct term for this. It seems to support the idea that these trials might somehow substitute for the use of force that is necessary to rectify the depredations of future Milosevics and Serbian para-militaries.
Fascinating testimony comes out of this. But as a trial (at least in the U.S. sense) it has been a circus. The prosecutor suggests:
This tribunal, and this trial in particular, gives the most powerful demonstration that no one is above the law or beyond the reach of international justice.
Do they? Will this trial change anyone's mind, or deter ethnic cleansing in other parts of the world? I don't think it will. No tyrant plans on defeat, and defeat is a necessary precondition to a trial like this. There can be no deterrent value. Only justification (or, in the worse case, rationalization) of military intervention after the fact.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Book Smarts and Street Smarts
My Sunday response to Bill Keller has been hyperblogged and I am enjoying many comments on aspects of intelligence. I've been pondering the question myself on my national tour of airport restrooms this week.*
Reader "Bob" comments:
Intelligence is one of those things that is in the eye of the beholder. I remember way back in Junior High when my English Lit teacher described between Brutus and Cassius in Shakepeare's Julius Caesar. Brutus had "book smarts" ala Clinton: He could cite all sorts of facts and figures and roll you over with feelings of self-doubt. But better than that were Cassius' "street smarts" ala Reagan: He could persuade anyone -- even the media (and even Brutus). I believe a President doesn't have to be "book smart". Look at Carter -- a nuclear physicist. But a President is much more effective when he is "street smart".
Bob is on the mark here. I have had the pleasure of working with a number of accomplished individuals who had trouble with academic learning. I know one fellow who had trouble passing his Series 7 (a rote securities law licensing exam) but knows his way around securities accounting and clearance better than almost anyone. Furthermore, he's one of these people who just gets things done.
He knows what he doesn't know, and where to get it. Then he knows what to do with it when he's got it. He also judges character quickly and well.
That's street smarts. We would all like a president who thinks great thoughts and has a full command of history, philosophy and science. But we would also like a president who mobilizes people and moves them towards specific goals under immense pressure. That's a very rare combination. Jeb Bartlett fits the description. He's also a Democrat New Hampshire governor, another rare animal.
Of course, in the elitist worldview there are no street smarts. The substitute is "ennobled". If some poor lamb is unfortunate enough not to be steeped in the generally statist academic traditions of the Northeast, they can also be ennobled enough by suffering, or connection to a recognized victim group, to be credible via pure authenticity. There are exceptions to this, of course, such as Clarence Thomas, Condi Rice, etc., but generally, some claim to victimhood Makes one a more credible policy maker. This is the elitist answer to "street smarts." It's as least as snobby as we objectivists insisting that people not only have experience but also actually make sense when they get a public hearing.
Rejecting the liberal canon, wasting his college years (oh no, nobody else ever did that) and raised in privilege, Bush fits neither of these criteria and therefore must be neither intelligent nor credible. No further examination is necessary.
*On the topic of my mileage this week, trust me - there are few things worse than traveling with a stomach bug. I've even logged enough airport facility time to hear the muzak version of Stevie Wonder's Golden Lady twice.
On another note, I see that Logan Airport has a very professional (and somewhat intimidating) looking private security team that is fastidious about passenger inspections. THe X-Ray guys is actually playing close attention (and he looked like Bruce Dern, too). This is the first team with which I've been impressed. They will be federalized in a week and a half. Although the guard I spoke with said they were being offered first preference on the new federal jobs, he was personally very unhappy with the change. The line moved on before I could ask why (as if I didn't know).
From the desk of Jane Galt:And finally -- Happy Holy
And finally -- Happy Holy Thursday, everyone!
’TWAS on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,
The children walking two and two, in red and blue and green,
Grey headed beadles walk’d before, with wands as white as snow,
Till unto the high dome of Paul’s they like Thames’ waters flow.
O what a multitude they seem’d, these flowers of London town!
Seated in companies, they sit with radiance all their own.
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.
Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song,
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among.
Beneath them sit the agèd men, wise guardians of the poor;
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.
From the desk of Jane Galt:And for a belated poetry
And for a belated poetry Wednesday. . .
DEATH, be not proud, though some have callèd thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so:
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me.
From Rest and Sleep, which but thy picture be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow;
And soonest our best men with thee do go—
Rest of their bones and souls' delivery!
Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!
From the desk of Jane Galt:Steven Green says the world
Steven Green says the world is too much with him, but can't remember from whence cometh the quote. Well, the recovering lit major's always up for a good game of "name that quote", so here it is, from Wordsworth, not one of my favorite poets, but it's among his best work:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Outstanding editorial from the WSJ
Outstanding editorial from the WSJ asks where the hell are all the economists who were lauding Argentina's de-pegging the peso, now that it looks like this may have singlehandedly destoryed both the peso, and the Argentinian economy?
When Argentina dumped its law linking the peso to the dollar late last year, international conventional wisdom hailed the move. Funny, but those same global wise men aren't taking credit for their handiwork now that all hell is breaking loose in Buenos Aires.They suddenly have the same profile as the Argentine peso, which is to say almost no profile at all. Back before it was "floated" in December, the peso traded with the greenback one to one. Now it's worth about 33 cents, assuming anyone is still willing to hold pesos at all. Despite bank holidays and partially frozen bank accounts, Argentines are standing in lines stretching for half a mile to buy dollars rather than hold their own currency.
The police have been arresting currency traders on the street, banana republic style. . . Forty-three percent of the population now lives below the poverty line, Equis says, and with inflation set to rise so will the number of poor. El Clarin reported on Tuesday that the "middle class basket of goods and services" has risen 27% post-devaluation. Yesterday's La Nacion told of Buenos Aires bakeries threatening to close if the price of flour doesn't fall. As for the trade "competitiveness" that devaluation was supposed to bring, Uruguay says it plans to raise tariffs on 300 Argentine products.All of this is a tragedy, but it was hardly an accident. The devaluation was the product of years of intellectual attack on the peso's dollar anchor; we know because we were on the other side of that debate. We're still waiting for the architects of the Argentine "float" to explain how all of their splendid schemes went awry.
One such would be Ricardo Hausmann, the former chief economist at the InterAmerican Development Bank. Writing in the Financial Times last October, Mr. Hausmann opined that "the government has to find creative ways to reduce the debt burden and gradually gain competitiveness." His "workable" solution to this was to convert the country's dollar debt to pesos and to float the exchange rate. . . There was another way out, as some of us argued at the time. That path was to remove all doubt about the peso's future value by dollarizing the economy. Yes, the country would still have to reschedule its suffocating debt. But it would have avoided the catastrophic loss of Argentine faith in the value of its own currency, which is the bedrock of any decision to invest or start a business. Even now the country might be able to stop the peso hemorrhage if it decided to dollarize, as Ecuador did to emerge from its death spiral in 2000."
From the desk of Jane Galt:Gary Farber takes me to
Gary Farber takes me to task for my post on public housing and drug use, saying that I read the decision incorrectly. I didn't, but I apolologize if my post implied that the issue is whether criminal tenants can be evicted. The issue, of course, is whether criminal residents who aren't primary tenants can be evicted.
