Chasing the cow

It does not work

2011-06-03T10:08:00.000-04:00

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. … And an enormous debt to boot!
Henry Morgenthau, Jr. - FDR Treasury Secretary, testifying before Congress, May 1939

Imagine two scenarios:

Today's awful economy but Obama loses his re-election bid
A booming economy, > 7% growth and < 6% unemployment, but Obama gets re-elected.

Which would you choose? I would choose the second, of course.

But the second scenario just will not happen. Because the main causes prolonging this dismal grey economy are Obama's various policies -- big gov't spending chief among them. Sadly, I have no doubt that the second scenario could not possibly occur.

The sad thing is, we could right this ship tomorrow with little or no further gov't spending. We would just have to repeal three bills: Sarbanes/Oxley, Dodd/Frank and Obamacare. Regulations in those bills are hampering job creation. All it would cost to repeal them and reinstate the status quo ante would be the cost of printing the repeal bill and signing it into law.

Picture a lion, chained to the ground so she cannot hunt, weighed down with a heavy iron collar so she cannot lift her head to eat, and presented with oatmeal instead of meat. Is it any wonder such a beast would waste away and become sick? Would you express astonishment if her muscles atrophied and her skin sagged? But release her and let her hunt easy prey and will she not recover?

Three popular fallacies

2010-12-18T16:26:00.006-05:00

Have you noticed how some people discuss tax policy as though they were helping Santa describe who gets what toy or how many? Give earners a break on their taxes by lowering the rate and, they think, they've just done them a special favor. However, hike their taxes and, you are doing them no wrong, they should just be grateful you didn't take it all.

The discussion inevitably devolves into a claim of just how much said tax break "costs" Americans in "lost revenue". There are three fallacies required to arrive at this distorted notion.

That all income and property belongs first to the gov't and we are lucky for whatever they deign to let us keep. The government is not protector of property, but owner of it from its inception.
That government spending levels are a given and can be held hypothetically constant while we determine the contribution of tax rate changes to raise or lower the deficit.
Also presumed to be constant are the rates at which we earn money, most outrageously, that we work just as hard no matter what we earn after taxes. Incentives effect behavior in every aspect of human desire and endeavor except employment.

You have to believe every one of these fallacies or the arguments against lower tax rates fall apart. Let's take them in reverse order.

3. Incentives matter, except when they don't
We get coupons in the mail. At the food store we're told that if we buy one box of crackers, we get another one free. Companies pay for all or part of your health care insurance, put money in your retirement account, allow you to purchase shares of stock at a discount, maybe even a bonus at Christmas time. We promise our kids ice cream if they eat their veggies. My mom wielded a special disincentive she called "the black belt" that put an end to a good deal of bad behavior when I was growing up.

We understand incentives. We use them because they work. So why, in discussions of tax policy, do we pretend that people are immune to incentives (and disincentives) to work. We are supposed to believe that people will show up and work just as hard regardless of how the government increases or decreases their net pay by lowering or raising the tax rates.

Having been poor, I can well recall that the ever-present need for money led me to work extra hours just about any chance I got. And the threat that my unreliable car was going to break down in an unforeseen way provided a disincentive against turning down opportunities to sock away a little extra bread. Thirty years later with the wolf nowhere in the vicinity of the door, I am much more responsive to incentives and disincentives, as I have rediscovered along the way the joys of goofing off (especially when goofing off with the family I love). It takes something extra to get me off the couch and into the office (more often than not, that incentive is the work itself which I enjoy when it involves some new puzzle). We had two rounds of layoffs where I work; that's a strong disincentive against slacking.

It is never explained what makes decisions to work or stay at home immune from incentive. Never are we told what puts work beyond the reach of a the calculus that informs most of our other decisions large and small. Could it be that in fact incentives do apply and that lower tax rates would result in more hours worked, more wages taxed and that the decline in tax revenue would not be exactly proportional to the decline in tax rate?

Consumers are smart. People will switch credit cards when offered 2% cash back. They will increase their spending when they get 5% cash back instead of 2% on rather small purchases. They will refinance their homes to lower their interest rate 1%/year on payments that comprise roughly one quarter of their expenses. And we are supposed to believe that savvy earners will not respond to a 4% decrease in tax rates on every extra dollar they make.

2. Every penny of government spending is required
Some people will acknowledge that raising tax rates depresses GDP and that money the government leaves on the table can be used to build businesses and put people to work.

Every dollar released from taxation, that is spent or invested, will help create a new job. -- JFK

But then these people say, "O, how we wish we could let people keep their property, but because the government has to pay its bills, tax revenue must be raised. And borrowing is no substitute for taxes, it merely shifts the tax burden from one generation to the next. No," they say, "taxes must be raised; we have no choice."

But of course we have a choice. We could simply decide not spend the money to begin with. To believe that tax rate cuts are "blowing a hole in the deficit" (what a strange and inaccurate way of phrasing the issue) one has to believe that it is solely a lack of revenue that creates the deficit rather than the excess in spending. But in fact, raising revenue or lowering spending each have an equal effect on the budget.

A small portion of federal government spending is not really necessary. Yes, a small fraction, but a fraction of a very large number represents some real cabbage. The rule in our household is that we don't buy what we can't afford. We don't pretend to have access to money we will never get. Most of us live by that simple rule.

How is it we have convinced ourselves that money spent by Congress is hallowed and money spent by those who earned it is tarnished by greed? Some have invented the notion that money spent by government helps the economy to a greater extent because of a multiplier effect: $1 spent by the government becomes $1.40 through a kind of magic that defies intuition. The theory is that the government is giving this dollar to people who will spend it immediately, putting back in circulation more quickly. This, of course, completely ignores the cost of distributing this boodle. Congress and all its agencies, the Executive and all its agencies, those who hand out this dough do not work for free.

And what is the cost of not taking the money? Zero. It actually costs nothing to let people keep their own money. It's not hard to understand this, but what is hard to understand is why the state spenders refuse to rate the value of our spending as highly they rate their own.

Congress can avoid the half a trillion dollar deficit that high tax proponents claim to hate by not spending that half a trillion dollars. The real cost to the American people when spending exceeds revenues by a half a trillion dollars is the excess spending, not the constraints on revenue.

This points to another trick -- when they talk about the "cost" of a tax policy, by convention, they talk about its cost over 10 years. It would be difficult to find $500 billion to cut out of a single year's budget, but that is not the challenge. The challenge is to find a mere $50 billion in each of ten years. That's less than 1.5% of the budget (and about 1% of the proposed 2020 budget of $5 trillion). Over the last 5 years the unemployment rate has gone from around 5.5% to around 9.5%, a 4% reduction of the workforce. If the employers of this country, in aggregate, could of necessity cut back on its workforce by 4%, don't you think we could find 1.5% of the federal budget to cut?

Imagine going to your boss with the following argument: "Boss, I just bought a $50,000 car that I cannot afford. I figure that given the high monthly payment on this car, I will run a monthly deficit of $500. Thus, I figure that over the course of the year, the meagerness of the salary you pay me will cost me and my family $6,000. In short, you are costing me $60,000 over the course of 10 years. What are you going to do about this?"

1. It's our money, not yours
We're told we have to raise tax rates on high earners or it will "cost" Americans half a trillion dollars. We'll "lose revenue". Balderdash! The dollars are inanimate and agnostic. They don't care where they go. The dollar resides in one account or the other. Nothing ever gets lost.

People who complain of "lost revenue" are suffering under the illusion that they have money that never really belonged to them to begin with. Despite rhetoric to the contrary, as the law is written today, each person actually owns all of his own money -- every cent of it. And he deserves every cent that he has earned because whoever has paid him has done so in an even exchange of some sort.

At no point does this money belong to the government, nor to the American people in aggregate. So they have no call to say they lost some of this money. In fact, the royalist notion that our government was instituted to possess our property rather than to protect it is the reverse of the idea that inspired our founders to declare us an independent nation. It is as un-American as any idea you could name.

So tax rate cuts for high earners are not giveaways to the rich, because the money has never been ours to give away.

Bear in mind these fallacies and read this article by economist Alan Blinder who claims that anything other than a tax hike on high earners is tantamount to Scrooge beating Tiny Tim to death with his own crutch.

Time to update the blog design

2010-12-18T11:50:00.000-05:00

I just ran across a bunch of new templates from blogger.com. Time for an update of the design.

Do the people rule or are they ruled by their betters?

2010-08-22T16:05:00.001-04:00

I forced myself to listen to Ted Olson on Fox News Sunday defending the judge who overturned California's Prop 8 that prohibited gay marriage. He must have won most of his cases by boring his opponents to death.

Somehow, I managed to stay awake (until the very end). He kept talking about how the Supreme Court has said 14 times that marriage is a fundamental right in America. I don't know anyone who disagrees. Not all rights are specifically enumerated in the Constitution. The question is whether the definition of marriage is so broad as to include the union of same-sex couples. The question is not whether same-sex couples should live together. That they do and our constitution protects that. The question is whether such couples can be married.

I personally believe that they should be allowed to marry, however, the people of California voted to prohibit the gov't from equating the formal union of same-sex couples with the formal union of monogamous, opposite sex couples. It has been quite a while since the US has tolerated plural (non-monogamous) marriages, but even when it did, such couples were composed of opposite sex members. Two women were allowed to marry one man, but not each other.

So the notion that same-sex couples can be married is a very new one. It is doubtful that any of the justices who previously ruled on the matter had in mind same-sex couples. If this is not the case and the record contains references to alternate definitions of marriage, Olson did not mention them.

In particular, Olson referred several times to Loving v Virginia, the ruling that overturned anti-miscegenation laws in this country. His point was that this case established the principle that the state cannot dictate who can marry whom, for example, that a black person cannot be prevented from marrying a white person.

Again, I do not think that anyone disagrees with that point. The question is really whether the state must regard the union of a same-sex couple as a marriage. Once this redefinition of marriage exists in the law, then the state has no say in who may marry whom. For example, the state could not prevent a black man from marrying a white man. Clearly, the justices who decided Loving v. Virginia did not rule that same-sex unions are the equivalent of marriage or they would have written so at the time. Olson seemed to believe that Loving v. Virginia did establish this kind of equivalence, but the evidence and history contradicts him. Surely someone in the 42 years since that case was decided would have been able to point to where the justices redefined marriage to include same-sex unions.

What the justices did conclude, unanimously, was "The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not to marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State."

They pretty clearly limited their observations to racial differences between opposite-sex mates. There is no mention of the sex of those being married and certainly they presumed such a marriage to be composed of one man and one woman. As for the race of the man and woman, take your pick. In fact, they wrote, "Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival...." What makes marriage fundamental to our very existence and survival? No doubt this refers to sexual procreation.

Let me clear: I support gay marriage. I want all my gay friends to find someone they love enough to marry. I hope that my fellow citizens care enough to allow them to marry. But I am disgusted at the notion that arrogant judges overturn the expressed desire of the people. Prop 8 did not prevent loving gay couples from living together. It prevented marriage from being defined to include such unions.

Loving v. Virginia also stated this, "To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law." I can't help but think of sexual orientation as equally unsupportable as a basis for classifying couples and think that to deny gay people the privilege of state recognition of their unions is also not treating them equally. I hope that some day a majority of my fellow Americans will vote to redefine marriage, or at the very least establish its equivalent for gay couples.

The Good Old Days of Economic Shambles

2010-07-03T09:22:00.000-04:00

From Jim Geraghty at National Review Online:

I went back and found this golden quote from a February 2008 Democratic debate: “Our economy is increasingly in shambles. And the families of Texas and all across America are feeling the brunt of that failing economy.” Well, that “failing economy” had a national unemployment rate of 4.8 percent. Captain Kickass’ first term will probably never see as many Americans employed as what he labeled a “failing economy.” If that was shambles, what is this? . . .

Politicians since Roman times have overpromised

2010-05-05T09:41:00.003-04:00

According to this article, since Roman times politicians have been over-promising benefits to win the favor of the voters. Problem is, once elected they find they cannot keep their promises. But by then it is too late, they are already in office. What advice did the spinmeisters of Roman days give to politicians? Say anything that sounds good just to get elected.

The only way to put a brake on BS politicians is to require them to be honest or lose their eligibility to serve. I measure their honesty primarily by whether they control spending. There is an incentive to promise, to spend to keep the promises -- but none to pay for the promises!

Here's the problem: you may have the right to vote for whoever you think may best serve your interests. But I want to restrict your right to vote for somebody who takes money out of my pocket. In other words, I have the right to protect myself from your self-interest. Entrenched politicians too often stay in power by over-promising and they are not about to voluntarily give up on a working formula.

How many times have you heard someone lauding a politician as a "public servant"? My former sister-in-law remarried a politician who recently retired. His retirement announcement was a boastful list of all he had done in his career. Good stuff, but he did not pay for these programs himself. No mention was made of the taxpayers who paid for the good programs he championed. They are the true heroes.

His programs may very well have been successful (I certainly hope so -- they dealt with child advocacy). But how many programs meant to solve an awful problem remain intractable, unsolved by the government programs meant to eliminate them? The politicians can still claim credit since they made an effort to solve the problem, but how many retiring politicians are honest enough to say, "I did my best, but I failed. Despite our best efforts, the problems persist." As Jesus said, "The poor will be with you always." There's an honest guy and look what they did to him!

That's why I propose to marry term limits to a balanced budget requirement. You can elect whomever you please, but if he does not vote to balance the budget, he loses his vote in Congress. In other words, you lose your voting rights in Congress if you elect a representative that steals my money.

In time, the most seasoned, powerful and senior people will also be those who squeeze every dime of taxpayer money.

Yield curve voodoo

2010-02-28T11:59:00.000-05:00

This author of this article, Larry McDonald, points out that a certain economic phenomenon known as an "inverted yield curve" signals recession. Right now, the curve goes the opposite way, indicating recovery. In fact, he points out, the ratio of 2-year to the 10-year treasury yield is at a historical high. Wow! Should be a gangbusters economy this year, right?

He then seems to scratch his head at this strange phenomenon: Banks are not lending. Despite being able to borrow cheap and lend high, they are not lending. Commercial lending has contracted 10% over the last 12 months. The previous record (since the 70s) for such a contraction is 2% in the 1990s.

The yield curve does not explain this. The author scratches his head and wonders how this can be. Why are banks refusing to make a profit?

To which I reply: Duh! It's because a lot of people have been making war on profit, promising to punish wealth-builders (the "evil rich"), vigorously attacking the incentive to earn.

As I have said before, the most convincing argument I have ever heard to explain what ended the Great Depression was that FDR finally stopped waging war on profit and started waging war on Nazis. It's all there in his speeches. He scared wealth-builders into seclusion until 1940 when he called a truce to get them to build warships and tanks. It makes no sense to say that borrowing tons of money to build things that you are planning to blow up is somehow an increase in "production". If wartime was so productive, why were people rationing every staple in sight? Ultimately, war is destructive -- literally so.

What you'll never get Paul Krugman and his crowd to admit is that the people's incentive to earn is essential to economic recovery. Guess who is at war on wealth-builders today? Just as FDR unwittingly and ineptly prolonged the Depression, so Obama keeps this economy depressed. That's my theory, at least.

Bunning's Perfect Game

2010-02-28T10:34:00.000-05:00

Friday, Senate Democrats tried to pass a bunch of spending by unanimous consent and the only Senator to put a stop to it was Sen. Bunning. Only one nay was required to stop it from being unanimous. Democrats can still pass these bills, they just have to go through a normal Senate vote and explain to the American people why they are increasing the size of the Federal gov't and the national debt (the proposed spending was not "paid for" by taxes or other spending cuts).

This pissed off the Dems to no end and they berated him hour after hour. Senator Durbin told Bunning, "It is simply unfair for one senator to attempt to hold the Senate hostage on this issue." From his seat the Senator muttered, "Tough sh*t".

I love it.

Senator Bunning used to pitch in the major leagues. In 1964, he pitched a "perfect game" -- the first perfect game in the National League in 84 years. The definition of a perfect game is when, one after one, the opposition sends a batter to the plate and the pitcher sends him back to the dugout: no hits, no walks, no hit batsmen. When Phillie pitcher Bunning defeated all those New York Mets, 27 up-27 down, I'm sure they were frustrated. However, none of them whined about how "unfair" it was to not even allow at least one of them to get on base, or that it was unfair for one player to frustrate the will of so many other players.

Thank you, Senator, for another perfect game.

Read more about it here: http://www.redstate.com/hogan/2010/02/26/senator-bunning-i-object/

THE SHOEBOX

2009-11-25T07:37:00.000-05:00

A man and woman had been married for more than 60 years. They had shared everything.. They had talked about everything. They had kept no secrets from each other except that the little Old woman had a shoe box in the top of her closet that she had cautioned her husband never to open or ask her about.

For all of these years, he had never thought about the box, but one day the little old woman got very sick and the doctor said she would not recover.

In trying to sort out their affairs, the little old man took down the shoe box and took it to his wife's bedside. She agreed that it was time that he should know what was in the box. When he opened it, he found two crocheted dolls and a stack of money totaling $95,000.

He asked her about the contents.

'When we were to be married,' she said, ' my grandmother told me that the secret of a happy marriage was to never argue. She told me that If I ever got angry with you, I should just keep quiet and crochet a doll.'

The little old man was so moved; he had to fight back tears. Only two precious dolls were in the box. She had only been angry with him two times in all those years of living and loving. He almost burst with happiness.

'Honey,' he said, 'that explains the dolls, but what about all of this money? Where did it come from?'

'Oh,' she said, 'that's the money I made from selling the dolls.'

A Wife's Prayer:
Dear Lord,
I pray for Wisdom to understand my man;
I pray for Love to forgive him;
And I pray for Patience for his moods;
Because Lord, if I pray for Strength,
I'll beat him to death.

Obama lies about his health care plan to sell it

2009-09-10T08:23:00.003-04:00

I got to hear a good deal of Obama's health care speech last night, much to my wife's disapproval. She especially disliked when I started shouting back at him after he commented on how little his plan would cost (only $900 billion). He said that cost was on par with wasteful spending like on the Iraq War or tax cuts for the rich. It was the "tax cuts" line that set me off. "It's my money! It's not the government's money that they can choose to give back to us! Why should I bother earning it if it belongs to them!" (with lots of salty f-bombs tossed in for emphasis).

