comment review: 05-30-09

belmont club now has a link to older posts so i have stopped cloning the posts here.

i will continue to have coment review and other thoughs posted here however.

for example...

40. no mo uro:

There has never been a benevolent regime controlled by atheists, in fact more people died violent deaths at the hands of atheist regimes in the last century than dies in all the religious conflicts in history COMBINED.

The more atheist an institution becomes, the less open and free it becomes. A prime example would be the educaction industry in the U.S., where, as the population of professors has become increasingly atheist and secular (or, at best, some anemic form of Christian), freedom of speech has declined. Another example would be postmodern Europe.

Groups of people who claim to be Christian or Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu can do and have done bad things, but they have, historically, also created enlightened and free societies. There has never been a society controlled by atheists which has done this, and I suspect there never will be one.

I can say that all - every single one - of the most intolerant people, with regard to religion, that I have met have been atheists. More so than any of the Muslims I’ve encountered, and that’s saying something. It’s been my observation more often than not that an atheist is not someone who doesn’t believe in God but rather someone who views themself as godlike.

I have added some comments of my own to the crisis of unfaith thread... i start at comment 56

Congress vs the Fed ... can you find the "white hat"?

A very insightful (and even predictive) comment by L3

http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2009/05/18/the-death-of-kings/#comment-34

This reinforces for me the significance of the fact that the founders never really debated fully or settled the question of how best to handle monitary policy when laying out the constitution (they just sort of tossed it in with the legislative). Structural forms in government are important. The levers of power must be separated widely enough from one another that any small/medium collection of bad actors will have difficulty in reaching enough of them to bring the whole system under permanent control (this says nothing of course, about the chances of a large group of bad actors attempting to capture the system). Leo seems to have no objection to the way Federal Reserve power is assigned… but to me there is room for improvement. The seats in front of the levers of power (all of the levers of power) should be filled by processes in harmony with the principles of a republic. … again more emphasis structural forms.

Its natural that there should be a temptation whenever a wise/competent/benevolent public servant (or one who appears to be these things) comes on the scene to rely on them. To place as many important things under their control as they can successfuly administer. to give them expanded powers to enhance their ability to do good with their core powers. This temptation to rearrange the levers of power for the seeming benefit of the public must be resisted at all costs. When too many levers can be reached from one seat there is no aparent danger while one of worthy character occupies the seat… but it is an historical certainty that some eventual successor will prove less worthy… and oppression will follow… then the spilling of blood to pry the levers of power from his hands and set them a respectable and safe distance from one another again.

Separation of powers is the most significant structural feature of the US constitution. From grade school civics lessons we all automatically think of the separation of powers as primarily encompassing the judicial, legislative, and executive with the monetary power lumped in with the legislative (where as before the constitution most forms of government would have had monetary power with the executive), but I wonder if the time may not be approaching when monetary power needs to be seen in a similar light to the powers of the executive, legislative, and judicial; and therefore separated and established as its own branch of government. Likely small and relatively independent, something along the lines of the supreme court (but without the bit about life-time service).

comment review: 05-06-09

Here is a good one... especially the last part.

13. bogie wheel:
The criminalization of political differences may be the worst structural effect of this Administration. Yes, the economy is being transformed and yes, our national security may be degraded, but without the ability to conduct open, honest, candid civil discourse the mechanisms for change are, to use a strong word, castrated.

Good observation, batman. And for those people (not most here) who insist that the worst that can happen under TOTUS is for America to become a socialist-democratic purgatory of strangling nanny-state regulations …

… this is a very bad sign.

Having a public space for political dialogue — which can get fierce, nasty, and quite personal (if you think contemporary presidential campaigns are rhetorically vicious, check out some of the ones from past elections) — is essential to our system of government. Hence the First Amendment.

Driving disagreement out of that public space — by mob ridicule (Miss California, anyone?) or by outright criminalization — does NOT eliminate the thoughts behind that disagreement. All it does is (1) ensure that expression of disagreement will seek other avenues, and (2) take TPTB, once committed to complete elimination of disagreement, down the trail of actually going after the “bad” thoughts themselves. At which point you get Soviet-style psychiatric abuse.

Totalitarianism seeks to control not just every sphere of the slave’s life, but every expression of the slave’s person as well.

First they came for the behavior …

Then they came for the speech …

And finally they came for the thoughts …

To say that this is the complete antithesis of the American citizen’s standing under the US Constitution would be putting it far too mildly.

May 2, 2009 - 3:02 am

Thoughts lead to speech, and then thoughts and speech lead to behavior (action). Freedom is bound to be collectively present or absent in these 3 spheres together. Because fewer and fewer people are willing or able to take the time and put in the WORK to think (due mostly to defective primary/secondary education and also economic pressures) the capability of our society in that sphere is less than it has been in generations past. Correspondingly our other freedoms are subject to decline, since thought is the wellspring of speech and action.