Public Housing authorites have had and do have, the authority to evict criminals, people who have broken the law. That wasn't at issue. In the slightest. In the least. So I have no idea what Megan McArdle is on about.What was at issue was whether public housing authorities can evict people who have broken no law, and have no awareness of any law being broken, merely because someone in their household used drugs at one time, at some entirely different place, utterly without the knowledge of the primary renter.
Which is a whole different kettle of squid from what Megan McArdle says she is concerned with, and which is why this went up to the Supreme Court, whereas the utterly settled issue of whether criminals can be evicted certainly need not and did not.
I may be misreading the opinion. But from what I have gleaned, the opinion is indeed on whether the behavior of secondary defendants is grounds for eviction. And it was directed at people who say, "Well, I didn't know little Fred was using drugs" or "Well, I can't control him". I worked in the public housing sector in the mid-nineties, and while I certainly could have missed a decision that allowed the eviction of primary tenants for the behavior of those who live with them, this was indeed a huge problem back then, and not one that the Court had addressed.
The Supreme Court overturned the Court of Appeals, and held that tenants may be evicted regardless of whether the tenant knew, or should have known, of the drug-related activity. Specifically emphasized in the decision is that ... any drug-related activity engaged in by the specified persons is grounds for termination, not just drug-related activity that the tenant knew, or should have known, about.... [...]The court [of Appeals --ed] ultimately adopted this reading, concluding that the statute prohibits eviction where the tenant for a lack of knowledge or other reason, could not realistically exercise control over the conduct of a household member or guest. Id., at 1126. But this interpretation runs counter to basic rules of grammar.
Are we clear here? Third-party actions that it isn't reasonable for the tenant to have known about are grounds for eviction, because of the grammar of the law, says SCOTUS.
Pause and marvel at that fine "strict constructionism." Imagine what one would have said if that was the reasoning of a Soviet court.
Keep in mind two things: the public housing authorities are dealing with an enormous problem of tenants claiming that they "didn't know" about drug use going on in their house, and thereby evading responsibility. Some of them probably didn't. But some of them obviously did, and the Housing Authority couldn't do squat. The opinion also, as far as I can tell, is issuing a ruling on whether people can be evicted for behavior of the secondary tenants that the primary tenants can't control. Hard on the primary tenants -- but sons, boyfriends, daughters, etc. that the tenant "couldn't control" have also been historically a huge source of crime in the projects. If you can't evict the primary, how do you get rid of the sixteen year old of whom that tenant is a legal guardian?
The agency made clear that local public housing authorities' discretion to evict for drug-related activity includes those situations in which [the] tenant did not know, could not foresee, or could not control behavior by other occupants of the unit. So much for individual responsibility. No, the new rule is collective responsibility. Conservatives and libertarians have long rightly held popular the meme that zero-tolerance laws and regulations were an absurd, if not inane, over-reaction of the liberal nanny-state, despite the fact that most liberals agree. Here is another case one would think is an example of zero-tolerance run amuck. But somehow Megan McArdle disagrees; based on what she wrote, I have to wonder if she read either the decision, or the story she linked to.
I don't necessarily agree with the particular application the housing authority is making of zero tolerance laws. Farber goes on to talk about the four cases, which are, of course, extremely disturbing; the Times rendition makes it sound as if the housing authority is evicting people because their grandson smokes the occasional mary jane in the parking lot. I say "of course" because those cases were hand-picked by the activist groups that pressed the case for maximum sob-appeal; most such cases I heard about were more along the lines of "her thug of a grandson is dealing from her apartment, but she says she doesn't know anything about that, and anyway, she's afraid of him."
Bad cases make bad laws. The Supreme Court was not ruling on whether these four people deserved to be evicted; it was ruling on a principal. The question was whether you can, or cannot, evict primary tenants from public housing for the behavior of those who live with them, even if they can't control that behavior. I say yes. It's hard on the tenants, but easier on their neighbors. So did the Supreme Court. Whether or not zero-tolerance drug policies are a good idea, or drugs should be legal, or conservatives are mean, is not the issue.
UPDATE: Here's a summary of the decision, via Edward Boyd
In Department of Housing and Urban Development v. Rucker (00-1770), Respondents were threatened with eviction from their public housing by the Oakland
Housing Authority after persons associated with Respondents' households were found to have engaged in drug-related criminal activity on or near the premises. The basis for the evictions was a clause in Respondents' leases that requires tenants to "assure that the tenant, any member of the household, a guest, or another person under the tenant's control, shall not engage in . . . [a]ny drug-related criminal activity on or near the premises." The clause closely tracked the language of 42 U.S.C. § 1437d(l)(6), which provides that each "public housing agency shall utilize leases which . . . provide that any criminal activity that threatens the health, safety, or right to peaceful enjoyment of the premises by other tenants or any drug-related criminal activity on or off such premises, engaged in by a public housing tenant, any member of the tenant's household, or any guest or other person under the tenant's control, shall be cause for termination of tenancy." HUD, in turn, promulgated regulations under this statute that
allowed local housing authorities to consider all of the circumstances in deciding whether to evict tenants for this type of infraction; HUD further clarified that such tenants could be evicted even if "[the] tenant did not know, could not foresee, or could not control behavior by other occupants of the unit."Respondents sued HUD , OHA, and OHA's director in Federal court after the OHA began state-court eviction proceedings. Respondents argued that HUD's application of the statute to "innocent" tenants violated the Administrative Procedures Act (i.e., was an unreasonable interpretation of § 1437d(l)(6)) and, alternatively, that the statute is unconstitutional. The district court agreed (with the first argument) and entered a preliminary injunction in Respondents' favor. A Ninth Circuit panel reversed, but the en
banc posse reversed and reinstated the injunction.The Court today reversed, with the Chief writing for all participating Justices (Breyer sat this one out-presumably as a result of his brother's role as district judge here and not because he signed one of these leases when occupying his swank-o Georgetown pad). Although dragging on a bit by his standards, the Chief quickly explained that § 1437d(l)(6) unambiguously requires lease terms giving local housing authorities the power to evict tenants for household members' drug-related activities, without regard to the tenant's knowledge of the activity. The word "any" clearly modifies "drug-related criminal activity," and, therefore, a knowledge requirement is not consistent with the statute. Moreover, although "under the tenant's control" obviously modifies "other person," it would be nonsensical for it also to modify "member of the tenant's household" and "guest," as the en banc Ninth Circuit found. That interpretation, of course, would deprive the disjunctive "or" of its meaning, and no one wants to see that happen.
Furthermore, elsewhere in the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act that gave us § 1437d(l)(6) Congress expressly imposed an "innocent owner" defense where it wished to do so. The plain language therefore makes it unnecessary to resort to legislative history, but, even so, that effort would not support Respondents' position.The Chief then took a moment to reject the en banc Ninth Circuit's attempt to rely on the canon of constitutional avoidance to read a knowledge requirement into the statute. After reiterating that avoidance is unnecessary because the language is unambiguous, the Chief went on to dismiss that court's suggestion that the lease provision presented problems under the Due Process Clause. Not only had Respondents contracted with the government for these lease provisions, he explained, but also they would receive adequate notice of any deprivation in their state-court eviction proceedings. Revealing that his main beef was with that insolent Ninth Circuit, the Chief relegated the Respondents' constitutional arguments to a lowly footnote, simply adopting Judge O'Scannlain's refutation for the initial panel of the First Amendment and Excessive Fines Clause challenges.