The scare tactics line bugged me, too. He very obliquely tells us we're all liars and that he will "call out" those who misrepresent the plan. I am not accustomed to being threatened by my President. Is that bullying threat not meant to scare us into silence?

This man has no connection to American ideals. He believes gov't has the right to control us (and, most of all, determine how much of our money we get to keep). He will allow us to keep our doctors. Really? Is that his option? He could have chosen not to allow us to keep our doctors, but he is being nice to us? Where in the Constitution does it give him the power to determine which doctor I will see or which insurance company I will use? Nowhere! You would think a requirement to defending the Constitution, as per his oath, would be the reading the thing and understand how it limits Federal gov't power.

I don't believe his cost estimates. I don't believe him when he says the plan will be entirely paid for by spending cuts (yeah, right -- and he's also not going to raise taxes on the non-rich). I don't believe that the gov't plan will not be subsidized, nor that the final goal is not a takeover of all health care in America.

He says we need a gov't plan because the for-profit insurance companies will always have too much of an incentive to rip people off. He does not mention that:

There are already not-for-profit medical insurance companies -- if they are not "keeping the insurance companies honest", why would his insurance plan do so?

The profit motive provides an incentive for efficiency, since inefficiency diminishes profit -- without the profit motive, inefficiency swells (as can be documented in Medicaid and Medicare and just about every gov't enterprise) as well as fraud and corruption (Fannie? Freddie?).

No, he did not mention these things. Does he think we're too stupid to know it? Of course he does, who are we kidding?

Insurance executives don't do this because they are bad people. They do it because it's profitable. As one former insurance executive testified before Congress, insurance companies are not only encouraged to find reasons to drop the seriously ill; they are rewarded for it. All of this is in service of meeting what this former executive called "Wall Street's relentless profit expectations."

What is that if not a declaration of war on profits. Do you know what prolonged the Depression more than anything else? FDR's relentless war on profits. When he stopped battling American manufacturers and enlisted them (for profit) in the war effort, the country finally rebounded. War on profit => Depression.

He complains that 75% of the insured are insured by just 5 companies. Well 70% of all cars sold in America are made by 5 companies. 40 years ago, 3 companies dominated the American market. The shift away from the big 3 automakers was not forced on us by gov't -- the market shifted because of the voluntary choices made by individuals. Did we need a gov't automaker? Don't answer that, Obama. We know your answer.

There was a time when 90% of all PCs were made by IBM. Did that change because of a gov't sponsored PC plan? Industry dominators Microsoft and Intel are losing market share. Is this because of a secret gov't plan? Still, Microsoft and Intel dominate their rivals. Is this a bad thing? Do we need a Federal department of computing to rectify this situation?

So why do we need gov't to increase competition in a market that has thousands of companies and is dominated by no less than five major companies?

He pretends to be mortified that almost 90% of insurance in Alabama is sold by only one company. But it's a free market in Alabama (I hope). They can choose any of the competing companies (if the state let's them). If 90% choose the same company, good for them and good for that company. Why exactly is that bad? A gov't run alternative is not necessary, nor necessarily better.

He says:

...the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects. But by avoiding some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits, excessive administrative costs and executive salaries, it could provide a good deal for consumers.

He wants us to believe that this gov't program would be efficient -- more efficient than the privately run alternatives. That would be a first in history.

Then there's this beaut:

It would also keep pressure on private insurers to keep their policies affordable and treat their customers better, the same way public colleges and universities provide additional choice and competition to students without in any way inhibiting a vibrant system of private colleges and universities.

Why are public universities cheaper than private? Why is that, do you suppose? It's because they are heavily subsidized by the taxpayer! Who writes his speeches, kindergartners? They are as thin as tissue paper and about as intellectually heavy.

He claims, "It's worth noting that a strong majority of Americans still favor a public insurance option of the sort I've proposed tonight." That cannot be true. I think that is a load of horse hockey. I doubt it is a majority, much less a strong majority. The last poll I saw showed a majority did not trust him to solve the health care problems, much less support any particular private option.

He is the liar-in-chief, as Thomas Sowell points out. He is attempting to rush this through, even though it will not take effect until after the next Presidential election, because he knows if we see it before it passes we would not buy into it.

Lincoln: Protector of states rights

2009-07-29T16:00:00.007-04:00

Many today long for a President and Congress who would respect the rights of each state and its people to control what goes on inside the state. They require their state legislatures to assert protection against Federal legal incursions that have come in the form of state mandates, gun control, heavy taxation and now a body of health care constraints so burdensome that they comprise a form of servitude to the state. I was wrongly taught that Lincoln was a Destroyer of states rights, but in fact he held a respect for them incomparable to any President in our lifetime.

Lincoln's First Inaugural Address focuses on the issue of states rights. There are a number of interesting passages in it, including this excerpt from the 1860 Republican platform:

Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend"

Lincoln believed he was constrained to respect state laws, and he explicitly states in the address that this included the right to own slaves where it was then legal and the duty of all states to return fugitive slaves. He explicitly denied any intention to forcibly abolish slavery in any state. Of course, he wished to abolish slavery and was elated at that certain prospect shortly before his death, but he wished it abolished by majority vote, not force.

What I find quaint is his naive belief that the Federal gov't would remain constrained. As we all well know, those who comprise all branches of our Federal gov't no longer exercise such constraint. Consider these two passages (again from his First Inaugural):

Think, if you can, of a single instance in which a plainly written provision of the Constitution has ever been denied. If by the mere force of numbers, a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution -- certainly would, if such right were a vital one. But such is not our case. All the vital rights of minorities, and of individuals, are so plainly assured to them, by affirmations and negations, guaranties and prohibitions, in the Constitution, that controversies never arise concerning them.

By the frame of the government under which we live, this same people have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief; and have, with equal wisdom, provided for the return of that little to their own hands at very short intervals.

Can anyone today earnestly state that the Federal gov't holds "but little power for mischief"? Does that describe our current situation of massive bailouts; phony, crony "stimulus" packages; ubiquitous and oppressive carbon taxes; and now the looming health care slavery? This government intends to deny us the vital right to make decisions about how we care for our health and that of our loved ones, while a bare majority stand by and cheer. They respect no "guaranties and prohibitions". Apparently, some do not even feel the need to read the text of the laws they pass!

Lincoln would not recognize the Union he preserved. But he would remind us of the duty we have, come the end of the "short interval" in 2010 when we have a chance to put an end to the power to make mischief; that in so doing we free ourselves from the reimposition of slavery masked as free health care. A revolution at the polls, I expect nothing less. The first shots have been fired this Spring. The next rumble will take place on September 12 in Washington. These are but precursors to the quake in November 2010.

I wish I had calibrated my words differently

2009-07-28T07:30:00.005-04:00

"I wish I had calibrated my words differently", said Obama, after saying that the police "acted stupidly" by arresting someone who had let his ego overcome his common sense.

Obama misuses his words about as often as his predecessor, but because he choose Latinate words, and because the watchers of his words tend to be enamored of his style, they fail to properly parse what he actually says. The word calibrate was wrong. One calibrates measuring instruments. One precisely adjusts tools and machines so that they work properly. That is calibration.

To some of us, words mean what they mean and not what we wish them to mean. We use them to express ourselves, albeit sometimes with less precision than we'd like. But to others, words are meant to be twisted and meaning is meant to be distorted for personal advantage.

Am I the only one who finds this abhorrent? I think not. I hope not. The low esteem in which journalists, lawyers and salesmen often find themselves, is testament to the unpopularity of twisting words. "Weasels" we will say, recalling an animal with uncanny skill at bending and twisting its very body to elude capture.

Obama might have said, "I wish I had chosen my words differently" (which is probably what he meant to say, but hoped to sound more intelligent by using the longer, Latin word "calibrated"). He could have said, "I wish I had calibrated my meaning differently", as he could have used words to adjust his meaning or to express a slightly different intention.

Or he could have said, "I wish I had phrased it differently", "I misspoke", or "I spoke rashly", or "I spoke before talking to the cop", or "I wrongly assumed the world would be interested in my ignorant opinion on this or any other trivial matter."

But he didn't. He looks at words as malleable in meaning and devised to calibrate our perception of him. This is canny in a politician or anyone else whose primary job is to manipulate people. However, a statesman is concerned first about the effect of his actions and secondarily about his words. This is why many of us admire W despite his infamous malaprops. It is why we often hear the word "Trumanesque", but never the word "Eisenhowerian" (or hear the word "Clintonian" to mean one who thinks he can spin his way out of anything).

It is why some of us watch plain-spoken Sarah Palin and rejoice. It is why thousands of intellectuals look at her and wince. She lacks polish, but she seems to speak from her heart and that is a welcome change, and quite a contrast to her President.

Cutting muscle

2009-06-09T06:30:00.008-04:00

Yesterday my company had a round of layoffs. Everything in this post is public knowledge except for my feelings about the people who were let go. I have removed all references to the company itself, per company policy.

This is the third round they have had since I started working there. In the first round, they got rid of dead wood amongst the permanent employees and kept most of the contractors (including me, at the time). I was new to the company and did not know the people who were fired.

In the second round, they cut the weak performers, people who were making a contribution, but whose work was non-essential or whose salary was high compared to their output or who were otherwise deemed expendable. They also cut most of the contractors. I knew several of those people who were good workers.

In the third round, they have cut some people who were indisputably making a genuine contribution, including two members of my team of eight and some managers who had been at the company a long time. Everyone acknowledges that as these people walk out the door, essential operating knowledge leaves with them. The cuts may be justified and unavoidable (and essentially protect the jobs of those of us lucky enough to still have a job), but they were brutal. We still need those people, we just cannot afford them. Brutal decisions like this are what keep companies alive in hard times.

If before they had been cutting fat, today they cut muscle. They just sold off part of the company. The argument is that, with that part out of the way, we will have less work to do and hence, we will need fewer workers. The reality is that, for the next several months, we will have more work to do in transition, we will have longer nights. But we will have the satisfaction of knowing we are helping to keep the company going.

The company's majority investor, has invested hundreds of millions in the company since February. This sale brings in $millions and once the sale is complete those stores will no longer be bleeding cash from our company. I am confident that these steps will bring the company back.

I have no way to judge the worth of our product: I am not a woman and have no taste in clothes besides. I have to trust the talent of those who know the industry and know their customers. I do not know all of the things upper management is doing to make this company profitable again, and some of what I do know I should probably keep to myself. They have replaced a key person with a more talented person. They have streamlined operations and are working to make things more efficient. We are exploiting free, open-source software to make ourselves more productive. The people who are running this company are doing a very good job in a difficult time.

I am surprised that I still have a job. I will not survive the next round. I hope there is no next round, but there is another financial reporting period before the Christmas season and the survival of this company depends on our customers coming back to the stores to spend.

But when I look at the economy and the direction of the country, I am not optimistic. The unemployment trend is atrocious and could have been predicted. Some of this could be blamed on the frightening collapse of financial companies, but some of it is also to be blamed on those who for more than a year did their damnedest to convince the American people they were suffering from the worst economy since the Depression last year: Obama and Hillary, chiefly. Well, now they have their wish, and it is up to them to fix the problem.

Clearly, what they are trying is not working, and let's face it, it never had any prayer of working. If they had wanted to give American industry a shot in the arm, they could have forgiven in taxes an amount equal to the inaptly named "stimulus" plan. How many jobs would have been saved?

They could have put a moratorium on various gov't regulations (e.g. Sarbanes/Oxley) which cost tens of thousands of jobs annually. That would be a stroke of the pen and real jobs saved -- not just phantom jobs as Obama claims to have saved without offering any evidence whatsoever. As many people have pointed out, the gov't does not measure jobs saved, so where does Obama get his numbers, if he is not making them up? He's making them up.

They could have borrowed this year's payroll tax revenue and let the people keep that extra money. People cannot spend what they do not have. Instead, they borrowed and printed the money, but have given it to banks who are not lending it. Even if banks want to lend it, they depend on the borrowers' confidence to repay, a confidence that is clearly absent nowadays.

Before he was elected, I predicted that Obama would be known as Carter 2.0, but now I fear he will take a place beside Hoover. Nothing he promised has come to be except for the thing he droned all last summer: This is the worst economy since the Depression.

The need for federalism

2009-05-17T01:50:00.004-04:00

Some say we should outlaw unfunded or partially funded mandates, with the naive hope that the burden of funding the implementation would make the federal gov't more responsive to the taxpayers. I hope it is clear now that there is bipartisan support in Washington for irresponsible borrowing and little aversion to taxation.

However, when it comes to taxation: They should never take this much of our money without getting better agreement from the people before doing it. The magnitude of the sums they will shortly require of us, call for significant deliberation and debate.

But Congress repeatedly ignores us. They specialize in the cramdown. They've very nearly lost sight of all principle.

There is no antidote to this other than to take back the power due to us at the state and local level. Let us decide. Let the federal government back away. We do not like having our money taken from us with the promise that somehow it'll all be best for everybody sometime down the road. Depriving the public of open deliberations leaves us with only vague promises that Father Law knows best. Where is our skepticism?

They continue to promise us a retirement and medical care when we get old, but all the actuaries tell us that these retirement and medicare funds are unfunded. It is not prudent to depend upon such an insecure system. And yet we do.

Those who have so carelessly abandoned the sound financial future of this country and its currency are not to be trusted with bigger responsibility. And yet they are intent on seizing control of the medical care community, an area most of think requires a very high degree of local control. How can the left tolerate such interference given that had nationwide laws prevailed prior to Roe v Wade they would have prohibited abortion at a time when states like New York had legalized it?

Are we to accept federal control over where your doctor can cut and how deeply? We need to let some states disagree with each other and tolerate the diversity. This is how the gay marriage issue is being decided today. The states don't all agree. That's federalism.

Nationalized health care is the most dramatic grab of Federal power in nearly 100 years.

Is it too much to ask that our Congressmen read and understand, and logically argue about the laws they pass before they pass them? The Obama "stimulus" package was no more debated, much less read, up front than was the Patriot Act. Both required careful consideration before passing. We were cheated of that debate. And even if 100% of all these bills were to survive intact after significant debate, we would still be richer for having hashed it out in public.

But we don't do that.

Awareness test: How many times is the ball passed?

2009-04-05T12:21:00.001-04:00

The Earth is "carbon starved"

2009-04-05T09:43:00.003-04:00

Trillion dollar question

2009-04-04T20:18:00.004-04:00

Someone at our local "tea party" group did this video. I thought it was pretty good.

What's the difference between Obama and Jesus?

2009-03-20T07:35:00.004-04:00

Stop me if you've heard this one...

What's the difference between Obama and Jesus?

One thinks he's the Messiah, the other was a carpenter who could assemble a cabinet.

It is pretty astounding that Obama has not yet filled all the openings in his cabinet. He was supposed to be the uber-competent President, but clearly is inexperienced and not a good judge of governing talent.

He is a good judge of political talent. He spins a good spin. He is great at getting people to feel enthusiasm. He makes a good campaigner.

Too bad he was elected to govern.

At this time in his Presidency, Bush had filled his cabinet. And remember that Bush had 41% less time to prepare to be President because of the Florida recount. Obama does not have all the top spots filled and still has most of the lower level Treasury spots to fill (which one would think would be the highest priority spots to fill).

Also, Bush had to deal with a Democratic majority in the Senate (thanks to the non-entity from Vermont who switched parties). Obama has a lopsided majority in the Senate from his own party who would confirm anybody (even tax cheats like the Treasury Sec'y).

But then none of this really surprises those of us who warned against Obama. Does anybody really think McCain would be at a loss finding people to run the gov't? Does anybody think that if he'd appointed Phil Gramm we would be two months into the Presidency without a plan to right the economy? Does anybody suspect that a conservative Treasury Sec'y would advocate huge deficits and sanction the Federal Reserve creating $1.2 Trillion out of thin air (as the Fed did yesterday).

People are griping (rightly) about the $165 million in AIG bonuses, but $1.2 Trillion of insta-cash is a huge pile. To put it in perspective, you'd be pretty ripped if somebody misspent $1,000 of your mone. $165 million is to $1.2 Trillion as $1,000 is to $7.28 million.

Hello Mr. Inflation, how long do you intend to stay in the United States?

I used to think of Obama as Carter 2.0, but now I am confident that people will eventually stop comparing Obama to Jimmy Carter out of respect for Jimmy Carter.

Asking others to pay for themselves is not immoral

2009-03-17T09:26:00.002-04:00

Eugene Robinson wrote, "The way we ration health care now -- according to the individual's ability to pay -- is immoral", and he goes on to advocate higher taxes to pay for the uninsured.

First of all, it is an exaggeration to say that such health care is rationed because some cannot pay for it. Rationing is a system whereby one's access to a good or service is controlled despite one's ability to pay, not because of it.

There is nothing immoral about letting one's ability to pay determine whether one gets health care. I would argue that it is morally hazardous to make others pay for all, while some escape payment altogether. Today, 40% of Americans pay no federal income tax at all. Are we now to give them a free ride on all their health care costs as well, while placing a higher burden on others (some of whom are struggling as well)?

We already pay for the health care of the indigent. I balk at paying for the health care of those who merely wish to pay less than health care actually costs. Many people forgo health care insurance despite the fact that they can afford it because they prefer to pay for cell phones, manicures, private school, etc. Health care is essential, these others are not. They choose not to pay for health care insurance because it is very expensive. This is irresponsible. I don't like that it is expensive, but I know that paying out of pocket is even more expensive. One must prepare for the worst and hope for the best -- or take responsiblity for one's gamble.

If Eugene Robinson wants to help those who fall into the gap between medicaid and affordable health care, I urge him to spend his time and money supporting a charity that will help such people. Some exist. If they are not to his liking, he should start one of his own.

However, to demand that I contribute to his charity is theft. To make gov't tax collectors force me to contribute to his charity only makes it legal theft -- it does not change what it is.

When I was poor, I depended on charity and was grateful for it. I pay the gift forward. That is the proper response. To suggest that the gov't do my work for me would be laziness.