Its funny how freedom of speech (and even action) can be enshrined in law yet rendered moot by a subtle undermining of the ability to think. It also inspires a gentle revision of the old saying, from: "those who don't read are no better off than those who can't" into "those who don't think (or act) are no better off than those who can't." Motivation/incentive is as big a part of the problem (and solution) as is ability.


...

here are some other rants/musings from Whiskey and Mongoose that I found interesting.

BC:05-05-09

fallen a bit behind it seems.

May 5th, 2009 7:13 am
Air Force None
The New York Post says that none of the photos taken during the VC-25 flyover of Manhattan will be released to the public, by order. “The $328,835 snapshots of an Air Force One backup plane buzzing lower Manhattan last week will not be shown to the public, the White House said yesterday. ‘We have no plans to release them,’ an aide to President Obama told The Post, refusing to comment further.”

May 4th, 2009 8:19 pm
The PKK loses its gamble
Noah Shachtman at Wired reports that Iranian helicopters have carried out airstrikes on Kurdish villages in Iraq, the first since the US toppled Saddam Hussein.

May 4th, 2009 6:33 am
Why should they worry?
The Voice of America reports that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is on a trip to the Middle East to reassure Egypt and Saudi Arabia that it is not abandoning them simply because it is engaging Iran.

May 4th, 2009 6:21 am
The taxman cometh
Open thread. Will Obama’s new tax compliance initiatives drive more companies overseas or is it simply a way of getting tax cheats to pay their fair share to the public coffers?

May 3rd, 2009 10:13 pm
Moral integrity
Step right up folks and take your political correctness quiz. For five points: who does a progressive person cheer for in a head-on clash between the NYT company and it’s unions?

May 3rd, 2009 9:36 pm
All roads lead to Rome
Lobbying is now a boom industry. The New York Times reports that in an era when people find they can do without many things, the one thing they can’t do without is influence in Washington. In an article entitled “Lobbyists Prosper in Downturn”, the NYT notes that while

May 3rd, 2009 4:01 pm
Houston, we’ve got a problem
The Examiner’s Caroline Grannan warns readers about the dangers of letting a ‘titan’ named Leo Linbeck III “build an empire of KIPP schools … Leo is also very involved with KIPP, one of the most successful public charter school programs in the U.S. He has been the ‘Chief Growth Architect’ at KIPP:Houston, leading the development of a plan to grow to 42 KIPP:Houston schools in the next 8 years, ” and involved with trying to match up high school teachers with scholars.

May 3rd, 2009 3:22 am
I will decide who gets what
Megan McArdle asks how you would want a hedge fund to behave if it handled your money. It’s not entirely an idle question. Hedge funds often represent institutional investors. The NYT reported in 2005 that one of pension funds that had moved assets into hedge funds was the General Motors fund. It’s been alleged, though I haven’t been able to find a hard citation, that the UAW pension fund is partly invested in hedge funds.

May 2nd, 2009 3:45 pm
Not exactly nine to five
How does this compare with working for ACORN? An NYT article entitled Dream job: Training Afghans as bullets fly describes the life of two Marines in outpost with 30 Afghans. “Their senior mentor, Cpl. Sean P. Conroy, of Carmel, N.Y., is 25 years old. His assistant, Lance Cpl. Brandon J. Murray, of Fort Myers, Fla., is 21.”

May 2nd, 2009 3:32 pm
Let loose the dogs of words
The New York Post says that “print reporters have posted a sign in the desk area of the White House press room reading, ‘Blog-Free Zone.’” (Hat tip: James Linville). I wonder what that’s supposed to mean?

May 2nd, 2009 2:37 pm
Lost
History will probably remember the Guantanamo Bay prison for longer than the already forgotten Prison S-21, where up to 20,000 people were tortured and killed by the Khmer Rouge. “Even though the vast majority of the victims were Cambodian, foreigners were also imprisoned, including Vietnamese, Laotians, Indians, Pakistanis, Britons, Americans, New Zealanders and Australians.” These were captured on the high seas as they were sailing through the South China Sea. “They included four Americans, three French, two Australians, a Briton and a New Zealander. One of the last prisoners to die was American Michael Scott Deeds, who was captured with his friend Chris De Lance while sailing from Singapore to Hawaii.”

May 1st, 2009 10:26 pm
A land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new
In Eric Ambler’s Epitaph for a Spy, the insignificant protagonist, Joseph Vadassy, is accidentally caught up in intrigue at a beach resort where behind the gay facade, danger lurked unseen. While sitting in the garden he observed that despite appearances, all around him in the flowers, a vast tableau of death was being played out among insects and nocturnal birds, with unseen tragedy just behind every beautiful petal. Nothing in the world, he observed, was quite as unblemished as it seemed, as he would learn when the police came for him on subject he knew nothing about.