In other words, not only did the court rule on a broad array of issues on secondary tenants; it also allowed for broad discretion on the part of the HUD authorities. The authoritites may have made a bad call on some of the cases, but that doesn't give those tenants a constitutional case.
From the desk of Jane Galt:A lot of anger about
A lot of anger about the labeling issue. Andy Freeman writes that there's too much disagreement about porn to label it:
Some folks think that it's topless. Some folks think that it's bottomless. Some folks think that it's suggestive behavior. Some folks think that it's smoking. Some folks think that it's violence/blood. (Is the opening 10 minutes of Saving Private Ryan porn?) I can go on and on. (Abortion information? Saudi articles about Jewish pastry ingredients?) Note that many of the smoking/violence folks aren't bothered by exposed flesh, and visa versa.
Well, first of all, this merely implies a set of, say, twenty labels instead of one. This is not an insurmountable problem.
Second of all, parents -- raise your hand if you're okay with your kid looking at porn as long as she's wearing a g-string. Or if your children are unaware of what smoking looks like and you want to make sure they don't get any pictures of it.
Movie standards were promulgated as much to prevent things that the "busybodies" don't like from looking cool as to keep kids from looking at adult content. Smoking is a public activity, unlike (in most cases) parading around au natural It's not really that hard to draw most of these distinctions. Sure there will be room around the edge -- there's room around the edge in any standard ever promulgated for the conduct of human relations.
Nor do I think it is fair to refer to them as busybodies. The social libertarian idea that the most permissive standard should become the de facto public one is every bit as oppressive as the Jerry Falwell idea that we should all hew to his idea of morality in the public sphere. The fact that many people want to have adult content on the net should not mean that parents have to watch their children every minute to keep them from being exposed to content they don't approve of. Personally, my parents were liberal on that sort of thing -- I saw my first R rated movie at aged 10, with my Dad (National Lampoon's Vacation, it was, and I can't remember why it was rated R). But they also didn't have to contend with the possibility that I might discover pictures of behavior that might frighten or appal me in casual cruising, which is not as hard to do as my correspondants have implied. I've stumbled across things I hadn't even known existed by following links that looked perfectly innocuous. (Yes, I suppose I'm sheltered. No, I'm not going to elaborate. Shame on you!)
Lane McFadden weighs in with the sensible point that the stuff we're arguing about is less than 1% of the porn on the net. I think a 99.5% effective filter is about as well as one can expect to do in an evironment as large as the net, and I'm pretty sure that most parents would agree it's better than nothing.
I'm not so much advocating labels as kicking the idea around and looking at it. I don't know what the solution is. But I think that anti-label advocates are going to have to come up with better arguments than
1) People who don't want their kids (or their employees) looking at porn are just prudes and they need to get with the program
2) It's too hard -- it can't be done. (The MPAA shows it can. Whether it's worth the social cost is another question)
March 27, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:I know my posts have
I know my posts have been pretty thin the last few days. . . I've been busier than the proverbial one legged man in a derriere kicking contest. Starting tomorrow, there'll be a plethora of thrilling posts on everything that's built up for the last few days. . . but right now I'm exhausted and I'm going to bed. 'Night.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Do you know why I
Do you know why I keep a dog? It's because of the way his eyes get all big and round when I wave his plush soccer ball around. To get a person to look that excited, you'd have to be waving a Porsche in the air, but the velvety toy does the dog just as well. And not only that -- by the second or third time someone gave you a Porsche, your eyes wouldn't get so wide. It'd be old hat. But for the dog, each and every brandishment of the fuzzy orb produces the same wondrous glee. As long as you keep the plush toys and the bones coming, they live in magic.
From the desk of Jane Galt:People opposed to smut filters
People opposed to smut filters complain that they don't work. So a sensible economist asks why we don't require content providers to label their adult content and then let consumers decide.
From the same site (just discovered it, and boy, it's good): will boredom save Microsoft from the Linux threat? I've been arguing here for a while that the problem with Linux is two-fold: first, that I haven't seen an actual realistic revenue model for a largely open-source world; and second, that it is good code but bad marketing, insufficiently responsive to the needs of the ordinary consumers who would have to use it, rather than the desires of the advanced users who code it. This bit points to a real-world example of what you might term an open source market failure.
And on the well-traveled subject of faculty bias, he makes a suggestion that I've approached asymptotically: the next time your college calls you for money, ask how many Republicans are on the faculty. If enough of us demand to know, colleges will respond to the fundraising market by getting some conservatives on board.
Market-based solutions for social problems -- who would have thought that stuff this good could come out of Smith College?
From the desk of Jane Galt:Okay, I just noticed this
Okay, I just noticed this post on Social Security and Democratic Strategy from Ipse Dixit, but it's a goodie, so I'm posting it. It covers the suicidal plans the Dems are making in a desperate attempt to hold the Senate:
What's perhaps even more amazing is that their budget - which they presumably plan to be the groundwork for a claim that they're the fiscally responsible ones - predicts a higher deficit than the one about to be passed by the GOP-controlled House. It's true, yes, that it's smaller than the one in the President's budget, but the two "GOP" versions fully fund the President's military spending request; Conrad's diverts some of it to social spending. Why they think that will go over with the electorate is quite a mystery, I must say.Conrad's right, of course. Securing the future of Social Security is a vital test of the current Congress' mettle. And, so long as Tom Daschle is Senate Plurality Leader, they will fail it miserably. Their only hope of long-term survival as a party is to keep as many Americans as possible on the public teat. So they will demagogue Social Security right up to the day (now likely to arrive before I am eligible to retire) that the United States government defaults on its promises.
Perhaps the saddest non-legacy of the Clinton Administration is that he could have secured himself a permanent legacy, a place in the pantheon of greats so strong that no number of scandals could ever have dislodged him, if only he had had the courage to reform Social Security in the manner proposed by President Bush. Just as, in the words of the ancient Vulcan proverb, "only Nixon could go to China", so Bubba could have privatized Social Security. He was largely successful pulling his party - kicking and screaming - up to a level of sustainable credibility on such things as the economy and crime; he could have done the same for entitlements.
From the desk of Jane Galt:So here's my opinion on
So here's my opinion on racial profiling: legalize drugs and concealed carry.
Think about it. All those traffic stops, the stop-and-frisks that humiliate and anger a large sector of society -- what are the cops looking for? When they make some kid drop his pants in the middle of the street, they're not checking to see whether he's carrying a stolen tv in there -- they're looking for weapons or drugs. Legalize concealed carry and drugs and you eliminate any payoff, in terms of making cops' quotas, to the searches. We also get rid of a lot of the payoff to the crime that leads to the environment in which the searches are necessary or permissible.
Now here's a question: If we legalize drugs, do we allow money to flow into the inner city, by creating a more stable environment, or pull money out of the inner city, by removing idiot bankers dropping $500 on a whiff of cocaine?
March 26, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Strike a blow for common
Strike a blow for common sense: Yes, you can evict drug users from public housing.
Now, followers of this page will know that I am in favor of legalizing drugs. All of 'em. Don't care how much they weigh, what class they are, or to what extent they resemble or do not resemble crack cocaine. Take the laws off the books.