I see two problems with gov't run health care insurance:

It eliminates the incentive to spend health care dollars wisely. Even though my company pays for less than half of my premium, as a payer, I remain motivated to keep health care costs down so as to keep next year's premium reasonably priced. Participants in a guaranteed health care system who themselves pay little tax to begin with, have no such incentive. It would soon make health care much, much more expensive than today. Unless taxpayer funded health care maintains an incentive to use health care wisely (and counting on the good behavior of others is folly) then the system will not work. We cannot hope to insulate people from the costs of living. We must encourage people to take part in hoisting the burden, not attempt to shift it from them.
Because we have a progressive tax system, most people would end up getting a discount on their health care insurance. Those who pay no federal tax would get free health care and have no idea who was paying their bills for them. They would be unlikely to recognize the gift, but would come to expect it as an entitlement. It is one thing to provide health care insurance to people in the gap, it is folly to provide it at a discount and make others pay far more than their fair share. It encourages irresponsiblity. Charity is fine, but reckless charity damages the recipient by discouraging self-care, lowering self-esteem and cementing dependence.

I have never seen a proposal for taxpayer funded health care that addresses these concerns. I am waiting.

Why I believe in the death penalty

2009-03-17T08:52:00.003-04:00

When I contemplate what this man did to his own daughter and grandchildren, I have the urge to bring an end to his breathing (after due process of law).

The Pope is off his rocker

2009-03-17T08:05:00.002-04:00

Speaking in Africa today, Pope Benedict XVI said that the distribution of condoms is not the answer in the fight against AIDS in Africa. "You can't resolve it with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, it increases the problem."

This is factually incorrect. Condoms may not entirely eliminate the problem of AIDS, but the fact is that unprotected sex is the major vector for the disease and condoms almost entirely shut down that vector (except that they can break or be used incorrectly).

What if the Pope were to say, "You cannot resolve the problem of germs with antiseptics. On the contrary, it increases the problem." Would you then insist that surgeons stop scrubbing before operations? that hospitals stop using alcohol, iodine and betadine?

The Catholic church has made a fetish of opposition to contraception. I will grant that human life begins at conception. That is a scientific fact. It does not follow that all conceptions must be protected against safe abortion, but it is impossible to argue that once sperm hits the egg it is anything other than a human being. I am sympathetic to those who wish to protect such innocent lives, even though I do not entirely agree with the position.

But to argue against preventing such human life is a step too far. It makes no sense, especially if one believes that human life should be protected from the moment of conception. The fact is that preventing conception also prevents the subsequent abortion of that human being. To the hypothetical person in question, the matter is moot whether she is conceived and killed or never conceived at all. But to most of us on this side of the womb, the distinction is considerable. Most of the eggs that erupt from a woman's ovaries are shed without conception. What is true for women's eggs is many orders of magnitude truer of sperm.

It is hard to argue the value of any of them until they are united -- not brought within close reach of one another -- united as one genetic whole. Nature does not value them. Nature does not even value fertilized eggs unless they manage to implant themselves in a receptive womb. Many fertilized eggs are spontaneously aborted. What value then do they have before they even come into being?

Leave aside that argument and assign some value to potential, preconceived human life for the sake of argument. Does such life then take priority over adult human beings? That is what the Pope is arguing -- that the use of condoms is worse than protected sex. He says, despite the obvious scientific contradiction, that they make the problem of AIDS worse. This is completely irresponsible.

Yet because of this fetish against contraception, the Pope is unwittingly (or perhaps disingenuously) encouraging unprotected sex. One cannot dispute that abstinence is the perfect contraception and prophylactic, when practiced without failure. But to suppose that abstinence is going to be successfully practiced in a majority of cases, much less 100% of the time, is to ignore the fact that human copulation has been popular for millions of years prior to the Christian Era -- popular since the species first emerged, in point of fact. To argue in favor of abstinence only is to guarantee conception will occur and disease will be spread. This, in turn, leads to at least some abortions, some unwanted births and some very unfortunate deaths from AIDS.

Just as environmentalists who oppose a dam must take responsibility for any deaths that result from a subsequent uncontrolled flood, the Pope and his fellow fetishists must take responsibility for the abortions and AIDS deaths that result from the unprotected sex that will inevitably occur amongst those they teach to avoid condoms.

Unintended consequences

2009-02-10T07:47:00.004-05:00

My uncle was an engineer maintaining the facilities at Ohio University. He built a little suspension bridge to connect the campus to the golf course. They had no budget, so he scrounged together parts and they built the bridge for about $500 in the 1960s. It was replaced 30+ years later by a bridge that cost about $500,000 -- 1000 times more. Your gov't spenders at work.

But my uncle's bridge was not built far enough over the river. They figured that if the water came up more than four feet, no one was going to go golfing anyway. One winter day, the bridge started catching the ice that was floating down the river, turning it into more of dam than a bridge. It's hard to think of every contingency when designing something. That's true even of something as simple as a 150 foot suspension bridge.

They watched as the water backed up behind the accumulating ice. What to do? One fellow suggested that maybe they could use dynamite to break it up. That seemed a bit dangerous, so they decided to go to breakfast and talk about it.

An hour or so later, they returned to the bridge to find that the water had risen while they were at breakfast and pushed the ice chunks over the bridge and downriver. Problem solved.

Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all. Have a nice breakfast.

The velocity of money

2009-02-05T09:16:00.003-05:00

I got a letter from a relative who says that she does not want to buy from companies like Nike because they exploit their workers. There seems to be a bit of a contradiction in what she said, in that she said she doesn't care about these people but she does not want to buy anything made by slaves or children or sweatshop workers (presumably because such work exploits them). Let us leave aside the notion that these people work voluntarily under such conditions in order to avoid worse conditions, that what is seen as a miserable existence to us is a step up for them from an even more miserable existence. I am focusing on this paradox: that she seems to care more about punishing those who make a profit from these people then she does about the people they are supposedly exploiting.

As for jingoism, my father's father ran for Congress in the 1930s and his number one issue was to preserve American jobs by raising tariffs. This was the accepted Republican doctrine of the day, a contrast to today's Republicans who tend to support free trade. Economists agreed then as now that raising tariffs was one of Hoover's big mistakes (another mistake was raising taxes quite a bit in a slow economy, when money was already tight).

But trade barriers, like union labor barriers, look good only when you consider their effect on a subset of people. When you consider the universe of people, they don't look so good. It is true that a union raises the wages of its members, but that also limits the number of people a business can hire at that wage (assuming that the business had already determined what fraction of its budget to devote to labor costs). This means that some people who would be available and willing to work at that company, even at a lower wage, will go unemployed. Is it better for 75 people to get 100 quatloos per month or for 100 people to get 75 quatloos (a quatloo being a Star Trek unit of currency).

The union worker says, "Yeah, it's better to have only 75 workers making a higher wage because I'm amongst the lucky 75 and the other 74 are my brothers and sisters in the union." The poor, unemployed schmucks on the outside have a different opinion. It is obvious they will never agree. But theirs is not the only consideration. Presumably, a group of 100 employees are more productive than a group of 75. All other things being equal, they are 33% more productive and produce 33% higher profit. A company with 33% more profit can afford to either hire more workers (if the market warrants it) or pay higher wages to its workers in order to secure its productive labor force in a competitive market. Or it might not expend the additional profit in labor, but might invest it in equipment. In this case, the benefit spills out of the company and into the coffers of its vendors. Conversely, when that profit is not earned as in our example where the company is restricted to 75 workers, this hurts not only the 25 workers who did not get hired today, but the various vendors who did not sell their wares.

Lowering labor costs is just one of many ways of boosting productivity, but higher productivity is good for society. It is what grows the economy. There was a time when people feared that automation would put people out of work and eventually only the employed elite would be able to survive (the rest, presumably, would have starved). In retrospect, we see that this did not happen. Not only do workers have a higher standard of living than 100 years ago, but we work fewer hours to make that living (and live longer).

As workers, we would prefer that productivity be increased through other means than having our wages cut, but the economic forces have no preference. I am not arguing that unions do not have the right to agitate for higher wages, and I certainly understand the reason for it. It's just that the effect of unions is higher wages and the effect of higher wages is also lower productivity and less than optimal economic growth.

The same principle undergirds trade barriers and union labor barriers: Both restrict the flow of capital. The union constrains capital to be spent on a less productive workforce. Trade barriers constrain capital to be spent on more expensive goods, presumably made by less productive workers. This depresses the economy by keeping money from getting re-spent. If I have to buy more expensive American-made goods, I might run out of budgeted money in the first store, so I never get to the next store to buy something from them. When money is concentrated with one entity, the more likely it is to be saved instead of spent.

Going back to my simplistic union example, the union shop supports 75 spenders and the non-union shop supports 100 spenders. Just as a sieve with 100 holes lose water faster than an equal-sized sieve with 75 holes, a community with 1,000,000 spenders spends money faster than a similar community with 750,000 spenders.

Economists speak of the velocity of money, which measures the rate at which the same dollar gets re-spent. They call this measure the M1 money multiplier. You can see what happened to the velocity of money this fall in this chart. It depicts a historic drop-off in the velocity of money. It would seem to me that the last thing you would want to do at this time is decrease the number of spenders in the global economy by restricting the flow of capital.

This is not just theory, either. America tried protectionism in the 1930s, the very sort of protectionism my grandfather espoused. We see where that got us.

Dancez

2009-01-23T08:44:00.002-05:00

I just rewatched the video for "The Safety Dance", a video from 1982. There's a word whispered by a breathless woman in the background before the first chorus. I never understood what she was saying. It's not repeated in the song. I had to look up the lyrics. It's voiced by a rather attractive blonde in the video.

I also ran across this homage to "The Safety Dance" from the TV comedy scrubs. Clever how they worked that in.

Baby boomer Obama

2009-01-23T07:47:00.005-05:00

My brother just wrote an email suggesting that Obama was not a baby boomer and that he will distinguish himself from his predecessors because he is of Generation X, not a selfish baby boomer. Well, Obama is technically a baby boomer, if you believe that hooey. I think astrology is more useful as an indicator of human behavior. What sign is he?

[I have an old girlfriend who just told me she is Aquarius with Scorpio rising. Well, she certainly made this Scorpio rise, but that had more to do with her birthday suit than her birthday.]

Anyone who looks at Bill Klinton and George W. Bush and sees them as alike because of their relative nearness in age is not a serious onlooker of history.

And if we're going to use hyphenated prefixes to describe Obama's particular flavor of American, then let's not stop at African. We must describe him as half-African-American. I don't know what the other half is and it does not seem to matter to most people. Even though the African parent spent less than a day with him after he had left Obama's mother, and it was his non-African mother and grandparents who raised him, his father's line gets top billing. How patrimonial!

We bother to distinguish between French and Italian and Irish and German Americans (although we do rightly tend to lump English, Scots and Welsh into the group British-Americans). We don't call all white people Euro-Americans. No one would mistake a Russian accent for a Mexican one (although we probably would not pick up Alsatian as Robert Redford does at the end of "Three Days of the Condor" when he confronts hit man Max Von Sydow). And yet we are to believe that all Africans are the same; Kenyans, Tunisians, Hutu and Tutsi They seem to distinguish each other somehow, sometimes cleaving the difference with a machete, but they all look alike to us (except those descendants of Boers, like Teresa Heinz Kerry; she's white! How dare she call herself African-American just because she actually came to America from South Africa).

I remember my niece excitedly talking about the international students at her college and how some of them were African-Americans (not blacks and not Africans -- "African-Americans from other countries!"). Look, if we really intend to remark upon a person because of the color of his skin, and I see no reason to, let's refer then to his skin color and not the continent where some of his descendants came from. And let's be more accurate about it. Barack and Michelle are not the same color, and neither is black.

I am not impressed with Barack Obama. He voted present more often than not in his short and undistinguished career. When and if he actually does something, I shall judge him on that basis and not on his relative age or skin color.

As for his wife, she received a $195K raise after her husband became a US Senator, probably solely because of his new position. Obama obliged by granting her employer $millions in earmarks. She went on to spend most of her time on the campaign trail and could not have done much real work for them as "VP of community affairs". Not a problem, she had already done her job (or I should say, Barack did it for her) by securing the money. Her raise in pay was a kickback. Nice kickback. Perfectly legal, too. And it turns out that, now that she has moved on to Washington and resigned her position, the hospital has decided that it really does not need a "VP of community affairs" after all and is not going to replace her, not even with someone willing to work for less than $317K.

With her, I'm impressed, but not in a nice way -- and I think it has nothing to do with her skin color, nor her relative age.

But these are our overlords. They live by their own rules. They are better than us, or they think they are. Obama's pick for Treasury Sec'y used to work at the International Monetary Fund -- what better qualifications for overlord? He had to be reminded by the IRS to pay his self-employment taxes (Social Security and Medicare) for 2003 and 2004. And he did pay them... late. Even though the IMF had promptly reimbursed him for those payments, making him sign a paper promising to use the money to pay his taxes -- he forgot somehow and pocketed the money. This is the guy we want in charge of the Federal fisc? A guy who forgets what money was supposed to go where? A guy who thinks paying his taxes is optional? This is the guy we want solving the Social Security crisis, a guy who forgets that Social Security is funded by taxes?

And, after the IRS reminded him of his 2003 and 2004 obligations, did he go back and pay his 2001 and 2002 obligations? He did not. Those were beyond the statute of limitations. He still owed the taxes, but could not be legally compelled to pay them. So he didn't (even though, he had been reimbursed by the IMF and signed the same notice saying that he understood what the reimbursements were for). He has paid them now, of course. Paid them while he was being vetted for the Treasury job. But would he have paid them otherwise? What reason do we have to believe he would? Under oath, speaking to Congress, he refused to answer the question. Well, at least he had the decency not to lie under oath. That's a step up from past Democratic administrations.

Shouldn't the same rules apply to all? And shouldn't the rules apply more strictly to those who seek to administer them?

But have no fear, Obama has signed a paper saying that he expects his administration to uphold high ethical standards. Of course, that is probably just lip service to soothe those who need such soothing, who hear words and feel no need to watch to see if actions match. He said the right thing. That's what matters, right?

And so, Obama promises to go beyond partisanship -- this after he trashed the previous administration and the opposition party in order to get elected. Oh yeah. The Congressional Republicans probably won't remember any of that. And they're mostly old baby boomers anyway.

We Are the Ones Who Are No Longer Waiting for Ourselves

2009-01-17T08:16:00.001-05:00

They sent out a memo at work saying "We recognize that Inauguration Day is going to be a historic day, but we caution against watching the event on streaming video. Thank you for respecting our bandwidth issues".

Had they been on the ball, they would have set up a video feed in the largest conference room and played the inauguration on big screen TV. I guess that's only for official executive use, though.

Not that I would be watching at that historic noon. I'll be in the bathroom retching.

Chris Matthews, whose leg tingles when Obama speaks, does not feel that way about Bush. After Bush's farewell address, he claimed that Bush was responsible for 100,000 deaths in Iraq. If that is the case, then FDR and Truman were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions (including 6 million Jews). Doesn't that get things backward? Is there not at least some intellectual rigor left amongst the media (not at MS-NBC, apparently). Most of the deaths in the Iraq War were caused by the insurgents. They planted the IEDs and they were the suicide bombers. They blew up the mosques and marketplaces. It was not coalition forces killing these people.

That's not to say that no innocents were killed, but anyone who understands the concept of a just war realizes that innocents may be killed. One cannot fight a just war if one is afraid of dying oneself, nor if one is afraid of accidentally or inadvertently killing the wrong person (including killing one's co-warriors in friendly fire). Of course one strives not to make these mistakes, but one cannot remain paralyzed in fear of making them.

Nonetheless, it was not by coalition forces that the majority of such innocents perished. It was at the hand of the enemy that they perished. It is calumny to suggest that it is Bush's fault. And it is blindness to fail to realize that Iraq is far better off today than under Saddam Hussein. Moreover, Saddam was a murderous bastard in his own right, a prolific killer who would have killed and tortured almost as many as the nearly vanquished enemy unleashed by his capture.

But these people are blind to true suffering. Obama will be responsible for more than 100,000 deaths in his first year in office if he fulfills his promises to reverse Bush's anti-abortion policies, such as funding for the UN's family planning agency, which helps fund forced abortions in China and China's one-child policy -- don't let anyone tell you they're pro-choice when in fact these people are pro-abortion, even when it is not the choice of the mother. Ironically,many of the aborted babies are female since Chinese prefer males, thus the feminists support the death of future women.

This is just one of the reasons I'll be quelling my nausea on Inauguration Day.

Doctor Doctor

2008-12-14T01:31:00.001-05:00

I tried to comment on a blog post at New English Review, but can't see the reply. I don't want to lose it, so here it is:

In Westport, Connecticut works a physician named Doctor. He is Dr. Doctor. His wife is a doctor. Together they are the Doctors Doctor. The physicians who treat them when they are ill are the Doctors Doctor's doctors. Not exactly "onions, onions, onions", but factual.

Conan Doyle chose Watson to be a doctor. It convinces because we know some doctors to be clear and precise.

James Michener described his success as being able to get people to read to the end of the page. Not a fan myself, but his popularity and the heft of his tomes suggests that he had found the knack.

Are clarity and precision essential in getting people to read to the end of the page? Usually, I would say, even when seeming to write about nothing. The writing may be desultory, or have no main topic whatsoever, may have no point or direction, yet capture and hold the reader's attention. Still, on that random walk, one expects clear and precise narration.

Exceptions abound. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" comes to mind. Wonderful, but in part because of what is left unreported and unclear. "A pair of ragged claws" is imprecise, but effective.

Drill and conserve

2008-08-07T07:45:00.003-04:00

Obama claims that we who support drilling in the outer continental shelf (OCS) are ignorant and that we are proud of being ignorant. Why? He claims (wrongly) that Americans could save as much oil by properly inflating their tires as could be produced by drilling for it offshore. He claims that to deny this is ignorance and to flout one's denial is to be proud of being ignorant.

He implies that those of us who support offshore drilling oppose proper tire inflation. As McCain said about inflating tires (and conservation in general), "Do that. But also drill". Obama assumes we are too stupid to realize that we can do both.

I guess his argument works with some people. It's very simple to contradict:

Consider what a child would do. Tell the child you've hidden a candy bar in the kitchen and a candy bar in the bedroom. Which will he search for? Well, some children would search in the kitchen. Some would search in the bedroom. But 99.999% of the children would search both rooms and get both candy bars. Because even little children know that if some is good, more is better.