May 1st, 2009 8:28 pm
Thanks but no thanks
Andy McCarthy declines an invitation to participate in “the President’s Task Force on Detention Policy”. The text is at the link. Most of the reasons for his refusal are straightforward.

May 1st, 2009 1:06 pm
In the central blue
Here are two interesting articles on how well Russian air to air would fare against US aircraft. The first tries to estimate the effectiveness of Russian Beyond Visual Range missiles against the US capabilities and argues that Russian aircraft, with their large missile loadouts and huge missile airframes can compensate somewhat for US quality by firing multiple missile salvos, which in many-on-many situations can generate a one for one tradeoff against US aircraft.

April 30th, 2009 7:46 am
Sealed with a kiss
The BBC reports that the suspects in the Hariri murder are off the hook as Hillary Clinton vowed never to “sell out” Lebanon in an AP article.

April 30th, 2009 3:38 am
The price of safety
So does this mean that Barack Obama agrees me? Or do political circumstances only create the illusion? The LA Times reports that the President has acknowledged that voluntarily refusing to employ certain forms of coercive interrogation may make it harder to obtain intelligence from enemy captives. However, he is willing to pay the moral price.

April 29th, 2009 4:04 pm
Up, up and away
A 6′4″ Eric Hagerman says he dreads flying because there simply isn’t enough space in an economy class seat for his outsized frame. More importantly, he argues there isn’t enough space in it for the ‘average’ sized person. The passenger can get into the space provided, but once there, he is practically immobile.

Comment review: 05-04-09

Leo on Public Goods:

3. Leo Linbeck III:
Every dysfunctional social movement has, at its core, at
least one major misconception. Socialism’s is the perfectibility of human
beings. Nazism’s was the superiority of the Aryan people. Juche’s is the
infallibility of the Kims.
The current brand of American liberalism believes
that a public good is any product or service that can be provided by the
government. If the government can provide something, the government should
provide it.
This is not the economic definition of a public good. By that
definition, a good is a public good if, and only if, it meets both of the
following criteria:
1. The marginal cost of providing the product or service
is low.2. The marginal cost of excluding someone from the product or service is
high.
Goods that meet these criteria must be provided by the government
because a private provider could not prevent free riders, therefore has no
incentive to produce the goods. Also, because the marginal cost is low, there
are significant economies of scale that can make everyone better off if they can
be realized.
A classic example of a public good is national defense. If we
protect our nation against invasion by a foreign country, and a baby is born,
the cost of protecting that additional baby is basically zero. However, the cost
of excluding that baby from our security shield is very high.
The fact is
that most goods are private goods. There are very few public goods, and even
some “traditional” public goods are becoming private goods as technology
changes. For instance, roads were once considered a public good, mainly because
they didn’t meet the second test (how could you exclude drivers from entering a
freeway without slowing down traffic and imposing a very high cost on everyone
else?). Now, however, with RFID tags and license plate recognition systems, the
cost of keeping people out has dropped dramatically, and probably will continue
to drop. This means that roads could eventually become fully
privatized.
However, the modern American liberal believes things like health
care and education are public goods. But they’re not; it’s pretty cheap and easy
to keep people out of hospitals and schools, and the marginal cost of healthcare
is pretty high. What they really mean by public goods is that they want the
public (ie. the government) to provide them.
It is pretty clear the Framers
understood the rarity of public goods, even if they did not have a neat economic
definition to go by. That is why they had a set number of enumerated powers
which were supposed to limit the scope of the Federal government to only those
things that were clearly public goods (national defense, postal service, minting
money, diplomacy, etc.). But over the past 80 years, the scope of government has
expanded inexorably. Now mortgages are held by some to be goods that must be
provided by government. GImme a break.
Barnett is right in that the only way
the expanding writ of the Federal Government can be stopped and reversed is by
constitutional amendment. Whether the Tea Party movement is the right vehicle
for advancing this agenda is open to debate.
But it certainly can’t
hurt…
L3
Apr 27, 2009 - 8:34 pm

comment review: 05-02-09

more from leo:

33.
Leo Linbeck III:
Great post, W.
Perhaps faith is the art of tentative
answers.
I’ve always thought that reality is like a a set of nonlinear
partial differential equations, sort of like a much more complex version of the
Navier-Stokes equations. It can’t be solved as-is, so we are all forced to throw
out terms to make the problem tractable. Trying to solve it as-is will simply
drive us crazy.
Thing is, different people throw out different terms, but not
all simplifications are equally valid. Throwing out the wrong term will give you
a really wrong answer. Sure, the problem is solvable, but the answer is not
true. (Kind of a variation on Gödel.)
In the end, then, our world view is
defined by what we ignore. So choosing what to ignore is the art of faith, an
art that relies on both Athens and Jerusalem. But while all answers are indeed
tentative, if we ignore the right terms we never stray too far from the truth.
And that is a comforting thought, especially when we are confronted with
evil.
Cheers,L3
Apr 27, 2009 - 5:37 pm

here is more leo

3. Leo Linbeck III:
Every dysfunctional social movement has, at its core, at least one major misconception. Socialism’s is the perfectibility of human beings. Nazism’s was the superiority of the Aryan people. Juche’s is the infallibility of the Kims.
The current brand of American liberalism believes that a public good is any product or service that can be provided by the government. If the government can provide something, the government should provide it.
This is not the economic definition of a public good. By that definition, a good is a public good if, and only if, it meets both of the following criteria:
1. The marginal cost of providing the product or service is low.2. The marginal cost of excluding someone from the product or service is high.
Goods that meet these criteria must be provided by the government because a private provider could not prevent free riders, therefore has no incentive to produce the goods. Also, because the marginal cost is low, there are significant economies of scale that can make everyone better off if they can be realized.
A classic example of a public good is national defense. If we protect our nation against invasion by a foreign country, and a baby is born, the cost of protecting that additional baby is basically zero. However, the cost of excluding that baby from our security shield is very high.
The fact is that most goods are private goods. There are very few public goods, and even some “traditional” public goods are becoming private goods as technology changes. For instance, roads were once considered a public good, mainly because they didn’t meet the second test (how could you exclude drivers from entering a freeway without slowing down traffic and imposing a very high cost on everyone else?). Now, however, with RFID tags and license plate recognition systems, the cost of keeping people out has dropped dramatically, and probably will continue to drop. This means that roads could eventually become fully privatized.
However, the modern American liberal believes things like health care and education are public goods. But they’re not; it’s pretty cheap and easy to keep people out of hospitals and schools, and the marginal cost of healthcare is pretty high. What they really mean by public goods is that they want the public (ie. the government) to provide them.
It is pretty clear the Framers understood the rarity of public goods, even if they did not have a neat economic definition to go by. That is why they had a set number of enumerated powers which were supposed to limit the scope of the Federal government to only those things that were clearly public goods (national defense, postal service, minting money, diplomacy, etc.). But over the past 80 years, the scope of government has expanded inexorably. Now mortgages are held by some to be goods that must be provided by government. GImme a break.
Barnett is right in that the only way the expanding writ of the Federal Government can be stopped and reversed is by constitutional amendment. Whether the Tea Party movement is the right vehicle for advancing this agenda is open to debate.
But it certainly can’t hurt…
L3
Apr 27, 2009 - 8:34 pm

Comment review: 05-01-09

another good education coment from LL3.

54.
Leo Linbeck III:
So, I guess I have a different take on this issue.

I’m not at all worried about the 12-year-old tunaphobe. Any kid whose parents can
afford to take them to a restaurant where seared tuna is on the menu will, by
the end of their senior year in high school, be able to read, write, and
calculate well enough to enter college and get a degree. These kids will likely
enter the workforce, make good money, pay their taxes, and vote. Over time,
armed with enough literacy and numeracy, they will come to see that the
environmental movement is anti-human; after all, the ecos hardly mask their
hostility to homo sapiens sapiens.

Now if they choose to live in a liberal
bubble like the West Village or Haight-Asbury, they’ll still believe all this
gobbledygook. But, then, that’s the way they’d believe regardless of what they
learned in 3rd grade, because those bubbles generally operate on, and attract
people to, a collective identity narrative that is impervious to logic, reason,
and data. The good news is that these bubbles are small,
electorally-speaking.

No, the big danger to our republic is the mass of urban
children who either don’t graduate from high school (>50% nationally), or
graduate with such minimal skills that they are dependent upon their “betters”
in the political world. Without the ability to read, write, figure, and think
critically, they are easily manipulated by the latest purveyor of
snake-oil.

Since Plato (at least), it has been well-known that a republic
relies upon an educated populace. Circumstances and environments change, and it
is the ability for the citizen to assess these changes themselves, without the
“leadership” of the so-called elite, that allows them to make good decisions as
a collective, through the ballot box.

What we are seeing in the AGW movement
is an attempt to leverage widespread ignorance into political power through the
liberal application of arguments from authority. This style of argumentation is
most effective on those who are intimidated by smart people, and it is a lot
easier to intimidate the illiterate.

So, at the end of the day, I’m not as
concerned that kids are learning the wrong stuff (though this is still a
concern). I’m much more concerned that kids are being rendered incapable of
learning and thinking on their own, and it is this incapacity that leaves them
open to the demagoguery that characterizes the proponents of AGW.
And it is
this incapacity that puts our republic at risk.
L3
Apr 25, 2009 - 5:03
pm