However, given that the laws are still on the books, drug use is accompanied by a great deal of other crime and anti-social behavior. And unlike other people, the other residents of the housing projects can't move away from trouble; they're stuck with whatever the government chooses to let live there. I'm always entranced by the thought of forcing the ACLU lawyers who argue these cases to live next door to the tenants they're willing to inflict on our minimum wage workers.
Predictably, poverty advocates are screaming that this is discrimination. Wake up, Moonshine; the sixties are over. The problems of the poor today are no longer lack of the basic necessities for survival; the problems of the poor can be divided into three categories: lack of status goods (Wal-Mart sneakers instead of Nikes); their own behavioral problems, for which they lack the safety net that middle class status affords; and the behavior problems of other poor people with whom the government forces them to live. We have a choice between guaranteeing, for those at the bottom, either a respectable if not glamorous standard of life for those who choose to live respectably; or squalor for everyone. There is no way of both guaranteeing everyone a place to live, and making the places that we offer to the less fortunate meet a minimum standard of decency; the two aims are mutually exclusive, because the essential problem with many of these places is the tenants. Not all of the tenants; just a significant minority that make it unliveable for anyone else. (I realize we have a third option, which is to bulldoze the places, but that's another discussion) While personally I'd like to see drugs decriminalized, I still heartily endorse the principle that we can kick criminals out of public housing, even if they're not the primary tenant.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Meanwhile, SmarterTimes lets us know
Meanwhile, SmarterTimes lets us know that the New York Sun is almost here! I don't know if it will be good enough to threaten the Grey Lady, but I'm willing to give it a try for $2.50 a week, their special subscription rate. I heartily encourage anyone in New York to take a subscription; even if your politics jibe with those of the Times, it can't be a bad thing to have more intelligent voices in the arena. Help us shake things up a little!
From the desk of Jane Galt:A chance conversation today reminded
A chance conversation today reminded me of a long family tradition of doing the wrong thing in the middle of a crisis; specifically, when assaulted.
About 18 years ago my grandfather, then 70, was working in his gas station when a man came in and demanded the cash. This man was 35, over 6 feet tall, and weighed considerably more than my grandfather, who weighed in at 6 feet and 150 pounds. Rather than doing the sensible thing and handing over the take, my grandfather leapt over the counter and lunged at him. When the cops arrived, the would-be robber was begging them to pull this crazy old man off him. The local papers wrote him up as a sort of geriatric wonder, which angered my grandfather deeply. My mother was angry too -- because he'd risked his life for the contents of the cash register drawer. She tried to get him to promise that next time, he'd comply quietly.
A few years later, my mother's purse was snatched by someone who was also, coincidentally, younger and larger than she was. Rather than doing the sensible thing, she chased him four blocks, threw him against a wall, retrieved her purse, and held him there for a little while before she realized that, this being New York, no one was going to go for the cops whilst she detained him. She let him go. I furiously lectured her on the relative values of her wallet and her continued good health.
A couple of years after that, I was sauntering down Osage Street in the lovely Philadelphia dusk when two teenagers appeared out of a corner. One of them grabbed my wrist; the other said "Give me your money, [Expletive deleted]". A flash of metal indicated that this one had some sort of a weapon, although I didn't see it too clearly, so for all I know they were holding me up with a roll of Reynolds Wrap.
I should mention that at the time I was dating a fellow who was a black belt in Karate and who had endeavored to teach me same. Unfortunately up to that point, all I had mastered was the scary yell and the fighting stance. Yet such was my rage at the thought of these little twerps trying to get their grubby hands on MY MONEY that rather than doing the sensible thing and giving them the eighty dollars and change that I was carrying, I emitted my best scary yell, yanked my wrist out of the hand of Perp #1, and assumed fighting stance.
The second I had done this I recognized that it was completely insane. What was I going to do if they called my bluff -- say, "ha, ha, glad to see you fellows can take a joke," and hand over my money? I frantically sought ways to get myself out of the now deeper predicament I was in.
I needn't have bothered. The one with the reynolds wrap said, "Oh, [expletive deleted], man, she knows karate!" and the two of them took off down the street. Amusingly, the other one kept looking behind him to see if I was chasing them. I suspect that I may have been their first foray into the dark underworld of crime; hopefully, I was their last. Thank you, Jean Claude Van Damme.
The point is, you can't know what you would do in a real crisis until you're in it. We like to believe that we will do the exact right thing; that we would be the ones hiding Jews in Nazi Germany; fighting against apartheid in South Africa; that in battle we would be heroic, and that in extremes of personal need we would hew to our deepest principles. But if you can't even plan a simple thing like what you're going to do when you get mugged, how sure can you be that you'd take heroic risks when the stakes are higher?
From the desk of Jane Galt:I don't know about you,
I don't know about you, but I watched the Oscars for about ten minutes. After suffering through Tom Cruise's speech, which sounded like the live version of the painfully earnest essays people write to get into film school, I thought "I'd pretty much rather be doing anything else" and went off to finish my taxes. Luckily, Cintra Wilson has suffered for all of us by sitting though the entire thing and producing a summary that is vastly more entertaining than the original.
March 25, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:I don't have anything in
I don't have anything in particular to say about this, except that over the past week or so I have been recalling the sort of righteous anger that suffused every fibre of my moral being six months ago, as the tributes roll out to the dead. This is a particularly moving one, because all it is is a description of the ordinary lives the people on Flight 93 were living, right up to the time they had to become heroes.
March 24, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:The law of unintended consequences
The law of unintended consequences is everywhere, even Afghani textbooks.
From the desk of Jane Galt:From over at Jumping to
From over at Jumping to Conclusions, there's a possibility that two of the hijackers were treated for Anthrax last June. It's a retroactive diagnosis, of course, but could put paid to the widespread rumor that the Feds know who the anthrax guy is, and he works for us.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Here's what I don't understand
Here's what I don't understand about the Democrats refusal to pass amnesty, while Bush pushes it: is this really not going to push some of their latino base into the arms of the Republicans?
From the desk of Jane Galt:Slow news morning, so I'm
Slow news morning, so I'm going to post something I've been meaning to do for a while: the answers, if anyone cares, to the emails that I got regarding my article on the Microsoft Anti-trust case. Of course, they tend to stress the same broad themes, so I'll just condense here, though you can see a good sample of criticisms, and applause, for the article here in the Salon letters section.
The amazing thing to me is how many people who emailed seemed to be trying to continue an argument with me that they'd started with someone else. The purpose of the article was not to argue that Microsoft played fair; it was to argue that the lawsuit Netscape is bringing is full of holes. But rather than responding to that, something I said touched off a hotbutton in their heads, and they commenced a familiar argument as if I were taking the other side.
You can too buy an Apple/Sun station for under $1000!
This has two answers. The first is that $1000 was essentially an arbitrary number: the point was that the cheapest PC's are about 25% cheaper than the cheapest Apple, more than 50% cheaper than the cheapest Sun. I could have said $900, and then you wouldn't have anything to email about.
The second answer is that I priced systems with the following criteria: CPU, printer, monitor, extended warranty (on the assumption that we are talking about the most computer illiterate consumers). The iMac comes in over $1000; the Sun comes in around $1600 (that $949 price didn't include a monitor). Yes, but. . . many of you argued that one or the other component was unecessary. Fine. Strip off everything and the Dell is $549, the Apple $799, the Sun $1200 (I refuse to concede that a monitor is optional).