Can Obama show one good reason why drilling offshore would prevent us from also properly inflating our tires (or vice versa)? If not, he is presenting us with a false choice.

You'd have to be ignorant to fall for that false choice. Obama assumes we are.

The Tautology of Hope

2008-07-19T17:33:00.002-04:00

Inspiration for Obama's campaign

2008-07-19T08:52:00.001-04:00

Fascinating how some patterns keep recurring.

Free Our Oil

2008-07-15T18:57:00.002-04:00

Editorial in today's WSJ: Free Our Oil

In Alaska, the citizens get cash payments from the royalties derived from Alaskan oil drilling. Wouldn't it be nice if we had some offshore royalties coming in to shore up sagging Florida state gov't revenues? Wouldn't it be nice if we had a Taxpayer Bill of Rights that limited growth in state spending -- and the offshore oil royalties were pouring in? Wouldn't it be nice if Florida had to send out royalty checks to its citizens -- per capita checks benefiting rich and poor, young and old, black and white, English-speaking and Spanish-speaking alike?

The only thing standing between us and those checks are the Dems in Congress. Does anybody doubt that, if the Republicans still formed a majority in Congress, the offshore oil ban would be history? If Newt were Speaker instead of Nancy, Congress would have presented a repeal of that ban for the President to sign on the same day he lifted the Executive moratorium.

And oil dropped by the biggest one-day percentage in some 16 years -- second big drop this week. This on the day after the President ended the moratorium. But we're told lifting the ban would not affect oil prices for years to come.

If Duke Cunningham, Jack Abramhoff and Mark Foley could sink the Republican majority in 2006, this issue -- Democratic obstinacy on offshore drilling -- could sink the Democratic majority. Did any of you see the electoral disaster for Republicans at this point in the summer of 2006? A steady drumbeat of criticism could do in the Congress who has overseen the doubling of oil prices and refused to respond.

Interesting lectures at Mises.org

2008-07-12T10:14:00.004-04:00

I just listened to a very interesting lecture called Rothbard as Historian that derided the use of GDP alone to gauge the health of the economy. You can hear it in the podcast available from Mises.org.

The relevant comments come about 25 minutes into the lecture. The issue is that much of GDP is gov't spending and gov't spending is a net drag on the economy (given that its revenue subtracts from economy in nearly equal amount as it spends). What Rothbard suggested is that we measure Private Product Remaining (which the gov't does not measure) which is GDP minus what the gov't takes out.

The lecturer, Thomas Woods, uses 1946 as an example. It supposedly was a bad year looking only at GDP figures. GDP dropped because wartime spending ended. GDP would lead you to believe the previous years were better, but in fact WW2 was not a time of great prosperity. True, unemployment was low (11 million people were in the military and some of them died -- this was not an ideal situation). In fact, lots of goods were rationed during the war. People were scraping by -- they had money, but nothing to buy. In 1946 soldiers came back, re-took their old jobs when they could (9 million of them) and replaced the less productive, less skilled people who had been doing this job (women, young and the very old). Is it reasonable to believe that productivity shrank by 22% in that year as GDP would indicate?

Rothbard claims that the only spending decisions that help when measuring the economy are voluntary transactions (rather than gov't controlled spending) because these are the only ones we can be reasonably sure are made to increase the individual's well-being. Private output increased by 30% in 1946 -- we've never had a year over year improvement as good as that. And, people living in 1946 will tell you that the American economy did very well that year, even though the standard economic measurements would have you believe it was catastrophic.

Mises.org is an extraordinary online resource. The lectures are quite Libertarian, so you'll hear about Rand, Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, etc. They like to take swipes (and outright attacks) against the Iraq War. I part company with them concerning foreign policy, but the economic thought is compelling.

You can find there a lecture entitled Senior Economics Seminar by Mark Thornton which examines the fallacies of alcohol and drug prohibition. It got me thinking. My son used a product which was adulterated and it killed him. He used it properly. If this were a legal product sold at Wal-Mart, his mother would be able to sue the manufacturer and probably Wal-Mart and definitely whoever it was who mishandled the product for wrongful death. Who is going to support her in her old age now that her only child has died? But because the product was an illegal narcotic and because it was sold only in an illegal market, none of the normal legal protections are available. In all likelihood, if narcotics were openly sold at a profit-making store (maybe not Wal-Mart), the capitalists who maintained that market would make sure the product was safe when used properly, lest they lose their profits through product liability lawsuits.

McCain on SNL

2008-05-18T11:38:00.001-04:00

On Weekend Update

Fake McCain 2008 Commerical

A defense of polygamy

2008-04-22T08:05:00.003-04:00

In an article criticizing polygamy, Rich Lowry of National Review states:

Polygamy is fundamentally inconsistent with our values as a society...

Here is my response:

Lowry's thesis is that polygamy is inherently anti-democratic, but not all polygamy is coercive. There are remedies to the faults he lists (e.g. require that all wives after the first be over a certain age, or that in plural marriages the man cannot be more than 10 years older than his wife if she is under a certain age), as well as some he missed (i.e. the chief problem with bigamy is that one or both of the cuckolded spouses is usually not aware of the other marriage -- require consent of all spouses before approving a subsequent marriage and you have truly democratized polygamy).

In other words, the institution could be reformed in such a way as to increase women's choices. But Lowry does not want to reform it, he wants to abolish it. His aim is not really to condemn it for cause, but to condemn it as offensive to his tradition and to look for cause to justify his bias.

I have no truck with polygamy (more correctly, polygyny -- polyandry, the other form of polygamy, empowers women). I can barely serve one wife, much less take on another (and as any devoted spouse knows, marriage is mutual servitude). But I know that some women who would otherwise go manless in a monogamous society would get married if polygyny were legal. I also know that some women prefer the company of their husband's other wives (lots of available babysitters). Polygamy does not have to take on the bizarre forms that it does when society shuns it and shoves its practitioners into the shadows.

In short, I think Lowry's case against polygyny is intellectually wanting. It reminds me of the case against gay marriage, which is said to weaken real marriage. From what I can see, it merely redefines the word "marriage" in an objectionable way. There is nothing about long-term loving gay relationships that anyone despises -- anyone accept those who despise gay sex first and foremost. Most people would accept the desire of gay couples to formalize their relationships through something like marriage, even if they dislike having the word co-opted.

So to say that such relationships damage other relationships fails for lack of a causal connection. There's a stronger case that heterosexual plural marriages put heterosexual single marriages at risk, for the reason Lowry mentions in his essay: men compete for available women. But this reason founders on the problem of the great abundance of available women (and men).

Close to 40% of American adults are not married. Moreover, nearly 90% of the population age 45 and older has been married at least once. By age 55, that ratio rises to 95%. That tells me that many of those who are not married, wish to do so, but choose not to. Those who choose not to be married do not do so because of a shortage of available partners. Perhaps there is a lack of desirable partners or perhaps they have better things to do.

And the fact is, legalized polygamy would increase the number of available partners. Men and women would be free to join an existing marriage.

Finally, I think we fool ourselves if we think that people forgo their urge for multiple partners by consenting to society's monogamous fiat. People commit adultery and this leads to divorce. In at least some of those cases, polygamy could keep the original marriage intact, and that would, in my opinion, be an improvement over divorce.

Lowry claims that polygamy undermines free choice. In fact, it is the prohibition of polygamy that constrains free choice.

Dick Cavett vs General Petraeus

2008-04-15T08:21:00.002-04:00

I think Dick Cavett went too far by criticizing General Petraeus for not displaying a sense of humor while testifying before Congress. He also made fun of the General's medals, believe it or not.

Cavett is not wrong about the General's gravitas and stilted language, but once again we see a man of the Left valuing style over substance. He takes issue with the General's choice of words, ignoring the content for the most part (except to say that he disagrees with the General's mission in Iraq -- which is really a beef with the Commander in Chief, not the commander in Iraq).

I think Cavett is wrong about the war, too. I am always astonished to hear people complain about the allegedly large cost of the liberation of Iraq. It is small in comparison to the cost of the liberation of France or even Belgium. But people can disagree on that point without making fun of an honorable soldier (and, by extension, the military in general).

Cavett was gracious when remembering the late WFB. What a shame to see him disgrace himself writing about General Petraeus.

Remembering Ben

2007-11-28T15:14:00.000-05:00

It was a year ago tomorrow that my son took his life through an accidental drug overdose. You can read my eulogy of him here. In that eulogy, I quoted the following poem:

Edna St. Vincent Millay -- Sonnet II

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go, -- so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

Today, by coincidence, the police called my house to tell my wife that someone by my name was injured in Daytona and that they thought he might be from Tampa. My wife called me at my desk, but I was in a meeting. She called my cell phone twice, but I silenced the ring while I was in the meeting. When I finally called her back she was, of course, quite relieved. What a awful phone call to get this time of year. You can imagine how worried she was.

It's been a horrible year. I will be glad to be done with it.

It's a terrible thing to lose a child. One can never be fully happy again, because, lurking in the back at all times, is the saddest of memories. It taints every feeling.

Super Atom Kim (German cartoon)

2007-11-19T17:26:00.000-05:00

"Broadcast News" from Odessa

2007-08-11T22:11:00.000-04:00

Pardon me for blasting this long Odessa report, but the internet here is terribly slow and I don't want to wait another 15 minutes for a separate form to appear. I have typed out the diary entry using Notepad. I only hope that the message goes through. And of course, there's no editing. Just my stream of consciousness, so pardon the mistakes.

This is my fourth trip to Ukraine. Each time, I have managed to find someplace to access the internet for email and browsing. This time, however, the only access I have is ridiculously slow.

I am getting DNS errors on yahoo.com. When the browser cannot even get a DNS resolution, that's pretty sad.

Still, one aspect of Ukraine never fails to satisfy: the plethora of pulchritude. It's amazing. Eight years ago the fashion was for young girls to wear short skirts and short shorts. These, I am happy to say are still in fashion. Mmm. I don't flatter myself that any of these girls are interested in me. That really doesn't matter since I cannot speak their language even if I wanted to talk to them. And I don't really want to talk to them. It just never stops being fun to look.

Needless to say, the beach was a special treat.

We went downtown with the kids. Odessa has changed a lot in the last five years. They have an area down by Deribosovskaya Street that is meant to attract tourists. They have spruced up that area quite a bit. When I first came here eight years ago, it was kind of sad, really. They have made big progress.

And yet, they have a long way to go. They have no idea how to route automobile traffic effectively, so traveling by car is crazy. It has always been this way, but now there are a lot more cars. You can tell that some people here are richer than most Odessans by the cars they drive. Also, they've made the tourist area more attractive, but there is still a lot of building to be done and no public restrooms -- just an awful latrine behind city hall.

I suppose five years from now they'll have made these improvements and that will all be for the better. But I find myself nostalgic for the primitive and somewhat innocent Odessa I found in 1999 as it was emerging from Communism and utter poverty and all things Cyrillic, Ukrainian or Russian seemed new and strange to me.

We went to a shopping mall that sits on top of a parking garage. One can even park one's car in front of the supermarket there and take the shopping cart out of the store to load up the car. No more lugging bundles all the way back to the apartment. This is a big innovation in Odessa. In 1999, the site of this mall was a boarded up vacant lot. I recall seeing a homeless bitch there nursing her mangy pups in the dirt. I was delighted with the improvement. Just think of all the jobs this very compact shopping mall has created.

Inside, the shopkeepers have learned the lessons of corrupt Western capitalists. Everything is ON SALE! 30%-50% OFF. These signs are in English, by the way. The Levi's store even had a sign that said, in big bold white letters on a red background

SALE.

Yahoo *

And then in tiny letters at the bottom of the poster, they had a footnote with the Ukrainian translation. They translated Yahoo as Uuu-AUU, which is really more of a transliteration of Wow. [What kind of language does not have letters for the W, H or Th sounds? Russian is absurd.]

It's clear that they aren't trying to appeal to the English speakers but rather to borrow the cachet associated with rich Americans. If only they knew that most real Americans are nothing like the supertoned, chic models they see on TV. If you want to see beautiful people, come to Odessa.

I get the impression that the window is closing for fat American men like me who want to pick up a beautiful Ukrainian bride. In five years, what will America have to offer that Ukraine won't have? Considerably faster internet service, that's for sure.

America has a great quality of life compared to here in too many ways to enumerate in this letter. Mundane things like car insurance and smooth roads. Important things like superb medical care. But is that enough to lure someone away from a land where your family lives and everybody speaks your language and opportunity is blossoming? It's going to be a much harder sell.

On the bus back from downtown, another passenger started an argument with Oxana. He tried to start it with me, but I was congenial and did not take the bait. He chided Polina for "shouting", even though she was just talking too loud. I agreed with him and promised that we would keep our voices down. This was not enough for him. He kept going on and on as though he were looking out for the interests of the other passengers. He could understand that Polina was speaking English, but those poor other
passengers could not. What significance this has, I cannot tell you. We were all lucky that Nastya, my three-year-old, was not throwing one of her screaming tantrums. They are language-neutral.

The fact is, he was drunk -- and persistent. Eventually, Oxana had had enough of it and started giving him a hard time. "What is your problem? Leave us alone." This just got him going all the more. Then he dropped the F-bomb. Odd thing to do for one claiming to be defending bus passenger protocol. "Fuck you twice!", was Oxana's response. She refrained from answering him in Russian and really telling him what she thought because she did not want to upset the other passengers and worsen the scene.

He made some drunken babble in broken English about how he could pleasure Oxana and that he did not need her because he had a wife to take care of him. He advised me to teach my wife to be more respectful. The F-bomb is not usually, and certainly not in this case, about actual fucking. It's just a gesture of contempt. I am amazed when people get bent out of shape over this word.

Some people will show tremendous disrespect and contempt to others (for example, offering unsolicited, non-constructive criticism, e.g. "What ever made you think you could wear that?"), but then gasp in horror when you reflect that disrespect with a blunt, "Fuck You!". They seem oblivious to their own disrespectful behavior that precipitated the swearing. Or perhaps they are perfectly aware of what they are doing and get away with it most of the time simply because they maintain a fig leaf of courtesy. That's why I was delighted when it was reported that Dick Cheney, in a private conversation, told Vermont Senator Pat Leahy to "Go fuck yourself". I feel certain Leahy deserved it (or worse).

In any case, I motioned for Oxana to calm down and assured the drunk bus passenger that he was entirely in the right and that we would talk more quietly. I shook his hand and kept nodding and smiling agreement. He retreated from where we were sitting, but even though he was getting ready to go, he kept trying to catch Oxana's eye so as to re-engage the argument. This was impossible as Oxana had had enough of him. Shortly before disembarking, he admonished Oxana to "Love your husband", advice I am happy to report that she really does not need. But, of course, this will now be a private joke between us as, whenever she disagrees with me, I can wag my finger at her and say, "Love your husband".

I was glad he finally left the bus, as were the other passengers, I presume, although, no one said a peep. Somehow I think that passengers on an American bus would have told him to shut up. Maybe not. It's hard to know what to do with drunks. I felt sorry for him. He was so drunk he weaved around as he stood. I wager he did not know we could tell he was drunk, that he thought he was holding himself together pretty well.

The fact is, I disagreed with him about Polina's talking, but I was not going to let on to him. Sometimes people do talk on the bus. On the way home from the beach the next day, the passengers were talking a lot, because we were mostly families. On this particular night, however, Polina was the only one talking, probably because we were the only family on the bus -- everyone else had but their own self for company. So why shouldn't my daughter play and talk with her father? True, she was not using her "inside voice", but she's six years old. A simple finger to the lips and a "shoosh" would have sufficed.

Coming home from the beach, we let the first bus fill up and waited for the next so that we could be first in line and have our pick of seats (an important consideration when you have two kids and a stroller to arrange).

A group of pre-teen boys came up behind us and one of them asked me a question. I said, "Ya nye gavaryu po Russki" -- a good phrase to memorize meaning "I do not speak Russian." I motioned for them to ask Oxana. They wanted to know if we were getting on the approaching bus (we were). Once we were settled in our seats, the boys passed us as they boarded the bus. Oxana tells me that they said (in Russian), "I don't see what the problem is. I speak English." Then he struck some rap poses and offered a sampling of his English, "What's up, muhthehfuckuh! What's up, muhthehfuckuh!". I'm sure his "muhtheh" would be proud.

People wear a lot of English phrases on their T-shirts. Some of them make absolutely no sense. Hell, back in the 80's I wore a tie that said "Kamikaze" in Japanese, or so I was told. It could have said "Suzie's Sushi bar", how would I know. If you have to ask why I would wear a tie with Japanese writing on it, you probably missed the 1980's. We saw one kid downtown with a shirt that said, "I'll fuck anything". At least it was worn by a boy.

Then at the beach Oxana saw one that read, "Born to fuck" (well, who isn't, I'd like to know -- why not just wear a shirt saying, "Desperately horny with no prospects in sight"). Again, there's some comfort that this shirt, too, was worn by a male.

Oxana said that she saw a girl at the beach baring her breasts for a couple of men who were old enough to be her father. One was Georgian -- one of the men, that is, not one of her breasts. I am not sure why the man's country of origin factored into the situation, but Oxana somehow deduced it and felt it was a necessary detail, probably to emphasize that neither of the two breasts being shown were from there. As father of two girls, I would be aghast to find them soliciting attention as this girl was. And yet, the prospect of having a pretty, teenage girl flirt with me, even if I had to pay for it, does have some appeal. How could it not? I am born to fuck, after all.

My girls were topless as well, but at three and six it's not an issue. One woman was sitting right at the edge of the water baring her beautiful and ample breasts for all to see. As luck would have it, Nastya insisted on gathering rocks at that very spot on the beach. I tried not to stare, but I certainly stole several (hundred) glances. Oxana was mildly disgusted. Personally, I think she was setting a good example. One I wish several dozen others would have followed.

The fact is, the bathing suits don't hide much, and as an irredeemable "ass man", I was in heaven. If I were a younger man, and not married, I would spend every day at the beach.

I am glad that my daughters like the beach, but I am constantly on the edge of panic if either of them strays out of sight, which Polina inevitably does, much to my consternation. Nastya, too, is quite willing to go walking right through the crowd of people, across their towels and over their bodies. She has no idea where she is going, she just occasionally takes off. The vigil really distracts from the plentiful eye candy.

Nastya was wearing her "pampers" at the beach (that's what they call disposable diapers over here). Several old ladies came over and talked to me about that. I pretended to understand them, but gave no reply, of course, just shrugged my shoulders. I presume they were giving the same advice Oxana got -- that we should just remove the "pampers". Oxana was convinced that the diaper was somehow protecting Nastya from the various dread diseases that lurk in the Black Sea. More likely, it just held the water in place so the germs could grab ahold. Eventually, Oxana saw fit to remove the diaper and Nastya was the only totally nude girl on the beach -- an example I was hoping several other girls would follow, but no dice.

The weirdest thing of all, however, happened after we left the beach. We walked the "boardwalk" of beverage, souvenir and food vendors. We bought shuarmas -- a cross between a burrito and a gyro -- a very large, soft tortilla stuffed with spicy lamb, cabbage, spicy shredded carrot and cucumber, garnished with (ugh) ketchup and mayo. I much prefer the shuarmas in Amsterdam that were made with what I presume are more traditional Turkish spices. The Ukrainians seem to like mayonnaise on everything. (ugh)

That's not the weird part. After eating, we walked the rest of the boardwalk and took in the seaview. There's a slightly more isolated area of the road that is not populated with many vendor booths. Families make picnics in the grass there and cook shashliks (meat kabobs). Oxana had to pee, so she took Polina off to find a suitably inconspicuous bush. Polina did not have to go, but Oxana figured that, if by chance there were onlookers, they might feel more sympathetic toward a little girl.

As it turns out, up the hill from the spot she chose, there was a yellow concrete building that housed two latrines, one for men and one for women. Each room was labeled -- Zhe for Zhenshina (Women) and M for, well, whatever the Russian word for Men is. The men's latrine was disgusting. It's hard to imagine a room for shitholes that is not disgusting, but these were extraordinarily bad. Outhouses have seats, at least, which not only aids in directing the effluent into the target hole, but also eliminates the need to put your feet close to said hole, where, by the way, some previous users happened to have missed the target.

Oxana and Polina had scrambled up the hillside and entered the latrine by themselves. With Nastya in the stroller, I had to take the long route to the bend where the low road meets the high road. That U-turn was about 100 meters long, so for a while Oxana an Polina were on their own. A teenage boy, I'd guess around 16 years old, decided to watch Oxana do her business. He just walked in after Oxana had dropped her drawers and stood looking at her. She yelled at him and threatened to call the police. But this nervy kid just stood his ground. Even after my girls emerged from the latrine, he continued to hang around. He finally took off after I arrived, but not because I scared him. I think he finally felt ashamed. I looked at him with a mixture of bemusement and pity. I remember what it was like to be so full of hormones and have no outlet for it. Nature is quite cruel in that respect. Needless to say, Oxana was a little freaked out by him.

There's more to write, but it's late. They baptized Nastya yesterday. She threw one of her screaming fits most of the time. She briefly stopped when she noticed a ring of candles in a brass candleholder surrounding an icon (one of dozens in the chapel). "Birthday cake!", she shouted. At another point, I managed to get her to play a word game.

"What about a tiger?", I whispered.

"What about a ELL-PHANT!", she shouted.

"What about a goat?"

"What about a SHEEP!"

This went on for two blissful, scream-free minutes until we exhausted all the truly interesting animals and started repeating.

It was ludicrous, but then any Orthodox ritual is ridiculous. At one point, the godmothers and godfathers (it was a dual-baptism with her cousin's baby boy) were required to follow the priest in a parade around the altar. Well, forget that! Nastya was not going to let anybody but her mother or me hold her. And yet, the parade must go on -- it's part of the ritual -- can't be fully baptized without the parade. So I had to join the parade, patting Nastya on the leg as her godmother held her and her godfather brought up the rear. I just hope none of the magic rubbed off on me instead of going to the intended recipients.

Afterward I apologized to all for Nastya's nearly incessant screaming. Apparently, she's an atheist. We should have asked. Well, now she's a baptized atheist.

[I'm reading Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion". It's a tedious defense of atheism. At least, I find it tedious and I'm an atheist. I think I'll move on to Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". What I really wanted to read was "God is Not Great" by Chistopher Hitchens, but that was oversubscribed at the library. One point that Dawkins makes is that we pay far too much deference to people on account of religion. With politics, we feel free to argue each point, but with religion we throw up our hands and say, "Well, that's his religious point of view". If he said, "2+2=5, according to my religion", would we still be silent? How about "genital mutilation is just a part of my religion"?]

After the "Christos" (baptismal ceremony), we went to grandma Tanya's place where she had laid out a big spread. Lots of tasty stuff, all fixed without onions for my benefit, so I ate a little of everything. Polina, of course, ate only the cheese. No strange food will cross those lips. Grandma poured me three double shots of vodka. I was hung over all afternoon. I've had enough vodka for a year (and we've still a week to go).

Bad news on Wall Street yesterday. Not a good time to be cut off from the internet, I suppose. I don't trust any of the computers I use over here (possible keystroke monitoring password sniffers), so no banking or brokerage business until Aug 20. I hope I still have some assets by then.

..Bob.

The Message Game

2007-05-19T12:50:00.000-04:00

I have been working a lot lately. This, of course, cuts into the time I spend with my wife and daughters. I was lucky enough to get home last night in time to kiss my older daughter good night and sing her a bedtime song. It is the parental equivalent of eating the icing off the cake -- enjoying the sweetest part, forgetting how good the rest is. Well, I can't say I have forgotten how good the rest is, but I am leaving it on the plate for now.

Before we went to bed, we played "The Message Game", which is what my daughter calls Yahoo Instant Messenger (YIM). I am proud to report that her hunt-and-peck typing is faster than that of my boss. Her spelling is better, as well, but I wouldn't want her running the business.

Her favorite part of the game is playing with her papa. It's nice that we can do this even when I am at work. She contacts me when she gets home from school and we sometimes play her second favorite part. We play checkers together. It will not stun you to learn that in all of the dozens of games we have played I have yet to win. The fact is, she very much enjoys winning. She tells me this every time. "I am good at checkers," she announces, "I always win. Super Red!"

Indeed she does. This serves my purpose in two ways. It allows me the opportunity to build her confidence, if not her checkers playing skill. She does not ask herself, as indeed I have not asked until today, where the name checkers came from. She does not question why she always wins, nor imagine that there is any strategy that might help to extend her winning streak. I know that such checkers strategy exists. I seem to recall that Boris Spassky, chess grandmaster of the 1970s, had a sister Irina who was a checkers champion.

In my daughter's mind, however, she wins because she is lucky, and because she has an innate talent for checkers. It will not stun you to learn that she has the same talent for tic-tac-toe, as we discovered at an Italian restaurant the other night while waiting for the food.

The other purpose for letting her win is that it shortens the game considerably. This is not because I dislike spending time with my daughter. It's just that she generally takes a good long time between moves. Hence, I leave very little to make up for that. In a timed game, I'd whip her ass. Don't for a second imagine that she is spending this time considering her next move. She is merely distracted by a dozen other things.

I see her on the webcam I mounted over the monitor at home. It has full view of the TV room. After she moves, I watch her rise and hop over to where she can view the screen. She watches Spongebob or whatever for a few minutes, then climbs up on the sofa and makes her way back to the PC by walking across the top of the sofa back. My wife deplores this, but to Polina it is as much an adventure as finding a land route to Asia (and sometimes seems to take as long).

When I think about Marco Polo, I cannot help but wonder:

Did he set out for profit or adventure?
Had anyone else gone there and back? Why did his deeds matter? Was it because he blogged about it (well, kept and later published a journal, the blog equivalent in his day)?
Surely there were others who tried and failed, died along the way, no?
What were his special talents that helped him avoid the spear and the cookpot along the way?
Did his father let him win at checkers?
Having discovered something that altered the lives of most of the rest of the planet, did he spend his later life happy to have advanced civilization and commerce, or did he die regretting that he had not fully exploited his adventure for personal gain?
Did he worry that by opening up trade routes that would bring species from one biological niche into another, certain species would perish? Did he not value the biological status quo?
Are the founders of the internet and web happy to helped most of the rest of the planet, are do they rue that others have become far wealthier than they?
Do the founders ever worry that by opening up new avenues of commerce certain species of business would perish? Do they not value the commercial status quo? Have they no mom? Have they no pop?

Hold on. It is my turn.

It is now her turn again. She gets a king, or, as this child of the 1970s tells her, a queen. One advantage of playing checkers on Yahoo Instant Messenger is that it enforces all the rules. If you have a jump, it is the only move it allows you to make. All other checkers are frozen in place. It also marks a checker that has made it to her opponent's home row with a crown icon. In regular checkers, of course, we would proudly say, "King me." It is a gentle humiliation of one's opponent to command him to relinquish one of the checkers he has captured.

Since YIM performs this service silently, I type a message to my daughter, "Queen!", or on those rare occasions when I reach the crownhead, "King me!".

I suppose someday someone will try to explain to my daughter that her checkers do not become queens, but rather kings. My daughter will confidently correct them. She knows that girl checkers can only become queens. Only boy checkers can be kings. She will say this with certainty. It will be impossible to dissuade her.

If I were to raise her a full feminist, I suppose, I would have to avoid any and all attributions of gender to the game token. Royal Checker. Elevated Token. Oppressor. "Oh, honey! How lucky for you. Now you get to be an oppressor".

Wait, it's my turn. Imagine that, I just lost a piece.

Thinking back on my college years, I recall how the fullest of the full feminists had a penchant for socialism and its ridiculous aim of producing an equality of outcome in a society where talent and luck are not equally distributed. I suppose they might have me teach my daughter that all checkers are inherently equal, and that no one checker should have more power than another. If one checker can move bi-directionally, then all must be allowed to.

In short, the full feminists would have me teach my daughter rules that have no relation to real life. They would raise her not to be someone who helps the rest of the planet with her special skills. They would consider such truck evil, capitalistic selfishness. In the name of empowerment, they would teach her she was a victim, and sap her of her confidence and special skills, for that is their special skill. They would destine her for the cookpot. They would scare the sense of adventure right out of her.

But as I said, she is a lucky girl. Her papa knows better.

Oxana's citizenship

2007-05-15T17:53:00.000-04:00

Oxana had her citizenship interview today. Her application for citizenship was approved (of course). She was really nervous about the gov't questions they might have asked. As it turns out, the questions were:

Who was the first US President?
What was the name of the ship that brought the Pilgrims to America?
How many stars are on the US flag?

I had told her that they wanted people like her to become citizens and that they weren't going to flunk her. But she was worried they might ask her to name the thirteen original states. She had written them out and was cramming on the car ride over, along with "John G. Roberts, Jr., Charlie Crist, Mel Martinez, Bill Nelson...." She was afraid she might say, "Charlie Christ" or "Robert Johns" and they'd send her back to Ukraine.

I suppose it is still possible for something to delay her application. She has a friend who made it through the interview, but got rejected shortly thereafter when it came to light that she and her husband had temporarily separated before she had the conditions removed from her permanent status. It didn't seem to matter that she had a good reason (he had cheated on her), nor that they have since reconciled and continue to live together as man and wife. I don't know what the issue was -- perhaps that she did not disclose this. It happened after she had applied to have the conditions removed, but before the BCIS got around to processing her application. Seems unfair to me that she should reap the consequences for her husband's infidelity and bureaucratic sloth. In any case, Oxana won't have those problems.

The only problem she has is that her green card and Ukrainian passport show her name as Oksana, but I filled out her application for citizenship as Oxana. I am not sure how they will handle that. We don't really want to go to court to have the spelling of her name officially changed. Just tell us how they want it spelled and we'll work out the rest.

I don't think any entity other than a bureaucrat would try to dictate a singular spelling of one's name. I could get a credit card under the name Bob or Bobby or Rob (probably even Milkchaser, so long as my social security number was right). Same if I applied for university. Hell, Jimmy Carter took the Oath of Office as Jimmy and not James Earl. Harry Truman didn't even have a middle name (just an initial). US Grant was born Hiram Ulysses Grant, but got stuck as Ulysses Simpson Grant after the Congressman who nominated him wrote his name that way. Once the gov't records your name, they really don't want to change it (he preferred the initials USG to HUG anyway).

The BCIS official didn't seem to think this would delay her oath ceremony. We'll soon find out when that is. A joyous day that will be. Oxana wants to bring Polina along. Much as I'd like the two-year-old to be there as well, that might not work out. She nearly got us kicked out of the office today with all her screaming. She's not really an "office-friendly" child.

BTW, for any non-Yanks reading this post, the answers to those questions are:

Who was the first US President?

George Washington (he's on the one-dollar bill)

What was the name of the ship that brought the Pilgrims to America?

The Mayflower

How many stars are on the US flag?

Fifty. One for each state of the union.

John G. Roberts is the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court.
Charlie Crist is the Governor of the state of Florida.
Mel Martinez and Bill Nelson are the junior and senior Senators from Florida, respectively (although, how much respect they deserve is a matter of debate).

Immigrant Friendly

2007-05-07T13:09:00.000-04:00

I have read two articles recently that inspire me to be more immigrant friendly. Gunnar Myrdal Was Right, by James C. Capretta, noted that the fertility rate of a country tends to decline as its government's responsibility for taking care of its aged population increases. The other article (paid subscription required) sought to raise an alarm about the substandard academic performance of Latino students, noting that the recent influx of mostly Hispanic (and mostly Mexican) immigrants will make Latinos increasingly responsible for the success or failure of the economy.

For those of you who like figures, the first article noted that US fertility peaked in 1955 at around 3.5 children per couple and reached its nadir in 1975 at around 1.8 children per couple. Even though the fertility rate has risen to 2.0 in the US, we still rely on immigration to make up the slack. And even with immigration, we still have a declining ratio of workers to retirees (owing to the retirement bulge of the baby boomers -- that would include me around about 2027).

I realize, of course, that only non-Democrats are reading this as Democrats, punished by fate and genetics with a complete lack of understanding and interest in math, stopped reading at the last paragraph. However, since I began the paragraph with the phrase, "For those of you who like figures...", some may have merely skipped the paragraph. C'mon now, kids. Go back and read the paragraph. You won't understand the rest of the essay without it. And do try to stay awake.

The upshot of the fertility argument is that Social Security programs have an innate contradiction, prominently noted by economist Gunnar Myrdal in the 1940s. People used to have big families because they knew that they would need their children to take care of them when they got older. More children = more people obliged to keep you from starving.

But with the advent of Social Security, reliance on one's own children declined. This seems a boon to those unlucky enough to not be able to have children. No longer would the maiden aunt be dependent on staying in the good graces of her more reproductive siblings. For that matter, one need not have as many children since one could rely on one's neighbors to populate the nation with a teeming mass of worker bees. Thus, one can conserve the resources of one's own family, no longer having to split it amongst a larger brood.

It's a kind of freeloading, in a way, although the effects of the freeloading are not apparent until quite a long ways down the road. It is not unpredictable, however, and here is where I begin to lament the inability of Democrats, who insist on forcing socialism down our throats, to grasp fairly simple math concepts. When we have fewer workers per retiree, we cannot provide the same level of benefit to retirees, or we have to place an unduly heavier burden on those workers who fund the system. It is a sad, but inevitable truth.

Of course, one way out of this is to import new workers. And owing to our wonderful way of life (secure property rights; highly functional, albeit imperfect, rule of law; mature economy; highly capitalized businesses; fairly low tax rate; not to mention a host of "quality-of-life" advantages guaranteed by the Bill of Rights), millions of people from just about every country on the planet are very eager to come here. We can import our worker bees to make up for our slacking fertility rate.

The irony, however, is that nearly every worker could easily provide for his own retirement through a forced savings program. The only thing Social Security really secures is a future where the vast majority of workers will remain poor and retire poor. It is really just a means of taxing the people so that politicians can decide how our resources are spent instead of the people themselves. If gov't in its various forms demonstrated honorable frugality, one might not begrudge this taxation. Sadly, it does not. It never has. The temptation to overspend the taxpayers' resources is irresistible to elected lawmakers. Hence, money that you might invest wisely if you were to pay it to a broker or banker instead of to FICA, is loaned without exception to the Federal Gov't at a rate that favors the big spenders and favors Social Security recipients very little. Oh, sure, it's 100% guaranteed by the full faith and bla bla of the US of A -- but it is still a crummy return on investment.

And, as stated earlier, this return is dependent on one of three outcomes:

a reversal of the current declining ratio of workers to retirees
a reduction of benefits from their current rather paltry level, or
an influx of highly productive workers from abroad.

And here, I come back to the second article, Boomers' Good Life Tied To Better Life for Immigrants, by Miriam Jordan. What constitutes a highly productive worker? According to this article, the children of immigrants are underperforming their "white" counterparts. Here are some more figures (and, Democrats, no cheating, no skipping).

In Georgia, for example, minorities accounted for two-thirds of the population growth between 1990 and 2000. Between 2000 and 2005, they represented 80% of that growth. Yet, only 12% of black fourth-grade students and 17% of Hispanic fourth-graders are proficient in reading, compared with 38% of whites, according to a report by the Center for American Progress, a public policy think tank.

The first thing that strikes me about those figures is that 38% is nothing to write home about. As a proud member of the white race, I am rather embarassed that two out of three of the white children attending school with my daughters cannot read all that they are expected to read. If twice that proportion of Hispanic fourth-graders cannot read properly, I am inclined to hope that it is because they come from bi-lingual or Spanish-speaking households and that a part of their difficulty comes from confusion between English and Spanish. As for African-Americans, I don't know what their excuse is. Their ancestors have been in the country long enough to have figured out the language.

Think this is just a problem for so-called dumb Southerners in Georgia? Nope. Turns out California is even worse.

In California, already a majority minority state, 11% of African-American and 9% of Hispanic fourth-graders are proficient in reading, compared with 36% of their white peers.

The striking thing about this number is that Hispanics in California score way lower than Hispanics in Georgia. I wonder what is the average per-student cost in Georgia vs. California. Less, I would think. And yet, Californian Hispanics trail way behind their Georgian counterparts. Why?

One guesses that it has something to do with California Hispanics...

Living amongst a larger population of Spanish speakers
Having spent a shorter average time in US, having immigrated later
Having been handicapped by a well-meaning, but misguided attempt at bi-lingual education.