Yes, but. . . there's actually more "value" in an Apple/Sun when you count software, performance, or whatever. That's a value judgement. Firewire maybe fantastic, but it's not something that everyone wants, as evidenced by the fact that not everyone has it. YOU may value your iMac at well over what it cost, but assuming that your hierarchy of values represents some absolute, objective standard is what made Communism such a rousing success. (Comrade Oblenko likes black pants better than brown -- therefore, we will only produce black pants and save many rubles on dye!)
Bundling Was Unfair Competition
The best argument I've heard on this score is that IE loads faster because it loads at startup; this makes Netscape compare unfairly.
Here's the thing, though -- I have a hard time believing that consumers make their software choices based on the extra 10 seconds they have to wait for Netscape to load.
If they do, however, then this is a genuine advantage of the browser to the conumer, one that Netscape couldn't replicate. Remember, the Appellate court ruled that the purpose of the Anti-trust legislation was to protect the consumer, not Netscape. You're going to protect the consumer by forcing them to give up a feature they like?
There is a compelling argument to be made about some of the API's, except that Netscape didn't make it. We can't try the case in the papers.
Microsoft designs its code so other programs run badly
Sigh. Also not in the complaint. Nonetheless:
Find me a Microsoft programmer who admits this, please -- and not one that your brother-in-law met at a party; one who's actually put it in writing. I've met several (current and former) who deny it adamantly, but then they would, wouldn't they? But short of a confession, or your looking at the Windows source code, you don't actually have any evidence that the reason that Microsoft programs run better is that Microsoft sabotages its competitors, rather than that the code is better. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. But you don't know and neither do I. And I know enough programmers to know that they'll blame anything when their code doesn't work, from sunspots to their officemate sending "evil thoughts" at them.
Users are lazy and stupid
That's a tech's perspective. I'm sure those dolts down in accounting feel the same way about what you do with your checkbook. The evidence just isn't there that they are imprisoned by whatever software is on the desktop; as I point out in the article, they proved perfectly capable of downloading Netscape when the dreadful I.E. 3.0 was on teh desktop. They stopped when it was no longer necessary to do so.
Internet Explorer isn't actually a "single platform"
It may well be that IE violates the "write once, run anywhere" ideal; I'm not a web developer. But the point I was trying to make is that if there are network effects in the browser market, they come from the web developers; the software isn't hard enough to use to create real switching costs, and of course users don't create files to share with other users, the source of the network effects for programs like Microsoft Office.
If the point is that network effects aren't as strong as were previously thought, I agree with you. So does Microsoft; that's why they compete like hell in every market they're in.
Unix is better
The argument that I was discussing was not about the Unix kernel, which is undoubtedly better (as many people pointed out) than Apple's old core; it was about Unix as implemented in Solaris, etc. Which is expensive and requires extensive training for users because it's harder to use. I frankly don't understand why people want to argue with me about this; it is empirically more expensive, and if you want empirical evidence of its ease of use, plop one computer illiterate user in front of a Unix box, the other in front of a Windows machine, and see which one's working faster. Linux is great -- and requires a lot of time to custom build a stable system, since the problems that were inherent in Windows are also inherent in Linux -- a whole lot of third party drivers that can interfere with eachother. That's why (I imagine) I know so many people who perfected their Linux system two years ago after much fiddling -- and haven't touched it since. Unix doesn't have to be all things to all people to be a great system; I don't understand why its fans can't accept that.
Netscape was free too
Check your facts. Netscape was free -- initially, while they built market share to that 70%+. At the point where Microsoft started to eat their market share, they were charging $40 a pop.
Microsoft's not Free -- You pay for it as part of your Windows license
So far, no one's been able to prove this. Arguments rely on one of two things:
1) It's not free for other platforms Check your facts. At least for Unix and Mac, it's free as far as I can tell. Go to Microsoft & download it if you don't believe me.
2) Pricing has changed Extremely hard to prove. Most proofs seem to relate to Microsoft's practice of raising the price of it's old operating systems to that of its newest release, which has more to do with other strategies than its browser prices. It's hard to generate a "true" price for Windows, because the makers of the other main competitive OS's either don't charge (Linux), or are integrated software/hardware makers, which changes the economics of their business.
In a larger sense this is true, of course; some of the profits from Windows go to pay for browser development -- but that doesn't mean that the company would necessarily charge less for WIndows; those profits might otherwise go into Bill Gates' pocket. Unless, of course, Netscape had succeeded in its strategy to seize the strategic monopoly position of Microsoft, in which case you'd be paying those profits to Netscape.
I'm an evil, pro-Microsoft shill
Did you read the article, or just the headline? Saying that Microsoft should win the lawsuit is not the same thing as saying that Microsoft is a good guy. I just don't think you should indict someone for something they didn't do, just because you can't make a case for something you know they did.
Best technology doesn't necessarily win in the marketplace
What's "best"? Every single person who made this argument achieved it -- if they offered examples at all, rather than just stating it, a priori, by leaving out attributes that they didn't care about, like price, or compatibility, or customer support, or something. Perhaps there are compelling examples, other than the widely debunked QWERTY or VHS ones, of a better technology losing, but I haven't seen it.
The Total Cost of Ownership of Unix is lower
As a consultant, I ran TCO's for Unix and Windows (and the person running the TCO for Unix was our Unix guru, not me). It isn't. Again, such comparisons are usually achieved by leaving out little things like training and availability of software. When it was lower, we used Unix.
Netscape server isn't as integrated with Netscape as IE is with Windows
That's true. That's because there's another viable product on the market. It's not seriously in question that Netscape initially planned to have a server platform that would work better than rival systems for the same reason Netscape advocates claim IE works better than Netscape. That's why investors were throwing so much money at them -- they thought the browser franchise would be a license to mint cash.
Microsoft's giving away its browser was predatory pricing
No argument here. Which I said in my article. Problem is, it's not in the complaint.
AOL isn't better
Than what? Than MSN it is. Consumers said so.
Personally, I wouldn't use AOL if they paid me. But a lot of people seem to disagree.
Microsoft themselves admitted Netscape is better
Not quite. What they said was that they didn't see how they could gain market share without leaning on their distribution network. That doesn't mean their product was necessarily worse (though that is indeed how Netscape cast it in their complaint); it could just as easily be taken to mean that Netscape's monopoly power was so locked in that the only way anyone could compete would be by leveraging the network. Which doesn't mean that the Microsoft executive was correct. Remember how many e-mails AOL had to sift through to get that one, out of context, quote.
The decision to use a browser is not the same as the decision to use a web browser
True, but hard to see how this is relevant. Emails on this topic seemed to point to the fact that browsers have lower switching costs (once you've got an email address, it's harder to switch to another service). However, this should have helped Netscape, not harmed them, if the desktop icon were truly decisive.