As I said, these are just guesses. I would not be surprised to be contradicted. And, as before, 36% for whites and 11% for blacks! -- nothing to be proud of, folks.

The author of the second article sees this as cause for alarm, since we cannot build a great economy on the backs of people who cannot read. We need architects and doctors, not fruitpickers and construction workers, is her point.

There might be merit in that, but except for the mass migration of British Americans who replaced the indigenous population of North America, the pattern for immigrants coming to America has been to take less skilled jobs. It is the successive generations, the descendants of those immigrants, who have moved up the economic ladder. And this is a rule that has yet to fail -- except in the case of those African Americans who continue to languish, for reasons I cannot fathom, generation after generation (one can blame skin color prejudice for some failure to advance, but that explains nothing of the gap in reading proficiency -- go ahead and call me a racist, but I note this is not a substitute for an explanation).

My take on the immigration problem is that we are not taking in enough immigrants and that those we do take are not those we select. We let people slip in undetected, unselected and demonstrating their willingness to break the law. I know that they are almost universally eager to work. I covet that productivity. But that distinguishes them not a whit. Plenty of people from Russia, China, India or Iran, and a host of other countries, are willing to come in as well. We should let more of these people in and select those we want. For example, we could expand and streamline visa programs such as the H1-B that are geared to bring in highly educated people. But we could also expand the number of visas granted to family members as these people arrive with a built-in network of support.

And as for the solution to Social Security, although immigration would help, there is no reason to allow the pay-as-you-go system to continue stripping us of our savings. We should put an end to the gov't pillaging of the working people through this awful socialist program. In the retirement system, the only roles I would like gov't to take on are:

to take care of the indigent, who cannot care for themselves (widows, orphans, disabled),
to force savings so that no one is allowed to become a burden to society through a lack of planning, foresight or wisdom,
to regulate forced savings so that people do not get ripped off and do not invest overly foolishly, so that we can project a worst case outcome that is better than currently promised benefits.

That said, I am glad to see immigrants come in, but not to save our country from socialism. We can do that ourselves by simply abandoning it. Socialism, and Social Security in particular, is a failure so far. It will always fail. This is not news. We should not continue to pretend otherwise.

Related articles:
Making Kids Worthless: Social Security's Contribution to the Fertility Crisis, Oskari Juurikkala, Ludwig Von Mises Institute, Jan 24, 2007
Having Large Families is An 'Eco-Crime', Sarah-Kate Templeton, Times Online, May 6, 2007
The Global Baby Bust, by Philip Longman, Foreign Affairs May/June 2004

One in Five Children Commits Suicide?

2007-03-27T08:15:00.000-04:00

Each week 450,000 children are bullied in school. Another 500,000 are taunted by their peer group in the community. And more than one in five children will turn to suicide as a way out of being severely bullied, writes Debbie Andalo.

Speaking as a survivor of school bullying and peer group taunting, let no one claim to be a greater foe of this awful practice. I am pleased that schools these days are trying to eliminate bullying. But this article claims that one in five children will turn to suicide. This is just nuts.

Granted, the rate of attempted suicide is thousands of times higher than that of suicides that end in death (I can't bring myself to call them successful). And the rate in UK is apparently much higher than here in the US. Who knows why.

Still... One in five children? This article claims that one in six children in inner cities attempts suicide. One guesses that the rate is lower in less depressed areas.

I suffer from chronic clinical depression (which I am able to treat with medicine). Also, my son accidentally killed himself by drug overdose. So I am sympathetic to the problem, but I can't help thinking that the aim of that wild statistic is meant to make the problem sound bigger than it actually is. Very few of the attempted suicides are serious enough to require hospitalization. A small fraction result in death. Are these people measuring suicidal ideation as equivalent to an actual attempt?

The quote says that one in five children turn to suicide as a result of bullying. But surely some of those children are reacting to the many other causes of despair: family problems, alcoholism/drugs, depression or factors endemic to their locale other than bullying.

It seems that the authors of the study are trying to drum up gov't money (about 4 British Pounds per child, it turns out). I do not know if that is an appropriate amount of money to spend on that particular program, but can't they justify its cost with believable statistics.

Global warming advocate believes in head shrinking

2007-03-24T09:55:00.000-04:00

The interesting part of this article is the description of a study that shows a correlation between skull size and higher latitudes. The author of the Wired article misinterprets the study to claim that thus global warming might shrink brain size. One hopes he's kidding.

The study might indicate that surviving in colder climates requires more brain power, thus smarter people lived longer than dumber people in more challenging environs. This is not the same as suggesting that cold climate caused bigger brains (killed smaller brains would be more accurate). Hence warmer climate would not cause smaller brains.

The author of this article demonstrates he might not have been one of the survivors in an icier era.

Worse, he demonstrates that the only way to promote his global warming theory is to attempt to ridicule its critics into silence rather than to present convincing evidence to the contrary. This is not science, but scaring people into believing pseudo-science is not about science. It's about controlling other people.

A Beautiful Life Lie

2007-03-22T12:12:00.000-04:00

Here's a provocative little essay. Jerry and I were discussing today how one of the things we resent about the Catholic Church is that they set themselves up as an Authority and insist that Catholic adherents believe things that have no basis in reality (e.g. even though they admit that the Eucharist and wine undergo no changes in physical properties, one must believe they are actually the Body and Blood or one is not allowed to partake of the Catholic Communion rite).

That's a lie, but the worst part of it is the so-called authority who foists it on others. This essayist suggests adopting your own "life lie" (by which he means what others call a life's dream). As I said, it's provocative.

I think of his advice as similar to buying a lottery ticket. It matters not that our chances of winning are small. We buy because we are 100% guaranteed at least a flicker of hope of riches. That's worth a buck every now and then.

Toxicology report

2007-03-07T09:37:00.000-05:00

I just received this note from Ben's mother today.

I finally got Ben's toxicology report. I will be mailing you the complete copy soon but basicly there were only 3 things in his system. There was NO heroin. There was :

Fentanyl : 3.3 ng/ml [therapeutic range 1-3]
Methadone : 54 ng/ml [therapeutic range 50-1000]
Diphenhydramine (antihistamine) : 77.8 ng/ml [therapeutic range 30-300]

He was treating himself for heroin addiction. He was trying to get off of the heroin. He was trying to be good and clean himself up. And he was trying to do this using a street mixture.

It was the fentanyl that killed him. It is a pain killer and usually given to patients in the form of a patch. It is a dangerous drug and doctors have to watch their patients for respiratory side effects. It can slow down the breathing which relaxes the body and also slow the heart rate. It is very potent and less controllable in liquid form. If Ben had been seeing a doctor, he would not have died. If Ben had been treating himself in front of his friends, letting them know what he was using, he would not have died. If he'd passed out in front of his friends and they knew what was in the syringe, he could have been given a drug to counteract the effects. Ben was a little bull-headed, always wanting to do things his way and this time it got him killed. I know this was an accident. I am slightly comforted by the fact that he was trying so hard to get his life on a positive track.

Please pass this information on to anyone who may be interested.

Give Evangelicals a break

2007-01-30T22:47:00.000-05:00

I am a former born-again Christian, now an atheist. I don't believe that Christianity is true and some of Jesus' advice is bad -- outright bad advice.

But I commend Evangelicals. I have fond memories of most of my experiences as a Christian (the worst part was really the anguish of struggling to believe, and that ended when I stepped away from the Faith).

Christians, especially Evangelical Christians are in general some of the most loving and generous people on the face of the planet. I also believe they are, in the main, extremely tolerant.

Some people find the Gospel to be irritating and maybe even a little boring. They find the professed certainty and judgementalism of committed Christians appalling. Christian-haters are entitled to such uncharitable feelings. After all, they are just feelings and don't by themselves do harm.

I feel sorry for people who let other people's fantasies bother them. Religious fantasies about Jesus and God and heaven might bother so-called liberals (what's liberal about despising Christians? Not much). Christians probably find some sexual fantasies repulsive. Everyone is entitled to feel that way about other people's myths. I don't mean to disparage genuine revulsion to other people's "happy thoughts". But I also feel sorry for people who let that innate revulsion eat at them or cause them distress.

For example, there's something about the irrationality of Christian myth that bugs me. But I don't let it distress me. If it makes some people happy, I don't want to take that away from them. I am not going to church anytime soon, but I am not trying to shut down any churches.

Similarly, I don't pass judgement on homsexuality. I see no rational basis for denigrating it in any way, but I feel an innate revulsion to it (well, to male-male acts mostly). I don't know why that is, but I would be lying to deny it. Still, why should my revulsion become a source of distress for me. No one is telling me I have to like it, just that my revulsion is not the basis for prohibiting somebody else's "happy thoughts".

To my way of thinking, everyone is entitled to their own beliefs about the cosmos -- and that includes the belief that all other belief systems are crap. I don't think you can really be said to have faith unless you believe that all contradictory faiths are crap. The tolerance required by the First Amendment is not that we pretend not to have faith, but that we don't take any action against all those others who do not share our particular beliefs.

You see, no one can make me believe in God. Nor can I make someone stop. Nor would I care to, especially since, as I said, I have fond memories of being a Christian. Christianity is a really blissful religion. It makes a lot of people really happy -- genuinely happy. And that's a pretty good thing.

My faith is now the faith of Liberty. I believe that letting other people act, talk, believe and own property as they wish is the profoundest rule we all should obey.

Ben's Eulogy

2006-12-28T14:45:00.000-05:00

Here is Ben's eulogy, slightly revised from how I delivered it at Ben's memorial service, Dec 2, 2006:

"Ben had such a big heart"
"Ben was always smiling"
"He was such a sweet kid".

Those are not just my words. You expect parents to say those things. Those are the words I've heard this weekend over and over.

If you took that impression of Ben, look at these two people: Cheryl and Bill. If he touched you, you should know that that kindness, that aptness of observation... He learned this kindness from his mother, Cheryl Ruth. He learned this acuity of perception from his father, Bill.

There are two other people who shaped Ben's life in innumerable ways, his grandparents Jim and Margaret Green.

Ben had a pillar of self-love inside him. He knew that he was special. If he ever doubted that, he needed to look no farther than Jim and Margaret and see the smiles that he brought to their faces.

Words fail to describe what that boy meant to them.

Let me read you a poem.

Edna St. Vincent Millay -- Sonnet II

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go, -- so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

Ben let us down. He let us all down hard. He must have known, he surely knew how many people loved him. Of that, I have no doubt. Look around you at how many people were touched by him. [There were over a hundred people at Ben's memorial service].

Lesson One: Our pre-eminent duty to the people who love us is to keep ourselves alive. Ben had a network of people who loved him. Look how many people grieve now that he, the focus of that network, has vanished.

Each of you has a network. Ben, in his narcissistic pursuit of a high ignored that.

Ben could be great, but he could also be awfully inconsiderate -- hard to get ahold of, hard to reach. And now he's made himself, albeit accidentally, impossible to reach.

I have anger about that, perhaps you do, too. It's okay to acknowledge that anger. We may not want to dwell in it. But here's something I know about anger:

You don't get angry with people you don't care about.

You don't get really, really angry unless you really, really care.

And you won't stay angry.

I can't be too angry at Ben, because I did stupid things, too. I was just lucky enough to live through them and maybe smart enough to run away from really dangerous things. But still, lucky.

I am reminded of a time when I was doing cocaine. I was with three people I hardly knew in Ossining, New York. The only reason I knew them was that they could get drugs. One guy decided to buy crack, so I thought why not try that. It had a strange chemical taste, sort of like smoking a cassette tape. And then the euphoria hit and I thought, "Man, this is my favorite cassette tape".

Then my heart started pounding and racing like it never had before. And I thought, "Oh my god. I could die here in this dingy garage in Ossining, New York with three people I hardly know. And I'll never see my son again". The thought of never seeing him again kept me from ever taking that risk again.

It was easier for me than Ben, because I'm the dad. Dads have a responsibility, they have to keep going. When I was going through the pain of the divorce there were times when I didn't want to live. I wanted to drive my car off a bridge into the roiling, icy waters of the Mississippi.

But the thought would come that I couldn't do that to Ben. I couldn't leave him not knowing what his father was like, always wondering, never knowing.

Of course, the great advantage that we have is that we do know Ben, and we'll carry his memory with us now that he's gone. He may have hidden his shadow self, but he by no means hid his whole self from us. When he shined his light on you ... that smile, those deep black eyes....

Couple of stories:
Ben loved to swim, we swam together quite a bit. One time we were swimming in Long Island Sound off of Westport Beach in Connecticut. We swam way out together and eventually we started to swim back. Ben got tired and asked if he could hold onto my back. After a while, I realized that I really wasn't getting any closer to shore. The tide was carrying us out faster than I could swim and I was getting tired.

Luckily, I remembered what to do when you get caught in a riptide. I started swimming parallel to the shore to get out of the current. We ended up way down the beach from where we started, tired, but glad to be on safe ground.

That's what you do when you're a dad: You have to get your son to shore. But you have that same duty to yourself to fight the tide and if it is too strong, evade it.

When Ben was around five or six, he was visiting me for the summer. I had a friend who owned a dinghy and we went swimming out in a lake in Putnam County, New York. Not too far out, really -- we stayed pretty close to the dock. But the water there was over my head. I was holding Ben the whole time. At some point I wanted to get out and I tried to put him into the dinghy, but he was a little scared and he wouldn't let go of me. Actually, he was making it difficult to tread water. I started to worry that we would drown.

So I pulled Ben under the water with me and his survival instinct kicked in. He let go of me and I was able to grab him and lift him up into the dinghy.

What happened to Ben's survival instinct?

This brings me to Lesson Two.
Lesson One is that our pre-eminent duty to the people who love us is to keep ourselves alive.

Lesson Two has to do with guilt. I have heard it said that guilt is a way of holding on to something or someone. It's not a very effective way. It doesn't really accomplish anything. But ironically, it's a kind of comfort.

I am sure you keep telling yourself, "If I had only..."
I have heard some of your "If only" stories this weekend.
"If only I had known..."
"If only I had been there..."
"If only I had said something..."

Yeah... if only Ben had listened.

For me, the thought is, "if only I had called". Some of you know that Ben and I were estranged for almost 4 years, and just last month he called me out of the blue and we got to talk twice.

By the way, I have to say thank you to two men who I never knew until this weekend. I have to say thank you to Dave and Glen. If it weren't for Dave, Ben never would have gotten the job at Insight [the cable company where he worked]. And Dave was a model for stability, so watching Dave helped Ben to start to get back on track.

Glen, I am told, took Ben under his wing. He recognized Ben's talents. When we cleaned up Ben's room we found several books about how to be an effective salesman. And we found page after page of hand-scrawled notes [at this point in the service, Ben's co-workers laughed in recognition]. He really took these lessons to heart. It was important to him to perfect his game. And the fact that he got so good at it led Glen to give him a promotion.

Glen, he was so proud of that promotion I think he felt like he could finally call me because he knew how proud I would be. He said so in the email he sent to reconnect with me.

If not for Dave and Glen, we never would have reconnected. I hope someday you come to realize what a gift that was to me.

So my "if only" phrase is: "If only I had called..."
"What was so important that I couldn't take one hour of my time to talk to him. At least then, I'd have had three phone calls..."
"Maybe if only I'd talked to him..."

Yeah... if only Ben would have listened. Ben had a bumper sticker in his room: "Knowledge speaks, Wisdom listens." I wish Ben had had a wee bit more wisdom.

But, as his Aunt Claudia put it, he was clear that he wanted to handle this on his own. Lots of people had tried to help him.

By the way, you know who wrote that bumper sticker? Jimi Hendrix. My god, guys. Listen to your own advice. Listen to this advice: Do not use heroin; Do not put a needle in your arm. (Jimi Hendrix. What a putz. He's no hero. He was not a wise man).

Lesson Two is that there was nothing you could do. Ben's death was the result of decisions he made. You're off the hook. We're all off the hook. There was nothing we could have done.

But if it comforts you think so, let yourself feel a little guilty. If it helps you to hold onto Ben for a short moment...

And there's a corollary to Lesson Two. We only have so much time with someone and we never know how much time that is. So you have to say the important things while you can. Ben and I were lucky to have two phone calls before he died. At the end of both calls, we said "I love you" to each other.

Say what needs to be said while you can, because when it's too late, it's too late. You'll worry that you won't say it exactly the right way -- and you won't -- but it doesn't matter. What matters is that you say it. Even if a thousand people told me today that he loved me, it wouldn't mean as much as hearing it from him. But I did hear it from him. I know he loved me and he knew I loved him.

Lesson Three: We're just flesh and blood.
Lesson One: you remember: Pre-eminent duty -- keep yourself alive, not for your sake, but for those who love you.
Lesson Two: Let yourself feel guilty but let yourself off the hook. And remember, we only have some finite amount of time with those who matter to us.

Lesson Three has to do with letting go and living life. At some point, you will stop grieving and go on with life and that will, on some level, feel like a betrayal of his memory. But we're flesh and blood. We're not saints. We're meant to live our own lives.

You all know in your heart that Ben would have wanted you to love yourself. I'm happy to know that he did. Does anyone here think he didn't? You know he did. As his parents, we wanted to give him the gift of self-esteem, because we all struggle with it somehow. Ultimately, self-love is a gift you have to give to yourself.

From talking to you, his friends, this weekend I know that he had that. You know how I know that? Because, he chose such wonderful, incredible friends. That's the proof.

So, Ben's friends, give yourself the gift of recognizing that you're only flesh and blood. And go on and live full lives.

News of Ben's death

2006-12-28T12:28:00.000-05:00

My son Ben died, November 29, 2006. He overdosed on heroin that night and accidentally killed himself.

He came home that night and said hello to his roommates. They said he seemed happy, not depressed. Then he went into the bathroom. When he didn't come out after a really long time, they went in to check on him and discovered his body with a syringe nearby. He was dead.

Ben and I had been estranged for quite some time -- since almost four years ago when he returned to Indiana after trying to live with us in Florida. But just two weeks before he died, out of the blue, he called. He told me about his life and we reminisced. He followed up a few days later and we talked again. He seemed to be doing well. He seemed happy. He planned to go to IU next fall. I invited him to visit over the holidays.

But now he's gone. I had meant to track him down the previous weekend to talk again. I was looking forward to it. But you know how it goes. There are always some hundred little things to distract from the important ones.