I don't understand how Microsoft tried to take over open standards to force people to their browser
Au contraire. But I didn't have time to elaborate on it; the article was long as it stood. And the core point is,
The fact that IE may have been better is not proof that it should have won
I'll quote directly from a Salon letter:
Even the "free browser" argument gets garbled in McArdle's presentation. The point is that Microsoft can afford to support a free product indefinitely, while a company like Netscape cannot. This is a brilliant bullying tactic on Microsoft's part, since a free product is a boon to the consumer, and their motives appear less predatory.Netscape isn't as good, but that's not the point of the antitrust suit. Netscape's 70 percent market dominance was not "monopolistic" as McArdle contends in her opening. Saying that IE is better, so nothing unseemly happened, is like saying that Nicole Kidman turns out to be a pretty good actress, so her marriage to Tom Cruise must have nothing to do with her success. Nepotism and Monopoly work the same way; they ensure success, even when the success is deserved. And that apparently is too subtle an idea for Ms. McArdle.
Predatory pricing -- don't need to go over it again.
70% market share is usually considered in the monopolistic range, at least when considering mergers and such.
The last is an interesting point, but the problem is that the writer has it backwards. Microsoft doesn't have prove it would have won the market share anyway; Netscape has to prove it wouldn't have. Which it can't.
Using IE as the help file made it more likely to win
Don't buy it. Browsers just aren't that hard to use, and the version used for the help file is stripped down and altered so that the relevant parts (the navigation buttons) are features of both Netscape and IE.
Microsoft didn't succeed just because its superior
I didn't say it did. I said it didn't succeed just because of its distribution practices, which is what Netscape is trying to argue.
March 23, 2002
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Stop Hollings Now
Click here for petitions, etc.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Live from the WTC has
Live from the WTC has received a coveted 4.5 stars from the most excellent John and Antonio (unfortunately, no permalink, but that's okay because you should read the whole thing anyway). Guys, when I said that I loved Europeans, I most especially meant ones who say nice things about me.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Curses, Foiled Again!
I haven't been able to access blogspot sites today. Blogger itself is working (it powers my "Rapid Droppings" to the right). Sitemeter suggests a few sites have commented (Coyote, for instance), but I can't read them.
I guess this means I have to work on my taxes.
Incidentally, next week stands to be even busier than last, including a multi-city tour, so don't look for heavy volume.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Blogger's down. I'm waiting for
Blogger's down. I'm waiting for the day when my host, my comments, my stats, and my blogging software are all working at the same time for more than a couple of hours. Then it's me for a bottle of Dom and a copy of the Critical Review!
From the desk of Jane Galt:Krugmanwatch: Social Security
Warning: Long column with more numbers than commentary. Not for the faint of heart or those with narcoleptic disorders.
In reading Paul Krugman’s latest piece, I’m reminded of a story.
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, when Jane Galt was just another computer consultant in the vast swamp of the New York financial community, I was working on a project that involved duct-taping together the technology infrastructure of two firms that had merged. My firm had produced a new design; it had been signed off on; and yours truly was about to implement it, when wait! A technology manager whose job was about to go bye-bye saw a golden opportunity to save his career by putting himself in charge of the project. To that end, he fashioned an alternative proposal and put it forward.
Now, I am the first to admit that there may be many ways to solve a single design problem, and that many of the variables hinge on value judgments, hazy priority assessments, and aesthetic considerations. Too, I have made my fair share of boneheaded design moves, the stupidity of which, in retrospect, seemed blindingly obvious. So I feel that I am on solid ground when I say that this was the single worst design of anything that I have ever seen, and I include Pepsi Clear.
This fellow was an old mainframe chap, and he took one look at our distributed, high-availability, high-redundancy plan and shuddered. Instead he proposed an enormous NT 4.0 server, the largest then made, maxed out with every bit of memory and hard drive space that any company would sell you. Actually, he proposed two of them, using server mirroring software called Octopus. One server. Running all the file, print, and auxiliary services, excluding market data, for a user base of between 500-1000 users. It was expensive, slow, and it provided a lovely, large single point of failure for the entire firm.
Friends to whom I showed this design were awestruck by its stupidity. “It’s breathtakingly idiotic,” said one. “It has its own weird logic that makes me wonder if I’m missing something.”
“This man needs help,” said another. A third, my most trusted mentor, called me ten minutes after I emailed him the proposal.
“I hope you’re not letting this man near your servers,” he said.
We pointed out all the design flaws in a long letter, and ultimately I ended up in a meeting where we were supposed to discuss the merits, or lack thereof, of the proposal. I started by pointing out some of the more pressing concerns, like the way a bad disk sector could take down the single, enormous volume on which his design depended. And he began to lie.
He made technical claims for his system and its software that were not only untrue of this particular system, but unavailable in any Intel-based system anywhere. No matter what I said, he had a refutation. Which is easy, of course, if the board doesn’t know a NIC from a knicknack, and you have no compunctions about making up features that violate the laws of physics. I gave up when he claimed that the motherboard was hot-swappable. How do you answer that? “My system is not only faster and better than yours, but also shines your shoes and dispenses ice cold beer” would have been the only rational response, but I felt uncomfortable advancing such claims in the presence of other sentient beings.
And now I feel it all again: the tingling on the back of my neck; the icy chill in my veins; the helpless rage forming an aching knot in my stomach. That’s right, Paul Krugman is talking about Social Security.
Remember the "bring out your dead" scene in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"? It's the one where the old man declares, "I'm not dead!" "Yes, he is," insists his younger companion, who persuades the undertaker to hit the old man over the head and cart him away.Now you understand the Bush administration's policy toward Social Security.
Makes me feel kinda dumb for running the numbers, when all I really needed was a Blockbuster card.
Ordinarily, the annual trustees' report on Social Security is released at a morning press conference, and simultaneously posted on the Web; this gives reporters a chance to read the material and discuss it with outside experts before filing their articles. Last week, however, the first copies were made available late in the afternoon, leaving hardly any time for analysis. One wag joked that the information was being closely held to keep it out of the hands of terrorists.But the real reason was surely to avoid too much attention to the report's unwelcome conclusion: that Social Security is in very good shape. True, the rest of the government is running big deficits, and borrowing heavily from the retirement fund — but Social Security isn't the source of that problem.
How does he do it? He knows exactly what went on in the minds of the Bush Administration without talking to a single person in it – knows to virtual certainty. Now I know how he performs his statistical wonders – he reads our innermost thoughts by remote control.
The introductory summary — which, unlike the report itself, is mainly a political document — does its best to make the worst of a good situation. But the bottom line is that the long-run sustainability of Social Security looks better than ever. The staff of the Social Security Administration, using conservative assumptions, now says that the system could operate without any changes at all — no cuts in benefits, no additional revenue — until 2041, three years longer than it projected last year.
I'm sure that 2041 sounds comfortably far off to Krugman; in all likelihood, he'll be dead. I, on the other hand, will be just entering my golden years when -- oops! -- there will only be enough money to pay 73% of current benefits.
I hope this satisfies readers who, when I criticize bogus arguments for privatizing Social Security, demand to hear my answer to the crisis. There isn't any crisis: the system looks good for 40 years, and with a bit of extra resources can survive indefinitely.
And this is where he says “the motherboard is hot-swappable and I don’t have to worry about electrostatic shock because this server won’t run on electricity” and my eyeballs begin to sizzle.
How in hell do you get that from this (or for the hard core numbers fans, this)?
While Federal law designates the Social Security and Medicare accounts as "trust funds," the accounts are not "trusts" in the private accounting sense in which funds of one party are held by a second party as a fiduciary. Rather, the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are financial accounts in the U.S. Treasury into which all income to these programs is credited and from which all benefits and administrative costs of the programs are paid. These accounts are established by Social Security and Medicare legislation. This legislation names the Secretary of the Treasury as the "Managing Trustee" with responsibility for overseeing the trust fund accounts. All revenues into the system not required to pay current expenses are used by the U.S. Treasury for general government expenses or to reduce the outstanding publicly held debt. In return, the Social Security and Medicare trust funds are issued special non-marketable U.S. Treasury bonds that by law carry an interest rate equal to the average market yield on all medium and long-term marketable Treasury securities. Interest on these bonds is paid through the issuance to the trust funds of additional special non-marketable U.S. Treasury bonds.As financial accounts, these Federal trust funds have income, expenditures and assets. The 2002 Social Security Trustees Reports show the Social Security trust funds, for example, as having $1,213 billion in assets at the end of last year, and anticipated Social Security and Medicare surpluses over the next 10-15 years promise to further increase the assets in the trust funds by a substantial amount. These non-marketable U.S. Treasury securities are properly entered under "assets" on the financial accounting balance sheets of the Social Security system, and are available to the system to meet future obligations. It is this availability to meet future program obligations that results in this year’s Trustees Reports identifying 2041 as when the Social Security trust funds will be exhausted, even though under current law Social Security tax revenues are projected to fall short of expenditures beginning in 2017.
Unified Budget Viewpoint of Trust fund Surpluses
While the bonds held by the trust funds are assets from the vantage point of the Social Security and Medicare programs, from the viewpoint of the unified budget they are liabilities of the U.S. Treasury. No one doubts the U.S. Government will honor the bonds. But since the U.S. Treasury is the ultimate payer of the programs’ benefits and the trust fund assets are also debts of the U.S. Treasury, neither the interest paid on the bonds, nor their redemption, provides any net new income to the U.S. Treasury. When annual revenues from earmarked taxes for Social Security and Medicare begin to fall short of annual expenditures, such shortfalls inevitably must be made up by increased taxation, increased borrowing (i.e., the sale of more U.S. Treasury bonds to the public) and/or a reduction in other government expenditures. This fact is the basis for the view that trust fund assets have no "real" economic value. From a unified budget viewpoint, the trust fund surpluses are a budget accounting device and make no meaningful contribution to funding future Social Security or Medicare expenditures. They simply reflect the fact that in the past, surplus Social Security and Medicare revenues have been used by the U.S. Treasury to fund other government programs or to reduce outstanding Federal debt.
Actually, that's a trick question. I know where he got it: he cribbed it from two reports (found here and here) from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which is, you’ll be shocked to hear, a liberal think tank opposed to Bush’s tax cuts. Paul Krugman’s column is a rehash of their talking points.
More specifically: The long-run actuarial shortfall of Social Security is less than half the revenue that will be lost due to last year's tax cut. The common perception that the tax cut was no big deal, but that Social Security faces a terrible crisis, is completely upside down. But the powerful forces that want to dismantle Social Security won't take yes for an answer; they insist that the system is doomed.
Those numbers are a little funny, given that the CPBB itself estimates the cost of the tax cut at $2.5 Trillion, and the shortfall at $4.9 trillion -- how does he get them? By projecting the "Bush tax cuts" out for 75 years. But wait a minute, I hear you say; those tax cuts expire in 2010. Well, yes, technically that's correct. But if we pretend that they don't, you can see that the Social Security crisis is really all Bush's fault. You do see, it don't you?
Never mind trying to imagine the accuracy of a tax revenue forecast for this year from 1927; Krugman is telling us that the current problem with Social Security is a tax cut that hasn’t been enacted yet.
It isn’t. This is the problem:
 |
Which is what’s causing this:
How do you call plain numbers “political”, except in the sense that the real world is getting in the way of your ideals? I’m sure Mr. Krugman would like to ignore that bit about outlays exceeding intake in 2017, 24 years earlier than the date that Krugman tells us we’ll be “just fine”, but it’s hardly a political statement; it’s a mathematical extrapolation from numbers we can guess relatively well, at least compared to tax revenues: the number of people in the labor force, and the number of retired people.
Let’s go over it one more time. There is no trust fund, any more than you can start a “trust fund” by writing yourself IOU’s due in 2017 and spending the hell out of all your income now. Come 2017, you're gonna have exactly the same annual income whether or not you take those IOU's out of the "lockbox". Now I'm sure that 2017 sounds comfortably far away. But remember how awfully far off the year 2000 used to sound? It is later than you think.
The system is broke the minute outlays begin exceeding intake; that’s when we have to cut spending, raise taxes, or start borrowing. In 2017. Actually, we’ll feel the pinch even before, as the Social Security Surplus that’s been masking our deficit disappears and we have to make hard choices about spending. Hard choices Krugman doesn’t want us to make – a lightbulb goes off -- that’s why he’s using Social Security to campaign against the tax cut now, even though he knows that restoring every bit of those taxes won’t save us.
2041 is the year when it becomes a total frigging catastrophe. Best summed up in this email I received from Mindles H. Dreck:
Look at the table on page 67 of the report.I added at the bottom a line that indicates the percent of payrolls that the
"balance" is deficient in the year the "trust fund" disappears:Intermediate (2041) =4.5%
Low Cost = NA
High Cost (2029) = 15.4%So, in those years, taxes or debt, of one sort or another, might have to be
raised by 4.5% or 15.4% of total payrolls just to fund that year's retirees. And
that deficit persists.
As Mindles points out, saying that we’ll be fine until 2041 is like saying that people who jump off the Empire State Building will be fine – until they hit the ground.
Krugman also conveniently leaves out Medicare, which itself has an unfunded liability of $8.9 trillion (unfunded liabilities are what we call "Promises we've made to give people money at some date in the future without setting aside the money now to cover those promises". Like, for example, when you promised little Johnny you'd send him to the best college he got into.) That unfunded liability is how much we're gonna owe Medicare benificiaries after we subtract the imaginary trust fund.
Notice Krugman likes to discuss Social Security and Medicare separately, never in the same column – that way he can blame the shortfalls in both programs on the Bush Tax Cut, with room left over for The Poor Condition of Our Public Parks and The Disgraceful Behavior of Young People Today. Now, Paul, you have to pick. Either the tax cut is responsible for the Medicare deficit, or it could cover Social Security. Even if the Evil Bush Administration makes the cut permanent and throws in a free week at the Palm Beach Hilton for all its billionaire buddies, it can’t be responsible for both.
No, no, no! Says Paul. It’s not the fault of demographics – it can’t be! Not my beloved welfare state! It must be the Bush Administration, eager to starve the old people so their rich friends can use the bodies as mulch on their diamond ranches.