My wife, Oxana was upset, too, and cried more than I. Ben had traveled with me to Odessa in 1999 on my second trip to meet her. She regrets that he never got to see his new little sister Nastya, or to see how much Polina has grown since he last saw her. She weeps to think that he missed out on so many joys of life: romance, marriage, children.

But Ben had a fairly good 25 years, too. He had just about every advantage a middle class kid could ask for. A lot of people loved him and made that clear to him constantly. And yet he had an unhealthy urge to get high and stubbornly refused to accept help to get beyond that. He was certain he could handle his problem.

It's a sad thing (a rather stupid thing, too) and those of us who really knew him will miss him terribly.

Interim

2006-12-28T11:29:00.000-05:00

On Sunday Dec 2, 2006, we held a memorial service for my son Ben. At that service I read the following poem (edited) by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The full version can be read here: http://www.bartelby.com/131/2.html

Interim

The room is full of you! -- As I came in
And closed the door behind me, all at once
A something in the air, intangible,
Yet stiff with meaning, struck my senses sick! --
...
You are not here. I know that you are gone,
And will not ever enter here again.
And yet it seems to me, if I should speak,
Your silent step must wake across the hall;
If I should turn my head, that your sweet eyes
Would kiss me from the door. -- So short a time
To teach my life its transposition to
This difficult and unaccustomed key! --
The room is as you left it; your last touch --
A thoughtless pressure, knowing not itself
As saintly -- hallows now each simple thing;
Hallows and glorifies, and glows between
The dust's grey fingers like a shielded light.
There is your book, just as you laid it down,
Face to the table, -- I cannot believe
That you are gone! -- Just then it seemed to me
You must be here. I almost laughed to think
How like reality the dream had been;
Yet knew before I laughed, and so was still.
That book, outspread, just as you laid it down!
Perhaps you thought, "I wonder what comes next,
And whether this or this will be the end";
So rose, and left it, thinking to return.

...

And here are the last words your fingers wrote,
Scrawled in broad characters across a page
In this brown book I gave you. Here your hand,
Guiding your rapid pen, moved up and down.
Here with a looping knot you crossed a "t",
And here another like it, just beyond
These two eccentric "e's". You were so small,
And wrote so brave a hand!
How strange it seems
That of all words these are the words you chose!
And yet a simple choice; you did not know
You would not write again. If you had known --
But then, it does not matter, -- and indeed
If you had known there was so little time
You would have dropped your pen and come to me
And this page would be empty, and some phrase
Other than this would hold my wonder now.
Yet, since you could not know, and it befell
That these are the last words your fingers wrote,
There is a dignity some might not see
In this, "I picked the first sweet-pea to-day."
To-day! Was there an opening bud beside it
You left until to-morrow? -- O my love,
The things that withered, -- and you came not back!
That day you filled this circle of my arms
That now is empty. (O my empty life!)
That day -- that day you picked the first sweet-pea, --
And brought it in to show me! I recall
With terrible distinctness how the smell
Of your cool gardens drifted in with you.
I know, you held it up for me to see
And flushed because I looked not at the flower,
But at your face;
...
(You were the fairest thing God ever made,
I think.) And then your hands above my heart
Drew down its stem into a fastening,
And while your head was bent I kissed your hair.
I wonder if you knew. (Beloved hands!
Somehow I cannot seem to see them still.
Somehow I cannot seem to see the dust
In your bright hair.) What is the need of Heaven
When earth can be so sweet?

...
That first sweet-pea! I wonder where it is.
It seems to me I laid it down somewhere,
And yet, -- I am not sure. I am not sure,
Even, if it was white or pink; for then
'Twas much like any other flower to me,
Save that it was the first. I did not know,
Then, that it was the last. If I had known --
But then, it does not matter. Strange how few,
After all's said and done, the things that are
Of moment.
Few indeed! When I can make
Of ten small words a rope to hang the world!
"I had you and I have you now no more."
There, there it dangles, -- where's the little truth
That can for long keep footing under that
When its slack syllables tighten to a thought?
Here, let me write it down! I wish to see
Just how a thing like that will look on paper!
"*I had you and I have you now no more*."
O little words, how can you run so straight
Across the page, beneath the weight you bear?
How can you fall apart, whom such a theme
Has bound together, and hereafter aid
In trivial expression, that have been
So hideously dignified? -- Would God
That tearing you apart would tear the thread
I strung you on! Would God -- O God, my mind
Stretches asunder on this merciless rack
Of imagery! O, let me sleep a while!
Would I could sleep, and wake to find me back
In that sweet summer afternoon with you.
...
How easily could God, if He so willed,
Set back the world a little turn or two!
Correct its griefs, and bring its joys again!
We were so wholly one I had not thought
That we could die apart. I had not thought
That I could move, -- and you be stiff and still!
That I could speak, -- and you perforce be dumb!
I think our heart-strings were, like warp and woof
In some firm fabric, woven in and out;
Your golden filaments in fair design
Across my duller fibre. And to-day
The shining strip is rent; the exquisite
Fine pattern is destroyed; part of your heart
Aches in my breast; part of my heart lies chilled
In the damp earth with you. I have been torn
In two, and suffer for the rest of me.
What is my life to me? And what am I
To life, -- a ship whose star has guttered out?
A Fear that in the deep night starts awake
Perpetually, to find its senses strained
Against the taut strings of the quivering air,
Awaiting the return of some dread chord?
Dark, Dark, is all I find for metaphor;
All else were contrast, -- save that contrast's wall
Is down, and all opposed things flow together
Into a vast monotony, where night
And day, and frost and thaw, and death and life,
Are synonyms. What now -- what now to me
Are all the jabbering birds and foolish flowers
That clutter up the world? You were my song!
Now, let discord scream! You were my flower!
Now let the world grow weeds! For I shall not
Plant things above your grave
...
Amid sensations rendered negative
By your elimination stands to-day,
Certain, unmixed, the element of grief;
I sorrow; and I shall not mock my truth
With travesties of suffering, nor seek
To effigy its incorporeal bulk
In little wry-faced images of woe.
I cannot call you back; and I desire
No utterance of my immaterial voice.
I cannot even turn my face this way
Or that, and say, "My face is turned to you";
I know not where you are, I do not know
If Heaven hold you or if earth transmute,
Body and soul, you into earth again;
...
Ah, I am worn out -- I am wearied out --
It is too much -- I am but flesh and blood,
And I must sleep. Though you were dead again,
I am but flesh and blood and I must sleep.

Nixon, Vietnam and the legacy of the Democratic Party

2005-05-27T00:21:00.000-04:00

To my Democrat friends:

I just happened to read this article tonight by Marvin Olasky after talking to a friend on a similar matter. Olasky, a repentant Vietnam War protester, wrote it after a recent visit to West Point. Olasky gets to the heart of the matter in this paragraph:

Here at this majestic site on a cliff above the Hudson, it seems that people should measure up to at least this part of the Cadet Prayer: "Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong." I did not: I chose a wrong not only easier but vile. So did the United States in its post-Watergate twitching, as we suddenly withheld arms from our Southeast Asian allies and were thus complicit in the creation of killing fields.

It seems to underscore the theory that Watergate was the weapon used against Nixon (although he fashioned it himself), but that the real reason the Left went after him was because he was a successful anti-Socialist, having extricated our troops from Vietnam with honor in such a way that the Republic of Vietnam could survive. Once he was weakened and out of the way, Congress abandoned our allies and weakened us around the world. Given the serious fallout of that Congressional action (death and misery to the Vietnamese and Cambodians in the vacuum left by American military forces, and an extreme poverty that exists to this day), Nixon's Watergate crime seems like stubbing his toe in comparison. Nixon covered up -- and who died as a result?

In fact, I recall that Nixon explained in his famous interviews with David Frost, just why the US needed to defend South Vietnam: because they were our ally as signators to the SEATO treaty. Nixon even said, "The easiest thing for me to have done was to say, 'This is Kennedy & Johnson's war'. But it was not Kennedy & Johnson's war -- it was America's war". But when we showed that we would not stand with them by continuing to supply arms to hold the Communists of the North at bay, we signaled to the world that pressure from the American Left could fatally weaken public support for defending Liberty abroad. That's why there's a plaque honoring John Kerry hanging in Hanoi today. So much for the legacy of Wilson, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower and JFK, eh?

And the sad part is, the Left continues to do this today, attacking the liberation of tens of millions of people in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon from thugs like the Taliban, Saddam Hussein and Syria's Bashar Assad (there's even a nascent democracy movement in Egypt and Cuba!). If the Left disparages successes such as these, what hope is there for the enslaved peoples of Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe and North Korea?

I'm not asking you to abandon your party -- far from it! I'm asking you to educate yourself and convince your fellow Democrats to wake up to the perverse pro-Socialist policies of Kerry, (Teddy) Kennedy, Dodd and Carter, and go back to defending Liberty. In the words of Democratic icon JFK,

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

This much we pledge—and more.

What has happened to that pledge? Who in your party continues to support that pledge?

You're Biased, I'm Not

2005-02-11T00:06:00.000-05:00

A response to "You're Biased, I'm Not" by Dick Meyer -- in the "Against the Grain" column at cbsnews.com, Feb 9, 2005. Is it really a good idea for somebody at CBS News to go on record yet again denying bias? You decide.

People who accuse other people of being biased while maintaining their own liberation from all bias are pre-sophomoric. I'm not sure they are freshmen. They are certainly fools.

...

If someone accuses you of being biased, the conversation is over. You're not going to convince them that you're not biased or that they are biased, too. Someone who plays the bias card does not want to understand another perspective even out of curiosity. They just want to hear things they agree with and be able to dismiss all the rest.

-- Dick Meyer

[Read his article in order to fully understand my response.]

It seems to me that it is not the person who "plays the bias card" who is a fool. Rather, it is he who denies his own bias who is fooling himself.

When someone accuses me of bias, the conversation is not over; it has just begun. I am likely to confess it and ask the person to explain where he felt my bias crept in. If he does not convince me of my bias, I keep it to myself. No need to argue the inarguable, since, if I am indeed biased, then it goes without saying I would be blind to it.

But this does not mean that I disavow my opinion. There is no need to disavow or hide my opinion. Holding, articulating, even shouting my opinion at times, is entirely appropriate. Because that's what human beings do -- it's how we sort truth from fiction.

I love opinion. It's my favorite section of the newspaper. I perversely enjoy being riled by the op-ed pieces that annoy me, because they inspire me to sharpen, adapt and change my thinking on issues that matter to me. But when I see opinion outside the op-ed pages, I feel a kind of nausea. It is misrepresenting fact in the name of reporting it.

The weirdness creeps in (and it is creepy) when people disavow their bias. Do they think their readers are fools? Apparently so. It is no far stretch to prove bias at the NY Times or the Washington Times -- even outside their respective opinion pages.

However, I now get accused of being biased almost as much by the left as the right, but the e-mail from the left is now meaner.

Only a newsman would claim that just because one receives criticism from both the right and the left, he is hewing to the center. Imagine a drunk driver weaving down the road, banging into property on both sides. He would certainly get an equal number of complaints from either side of the road. Please don't offer this as evidence of his good sense of direction!

And yet I believe this is analogous to the way Dick Meyer rationalizes ignoring his own bias. But then I could be wrong. I'm biased, after all.

Social Security Ads: Risk or Protection?

2005-02-10T18:29:00.000-05:00

Three comments on the essay, "Social Security Ads: Risk or Protection?" at factcheck.org. This essay considers a TV ad from Progress for America and a print ad from AARP. While factcheck.org have only minor criticisms to make of the pro-Social Security ad, I felt that some of their criticisms were wrong.

1. The essay suggests that Progress for America was wrong to use the word "retiree" when referring to the ratio of workers to retirees. They suggest that "beneficiary" is more appropriate because Social Security also pays benefits to non-retired survivors and disabled people.

In fact, the ad is correct to refer only to retirees because President Bush's reform plan is focused solely on the retirement fund of Social Security. The disability and survivor funds would be maintained as is. The SSA considers the revenue needs of each fund separately. Personal Retirement Accounts (PRAs) are only intended to divert retirement funds into equity accounts.

2. The essay mentions that FDR's grandson states that his grandfather would have opposed reforming Social Security. True.

It also fairly states that what FDR would or would not support is a matter of opinion. True.

Even if he opposed it today, it would not be clear if he would do so because he viewed PRAs as a bad idea, or if he were merely opposing it for partisan reasons, to support the political party he loved and led for many years. He is not alive to speak for himself.

So we would do well to take him at his word and read what he himself wrote about the future of Social Security. In his "Message to Congress on Social Security" on Jan. 17, 1935:, FDR wrote:

"In the important field of security for our old people, it seems necessary to adopt three principles: First, noncontributory old-age pensions for those who are now too old to build up their own insurance. It is, of course, clear that for perhaps 30 years to come funds will have to be provided by the States and the Federal Government to meet these pensions. Second, compulsory contributory annuities that in time will establish a self-supporting system for those now young and for future generations. Third, voluntary contributory annuities by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age. It is proposed that the Federal Government assume one-half of the cost of the old-age pension plan, which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans." [emphasis added]

Bush's proposal would create accounts invested in equity markets rather than annuities, but either would be self-supporting. It is doubtful that FDR could have foreseen massive participation in equity markets, since this has really only been made possible by modern telecommunications, computing and networking. But even he could foresee a self-supporting plan. Annuities bear risk to the borrower and provide security to the owner. The index funds touted by Bush do not, but provide higher returns to the owner. Still, both work by investing funds in equity markets and both are self-financed not taxpayer-financed.

The similarity between FDR's vision and Bush's proposal should be considered when thinking about what the father of Social Security would want 70 years later.

3. Like other essays, this essay remarks on the volatility of the stock market and mentions notable recent declines such as the 1987 mini-crash and the more distressing long-term slide from 2000 highs to the 2002 trough. I do not dispute the facts mentioned, but suggest that the essays omit another important fact, namely, that even five-year slides are insignificant when considered over the typical 49-year time period during which a worker pays FICA taxes.

I believe that, starting in the mid-1920s, there exists no 40-year period during which the US stock market has not yielded at least an average of 6% (and that is the floor). It is a mistake to let worry over potential short-term losses prevent an investor from reaping long-term returns. And retirement horizons are long-term.

Also, one needs to consider the effect of dollar-cost averaging which, simply stated, tells us that, given a steady stream of investment funds, the negative effects of bear markets is mitigated by the positive effects of bull markets. What matters, over the any given term, is whether assets rise in value in the end. It is important to point out that for terms of 20 years or longer, equity assets have always risen at rates exceeding the returns promised by Social Security.

2004-12-24T11:35:00.000-05:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Thaddeus McCotter

2004-08-26T22:59:00.001-04:00

I watched the chairmen of the 9/11 Commission, Thos. Keane and Lee Hamilton, come before the House International Relations Committee this week (August 24, 2004). Lee Hamilton was brilliant. He definitely took pains to avoid partisanship and that emphasized the need for both parties to be unified in our opposition to the terrorist enemies.

But I was most impressed by Representative Thaddeus McCotter's statement. He's a Republican from southern Michigan. I thought his delivery was forceful. His statement follows:

First, thank you for your work. It's a particularly difficult year to be bi-partisan, but you managed to pull it off.

Um. Just a couple quibbles, because I'm sure that you get that all the time.

First of all, the use of the word "sanctuary" is apt, but I would have liked to also have seen emphasis on states that actively participate in the sponsorship of these terrorist organizations. I think "sanctuary" has a sort of passive connotation to it, when I think there are states that actively are involved with perpetuating terror.

Also, the "failed state" has kind of a connotation of exoneration. I don't think there's anyone who'd say that Nazi Germany was a failed state. I think it was an evil state. I think that "failed state" means there was a good, honest effort to tend to the needs of one's people, and it just didn't work out. I don't think that's the case with much of those states that we're dealing with.

Um. One of the things that I think we have to look at, and it's been touched on, is the fact that we're approaching this as if it's a solely political matter and I think that Mr. Hamilton touched on the fact that, in many ways, it's a theological matter -- that one of the reasons we're hated in the Middle East is our culture itself. We are infidels. We are not simply non-Muslims. We are people who lead good Muslims away from the true faith. In the mind of bin Laden, we are the greater danger.
That's why we are the Great Satan. It is not about what we did in Iran. It is not about what we've done in Iraq or elsewhere. It's the very fact that our existence, that our pluralism is a direct threat to their version of Islam.

That's why there is no emphasis on the nation/state that will be built if bin Laden were to be successful, or if the Islamic extremists were to be successful. They're not concerned with the nation/state. The first grave threat to them is the threat to their version of their theology. That includes our Arab allies in the Middle East.

In terms of the jurisdiction of this committee, I would just caution: Diplomacy is not a magic word; that nation/states have interests; and even amongst allies, those interests tend to collide sometimes just as much as they coincide.

And, particularly, with the French, we can look back to Richelieu to see what they're up to these days. It hasn't changed. So we can talk 'til we're blue in the face, but given our experience in the Cold War -- and again I use France because of their in and out of NATO... the DeGaulle years --- is that sometimes you can't do anything to get someone to go along -- especially if, in the past they believe that their problem is the number one problem for the United States (just like the Soviet Union was) and that a lot of American money and a lot of American blood will be spent to defeat the enemy regardless of their apathy or participation.

We've seen this before. And, in keeping with the Cold War theme, it just strikes me that we have to look at radical Islam as having arisen to fill the vacuum of the secular theology of Communism. It has a great appeal to the dispossessed.

And I think that your recommendations for "soft power" are necessary. The one thing that I would like to see (you talked about the Marshall Plan having complexities to it) is that we have to be sure that any soft money is accounted for and beneficially used. And I think it should start from a grass roots approach rather than a top-down approach that we've taken in Iraq. It has to immediately be felt at the grass roots level and have a tangible, palpable effect on these people. But we also (as Mr. Lantos pointed out) to protect the soft money and the possible impact at the grass roots, we have to have the military option to be prepared -- whether it be America's or others -- to defend those from the terrorists attacking them at the grass roots level.

In many ways, it would be akin to what Pablo Escobar used to do in Colombia in that any gains that the government would make, he would blow it up. He would terrorize people. He would threaten them with... you would either be bribed or you would get a bullet. We see this in Iraq today with the people that we're trying to recruit to defend their country, to build it. They're being targeted by terrorists.