Never mind the rhetoric about retirement security; the real reason for the attack on Social Security is ideology. Here's what Edward Fuelner, president of the Heritage Foundation, wrote to supporters: ". . . today's policies are a product of the Great Society of the 1960s, which grew out of the New Deal of the 1930s, which was an assault on founding principles articulated in the 18th century. . . . Connecting the historical dots is no small task." For Great Society, read Medicare; for New Deal, read Social Security. And the real task is to connect the contemporary dots.For Heritage is the intellectual engine driving today's conservative movement. The foundation's Web site proudly quotes Karl Rove: "We stole from every publication we could; we stole several key staff persons; we want to steal more of your ideas." Indeed, before Elaine Chao became secretary of labor — and hence a trustee of Social Security — she was a fellow at Heritage. And the influence of Heritage spreads far and wide, from employees like Virginia Thomas (wife of the Supreme Court justice) to the stable of columnists featured on its opinion site TownHall.com, most notably Ann Coulter ("We need to execute John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too").
Honey, get the torches -- the freemasons are poisoning the wells!
And it won't surprise readers of my last column to hear that Heritage was founded with financial backing from Joseph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife.But I digress. The important thing is to understand what's really going on here. The ideological powers behind the current administration want to do away with Social Security — not to offer retirees a better deal, but because they are opposed to the program in principle. Unfortunately, that's an argument that won't work in the political arena; Social Security is very popular. So the strategy they have adopted is to declare that the program is already dead, or nearly so. If the facts say, on the contrary, that Social Security is very much alive, the administration doesn't want to hear about it. And it doesn't want you to hear about it, either.
The important thing is not to address our demographic crisis. It is certainly not to look at the actual numbers and try to fix things.
No, the important thing is to make sure that we all know that Joseph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife and their friends in the Bush Administration are trying to kick the old people out of their condos and make them live on the street so that all the billionaires can use them as slave labor in their yacht factories. The ones where Johnnie Walker Lindh’s dead body will be hung on the wall as a visible reminder of what can happen if you cross the Bush Administration.
Hell, I don't have to tell anyone, Democrat or Republican. You can add -- go look at the report. Then look at what Krugman says about it. You tell me whether he's being up front or lying through his teeth.
I’m reminded of another story. Actually a quote. From my economics textbook: “Economic value (wealth) is created when resources are moved from lower-valued to higher valued uses.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m sure glad Paul Krugman’s moved from writing books on international monetary theory to this.
From the desk of Jane Galt:What is up with the
What is up with the WTC cough? I've been sitting across from the Pile for six months now, and given that my asthma already had a nice head start, if anyone's got it, it should be me. But my asthma's about what you would expect if I was sitting on any construction site, even one where only 100% organic dirt from dispossessed Third World workers was floating around in the air. I'm waiting for Michael Fumento or someone to give me the straight talk on what's going on.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Keller Pegs the President
Bill Keller takes on President's character today in the Times today. First he deals with his smarts:
...to put it generously, Mr. Bush is not himself an intellectual. The sometimes skillful work of his speechwriters, which he sometimes delivers with conviction, cannot disguise the fact that he is not a deep thinker, a student of ideas, or even a very curious man. For all the spoon-fed portraits of the president exuding new gravitas since the war began, President Bush is still an easy man to take lightly.
Contrast this with Andrew Sullivan who is taking on the topic in his book club:
Some of the questions about Bush's intelligence arose from what can, I think, justly be called his poor brain-to-mouth coordination, and from his relative inelegance or simplicity in talking about policy. That's a yardstick that gets used, and it's probably a shallow one. But there are so many other yardsticks -- knowledge of one's own strengths and weaknesses, the ability to make accurate visceral judgments about people, the mental discipline it takes to keep an eye on the forest without getting distracted by the trees, a good and accurate sense of the atmosphere around you at a given time. And by these yardsticks, which are also incomplete and probably insufficient, Bush fares much better, I think.
Conclude what you will. I also found Bush came across as an imbecile during the campaign, but a flair for public speaking and ad-libbing really is only one form of intelligence. Any business person will tell you that many who are not smooth public speakers are extremely effective leaders within organizations.
Whether you like Reagan or not, he was an effective leader, and my memory of him as a speaker was actually similar to Bush. I often found it hard to pay attention to the "Great Communicator".
Clinton was great unscripted, but his speeches were horrible (and interminable). As a manager or leader, I always thought Clinton might have been taking on too much. Good leaders have a few clear priorities. Running around addressing every wrong, as demanded by the Times editorial pages, is a recipe for making no progress on many things. This is one of the great humiliations for those of us educated in elite Northeastern institutions. Our ability to juggle contrary ideas and B.S. our way through any confrontation is of little use, most of the time, in actually getting things done. It is salesmanship, not execution. At the risk of being criticized for your simplisme sometimes you have to hammer on a select few things, at the expense of others, in order to make them happen. That steel tariffs should even audition for that short list is a big disappointment.
Incidentally, one of the best public speakers I ever saw was Newt Gingrich. He had an amazing command of facts and a wonderful ability to use history in lively analogies. He is also very fast on his feet, and would not be tripped up in debates or press conferences. Much like Clinton, his most severe challenges came from his on flaws.
Keller's agenda, however, is not only to re-cast the standard "stupid W" line, but to extend it into something horribly sinister. By the end of this editorial, he has painted Bush as Senator Greg Stillson, the moralistic warmonger (played by Martin Sheen, of course) whose quest for the White House (and Armeggedon) is thwarted by the supernaturally prescient Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone:
"On tactics, he may be listening to Colin Powell," said Norman Podhoretz, the influential conservative editor and author. "But he's very clear as to his strategic objectives — not just to clean up Al Qaeda cells but to effect regime changes in six or seven countries and to create conditions which would lead to internal reform and modernization in the Islamic world."Whether the president will, in the end, take us to a multitude of wars in the cause of liberating the world from evil, or whether the mission will lose some of its energy when the cost (literal and political) grows, I can't tell. But I think Mr. Podhoretz correctly reads the president's heart.
If you were hoping for the right-of-center moderate Mr. Bush campaigned as, or if you shared the patronizing view of the president as a good-natured boob tugged along by avuncular ideologues, this may strike you as chilling. But have no doubt, it is très sérieux.
A bit of ominous French at the end, non?. Forgive me for putting words in Keller's mouth, but I'm hearing "He has rope-a-doped us. He is capable of a master plan, and it is hegemony through warfare."
This is not an analytical piece, it's a trial balloon for the next characterization the Democrats will try to foist on the President, and it reminds me of the intentionally frightening behavioral extrapolation used to turn a philandering and dissembling President into some master criminal or "freedom's greatest enemy". All's fair in campaigns, I suppose, but why can't Keller let Terry McAuliffe come up with this stuff instead of using the NYT Op-Ed pages? And if he thinks Bush is an unbalanced and dangerous crusader, why won't he just say so, instead of leaving it hanging in the air? Perhaps because he doesn't really believe it himself.
There is, however, some interesting material in the article about "libertarian conservatives" becoming disenchanted with Bush over free trade, military tribunals, etc. Enough, in fact, to make me wonder if Keller has been dabbling in the blogosphere.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Via OpinionJournal comes this tale
Via OpinionJournal comes this tale of a man who shot the armed men who were trying to rob the video store where his son worked. The police seem to be behaving with uncommon sense:
From his DeLand home Tuesday, Shockey recalled the events. The door burst open and two men rushed in. Ski masks covered their faces. One brandished a rifle and both were shouting violent, obscenity-laced threats."They made it clear that they would kill us," Shockey said. . . .The gunman first pointed the