In many ways, we have to make sure that any soft power is started at the grass roots level and is dispersed so that it makes it harder for the terrorists to aim at one particular target -- and also have the military option there to make sure that these people are a) able to defend themselves or b) that we might have to protect these gains or the ground from being taken away by the terrorists themselves.

But, all in all, I'd like to thank you for your work. I think it was a tremendous service to your country and, you know, best of luck to you in whatever you're going to do now.

John O'Neill and Nixon

2004-08-23T16:38:00.000-04:00

I am intrigued by the attempt to link O'Neill to Nixon (as if that would somehow invalidate what he has to say -- transductive thinking at its worst, inferring a particular from a particular). Tom Oliphant has made this charge in print and on the Lehrer NewsHour. But is it true?

In fact, O'Neill was picked for the Cavett Show debate with Kerry by the Cavett Show. He paid his own way to New York.

Didn't Chuck Colson comment favorably on him? Yes, in a series of June 1971 memos, he talks of trying to recruit O'Neill for further debates with Kerry. As I understand it, O'Neill was willing but Kerry didn't want to take on O'Neill again and refused.

But note the dates: First Cavett Show [June 11, 1971] -- Meets Nixon [June 16, 1971] O'Neill inserted himself on the scene. He was not initially recruited by the White House, although clearly the White House encouraged this group (and why not?). And since Kerry refused to go head to head with O'Neill after the second Cavett show [June 30, 1971], all of Nixon/Colson's efforts came to nothing.

So, the attempt to demonize O'Neill is spurious and certainly demonstrates that Oliphant is a biased Kerry supporter, not a dispassionate journalist (the fact that his daughter is working for the Kerry campaign is an even stronger sign).

It is conventional wisdom on the left that the Vietnam War was all bad and that Nixon had no redeeming qualities as President. I think both assertions are suspect. I am no researcher, but I cannot think of anything that President Nixon did that other Presidents have not done.

Let me be clear, I do not think this excuses his actions. When people say, as they often do, "All politicians lie", I retort, "Then all politicians should be replaced. This is a democracy. We are in charge. We get to choose. We should demand honest politicians". To say the least, Nixon did not qualify as an honest politician. But neither were Kennedy, LBJ or Klinton, so gimme a break.

Bring the troops home

2004-08-18T18:15:00.000-04:00

Can you believe that Kerry is criticizing Bush for bringing US troops home? If that's not turning the world upside down I don't know what is. How did he become famous? By demanding that we bring troops home. I guess he only wants them to come home when they actually have a job to do overseas. How the hell can this guy be ahead of Bush in the polls?

Vodkapundit - Game Plan

2004-08-10T20:29:00.000-04:00

Vodkapundit - Game Plan: "Nobody ever knows what the peace will look like. Let's use our examples from earlier. Even as late as Appomattox, who could have predicted the KKK, Jim Crow, or Radical Reconstruction? No statesmen in 1914 knew that the war they were about to unleash would result in 20 million deaths, Russian Communism, or Nazi Germany. World War II? If you can find me the words of some prophet detailing, in 1940, the UN, the Cold War, or even the complete assimilation of western Germany into Western Europe. . . then I'll print this essay on some very heavy paper, and eat it. With aluminum foil as a garnish.

NOTE: That's what gets me about all the complaints that President Bush 'didn't have a plan' to 'win the peace' in Iraq. Oh, blow me. Nobody ever has a plan for the peace. Or if they do, it will prove useless. 'No peace plan survives the last battle' is the VodkaPundit corollary to Clausewitz's dictum that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy."

Why abortion is wrong and why it must remain legal

2004-07-28T21:04:00.000-04:00

I Had an Abortion by Mike Adams.

I thought that this article was moving. How important that we never stop witnessing the humanity of the unborn and grieving for those who are mindlessly discarded. I share Mike Adams' sadness at their destruction and outrage that some would boast of their abortions.

Two of my children were aborted. There was probably nothing I could have done or said that would have spared their lives (although, I will always live in doubt). You could say that I had no choice, but I did. I didn't have to have unprotected sex with those women. My mistake. I am ashamed.

I freely admit this, but with a strong sense of shame and remorse. I think it's important that I confess the fear I had when I found out I had fathered each child, and frankly, the sense of relief when the responsibility evaporated for raising the child (or, perhaps more likely, paying child support for a child I might only occasionally be allowed to visit). And yet, never would I have made the same choice those women made. Gladly, albeit with some trepidation, I would have shouldered the responsibility had either of them borne the child and let me raise him (or was it a her?). Gladly, I would have borne the child myself were it possible. I certainly had the means, the heart and the stubborn determination.

I am now married, and my wife and I just had our second daughter last week. I cannot imagine intentionally harming her in any way. Abortion? Unthinkable! I cherish my daughters, perhaps more, because I lost two to abortion.

So understand that when I say that I support legal abortion, it is not for lack of reverence for the life of unborn children. I have no doubt that most abortions are cruel and unjustified (let us leave aside discussion of those rare cases where the unborn child threatens the life of her mother or her unborn siblings). I do not support legal abortion because I believe it is a moral thing to do. It usually is not morally justifiable. Full stop.

I cannot entertain the simplistic notion that fetuses are not living human beings. Even John Kerry admits that human life begins at conception. This is scientifically provable. It is unfortunate that neither side ever really homes in on the most important question, the possibly unanswerable question: Under what circumstances shall society extend to these living human beings some of the protections most other living human beings enjoy (most importantly, the right to live)?

Let us also leave aside the questionable validity of deciding the issue via the Courts rather than through state legislature. Roe is a legal abomination as well as a moral one. I believe society should have the power to restrict this behavior. But I can also understand why some societies/states would choose to permit it.

First, this is because I recognize the limits what the law can accomplish. Certain types of even moderately popular "bad" behavior (drinking, smoking, drug use, abortion, speeding) can never be successfully prohibited and to try to do so will only make criminals of otherwise law-abiding people and empower and enrich the criminal class. This has a corrupting effect on the populace -- it rends the social fabric. Laws intended to curb such behaviors must be reasonable and reconsidered from time to time in light of their effectiveness (Alcohol prohibition and narcotic laws are perfect examples of terribly ineffective laws). Sometimes, as hard as it may seem, I believe we must let others do something bad because to try to stop it would cause something worse: a kind of breakdown of society and respect for the rule of law.

Perhaps one might argue that in order to save many unborn lives we can tolerate the slight societal lacerations that occur when women seek abortions illegally (one will never, ever stop some number of women from seeking abortions -- to believe otherwise is naive). So perhaps this alone is not reason enough to permit abortions. But it's a partial justification. We have to face the limits of the power of law.

Second, I would also argue that there is no perfect legislature, nor court system, that would properly decide those few instances when abortion is marginally, but not obviously, justifiable. What about aborting a severely defective child? How defective must the child be? What about Tay-Sachs? Is it not crueler to bring such a child into the world only to suffer terribly and die young? I hope never to need to make such a decision, but I damn sure don't want these decisions made by gov't appointees.

Again, this may not be sufficient reason to permit abortion, but it adds weight to the notion that the individuals who are most affected by the circumstance should make the decision. We have to face the inherent unfairness of our earthly system of justice (though we strive to minimize its imperfection).

There are several other such considerations, I'll only mention one more. Every birth involves some risk to the life of the mother. As of today, it is almost impossible to accurately gauge that risk. Of course it also involves pain, discomfort, inconvenience. These aspects of birth pale in comparison to the ultimate risk, still they are scary as well. I just cannot see how one justifies empowering the state to force a woman to take on this risk.

We do so when we draft men into the army. We also command soldiers, fireman and policemen, volunteers all, to go into harm's way. We punish those who fail to fulfill their duty. We are immensely grateful for those who merely risked their lives, even for a short time, in military or other service to their country or community. And to the fallen, we can never be grateful enough. Why then can we not demand of a woman the much lesser risk of bearing a child?

The important difference is that what we ask of our protectors is done in the name of collective security. We ask them to protect our lives and property and everything about our way of life, including, most dearly, our liberty. I can think of no other circumstance in which we compel someone to risk her life for one other person (or a few other people). We must take into account how extraordinary this situation is when we aim to compel a person to risk her life unwillingly for such narrow benefit (even though the risk may be negligible and the benefit great).

I do not make these arguments with any sense of certainty. In the meantime, we can agree to do all we can to make it clear just how inarguably abhorrent abortion is (in most cases) and hope to prevent abortions one heart at a time. In the end, I believe this is the only truly effective solution.

As Easily As He Breathes

2004-07-27T22:33:00.000-04:00

Bill Clinton deceives as easily as he breathes. It's not clear to me why a party of patriotic Americans would sit through one of his speeches, much less cheer and idolize him. But I suppose they do because they just like what he says. Here is a President who has brought more people to the Republican Party than any since Abraham Lincoln, and yet the Democrats idolize him. It boggles the mind.

In his speech last night at the Democratic national convention, Clinton was in top form. He pretended to be self-deprecating when comparing himself and, more importantly, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney to John Kerry. Kerry served in Vietnam for four months, whereas the others stayed home. Of course, quite a few others served in Vietnam for even longer than Senator Kerry. If Vietnam service were an essential attribute in a President, why not run them? On the other hand, both Presidents Clinton and Bush have demonstrated that Vietnam service is not essential (not even a "nice to have"). I have a personal preference as to which outperformed the other, but that's another discussion.

Of course, there are plenty of Vietnam vets with honorable service. Kerry is easily outdistanced by them. But that doesn't qualify them to be President. It's largely irrelevant.

On the other hand, how one avoided service might be an issue. Some avoided military service during the war by leaving the country. President Carter offered these men amnesty and I won't argue with that decision. There is a time for forgiveness. Still, I would be reluctant to raise such a person to the office of Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. It just might rankle some to be asked to risk their lives by someone unwilling to do the same.

Clinton did not dodge the draft. He didn't have to. It seems likely that he would have if it had been necessary. He made plenty of preparation to avoid this service, as did many others his age, but in the end he didn't need to dodge the draft as he pulled a lucky lottery number.

The disturbing thing about Clinton and the draft is how he did his best to obscure the means by which he avoided military service. This was the first, or one of the first, tastes we got of the Clinton modus operandi: slowly let the truth eke out, never apologize for the lies and half-truths that preceded it. We would later see this regarding the FBI files scandal, the White House Travel Office scandal, the campaign finance abuse scandal, and ultimately, the lies under oath that brought about his impeachment.

The ironic aspect of this is that a few of the most die-hard Bush haters, those who are quickest to give a pass to Clinton for his lack of military service and his reluctance to tell the truth about it, are the first to claim that Bush is hiding something regarding his 6 years in the Texas National Guard.

But of course, Clinton knows the subtext of the veiled criticism of himself, Bush and Cheney: "Now, I know y'all will forgive me for this, but don't let that stop you from beating Bush and Cheney with this stick all night long". The double standard is obvious. When Clinton ran for office, Kerry said (in a rebuke to Clinton primary rival Bob Kerrey)

I am saddened by the fact that Vietnam has yet again been inserted into the campaign, and that it has been inserted in what I feel to be the worst possible way… What saddens me most is that Democrats, above all those who shared the agonies of that generation, should now be re-fighting the many conflicts of Vietnam in order to win the current political conflict of a presidential primary.

But of George W. Bush he said

I've never made any judgments about any choice somebody made about avoiding the draft, about going to Canada, going to jail, being a conscientious objector, going into the National Guard. Those are choices people make.

Excuse me, but some of us draw broad distinctions between avoiding the draft by going overseas or to jail, and minimally putting yourself at risk as a C.O. or joining the guard. Some of Bush's fellow guardsmen died flying the same type of plane in which Bush logged many hours of flight. Nonetheless, why is it Kerry considered Vietnam service taboo when used against Bill Clinton, but now that it is to his potential advantage, it bears repeating unto distraction.

Clinton knows that whatever mistake or sin he may have committed, he will be forgiven by his fellow Democrats. His wife suggested that this is because "He showed Democrats how to win again". Perhaps. Although, James Taranto is skeptical of just how accurate that assessment is:

Let's just say it's unproven. Of course, he was the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a second term as president. But when he took office, the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. Within two years, the party had lost both chambers. They made some gains in subsequent elections (in the House in 1996-2000 and the Senate in 2000), but not enough to make up for the 1994 losses.

This may be why they are so quick to forgive Clinton. I rather think the explanation is even simpler than that. I think that Democrat politicians just don't care that much about practicing piety or adhering to principle. Democrats do, I mean, ordinary Democratic voters do in their daily lives, but they excuse it in their political leaders. Politicians in general, and Democratic politicians more than the rest, are never afraid to rise above principle for the sake of their party. Clinton gave them ample opportunity to demonstrate this, or more devoutly to be wished, to prove me wrong on this. But sadly, they did not. Though Clinton out-Nixoned Nixon, they knew better than to let him suffer Nixon's fate, lest their party suffer what Nixon's party suffered.

Republican Senators, when faced with the misdeeds of their party leader in 1974, refused to hang tight and defend him. Nixon probably suborned perjury and obstructed justice. But then so did Clinton, and he explicitly perjured himself to boot. What we learned from Clinton is that you can get away with it. Had the Republicans hung tight and refused to vote for removal, Nixon would have finished his term. He might even have turned survival of humiliating impeachment into a badge of honor. Of course, Nixon did not let it come to that, and that is at least something to his credit. For all his faults, he lacked Clinton's hubris.

And what good can we say about Clinton? He sure gives a good speech. He has a way of making even the most absurd things sound reasonable. He accuses Republicans of not caring about others, of being a ruling elite devoid of compassion for their fellow men, of robbing from the poor to give to the rich. None of this is true, mind you, and it tends to sicken and infuriate those who are accused as such. But he says it with a smile and a wink and darn it, it's hard to stay mad at him (unless of course, you have an IQ over 100 and Alzheimer's has yet to take hold).

Here are some examples:

The Republicans in Washington believe that America should be run by the 'right' people — their people...

So Republicans want Republicans to run the show. What? And Democrats don't want to put Democrats in charge?

...in a world in which America acts unilaterally when we can and cooperates when we have to...

Of course, the opposite is true. Bush sought and gained cooperation from allies both in the Afghanistan and Iraq operations. He didn't achieve universal consensus, but at least he tried. Clinton did not even attempt to get either NATO or UN support before sending troops into Bosnia or bombing Serbia into submission. But, as I said before, Clinton deceives as easily as he breathes.

They believe the role of government is to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of those who embrace their economic, political and social views...
Mind you, the tax cuts Bush championed do not take into account anyone's ideology or political affiliation. No one was denied this or any other benefit because of their economic, political or social views, nor can Clinton point to a single law signed by Bush that does. But why bother with facts when you can make a real spiffy point by ignoring them?

And isn't it rather disingenuous to claim that Republicans are concentrating wealth whilst the standard bearers of Clinton's party are multi-millionaires, Kerry's wife is a billionaire and both Clintons are millionaires? What of George Soros, Michael Moore and Denise Rich? Have the Bloodworth-Thomasons drifted into the poorhouse over the last few years? Has Terry MacAuliffe lost his Global Crossing millions? Who exactly is doing the concentrating here?

...leaving ordinary citizens to fend for themselves on important matters like health care and retirement security.
I have to agree with him on this last bit. Sensible people of every stripe expect that ordinary citizens fend for themselves when it comes to health care and retirement security. We also expect them to feed themselves, clothes themselves, make their own beds and wipe their respective hind ends. What's wrong with this?

This is truly where Democrats and Republicans part company. Republicans will gladly extend a helping hand to those in need, the poor, the indigent, the handicapped. But ordinary people, well, we expect them to pull their own weight. How could the country function otherwise? Is Clinton suggesting that the rich should pay for the health care and retirement checks whilst all the rest, the ordinary citizens, relax and drink pina coladas? Pardon me for noticing, but that way leads to ruin. The accounts won't balance.

Certainly, I am disappointed with Clinton's speech, and yet I expect such baloney from him. My greater disappointment stems from the wild and unthinking acceptance of his blarney by the Democrats in Boston and those listening across the country. This nation needs a strong, vibrant, intelligent party to oppose the Republicans. Absent a reasonable alternative, the Republicans would have free rein to do as they like, regardless of the wisdom or ultimate effect of their actions.

59 Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11

2004-07-22T00:01:00.000-04:00

Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11

Short PDF summary

Some of these so-called "deceits" are rather innocuous errors. Others, though are clear and scrupulously annotated examples of Moore's gross distortions of documented facts.

I have heard it said that by discrediting Moore, one is merely offering an alternative version of the truth -- as if truth, since it cannot be known with certainty, has versions. The implication is that because Moore is partisan, as are those who debunk his film, then the relevant facts no longer matter -- that it has all become a partisan game.

But truth exists. One cannot doubt that truth exists and that it can be apprehended. The problem is only that we as humans are imperfect judges of truth. To use an analogy, no chemical product is 100% pure, owing to impurities in the raw materials. But it would be incorrect to say that chemicals cannot be refined into states of increasing purity -- or that such purity cannot be accurately measured. Likewise, I think one can measure truthfulness (or lack of it) with some degree of error. We know that a single controlled chemical process cannot have completely distinct results -- could not produce hydrochloric acid one day and soda pop the next. Likewise, a methodical, iterative investigation that gathers and verifies evidence cannot point to fact one day and fantasy the next.

What Dave Kopel enumerates are facts that contradict Moore with greater allegiance to documented history than Moore has ever shown. Some of these facts are evidenced by videotape of the events, others by numerous independent sources. At some point,in the mind of an objective person, the sheer weight of Moore's documented misstatements must impeach the credibility of his conclusions, wouldn't you say? It stops being a gray area, a matter of interpretation one way or the other.

At some point, even one disposed to believe Moore's story because one agrees with his partisan point of view, must conclude however reluctantly that his film doesn't succeed in proving what he hoped to prove (namely, that Bush has failed as a leader with respect to the events of 9/11). That conclusion may be valid, but one must look elsewhere for a more reliable proof.

Federal Marriage Amendment

2004-07-21T21:04:00.001-04:00

A friend writes that he's discouraged by Bush's slightly low poll numbers, but expects Bush will pull ahead in the fall.

I agree. Bush (41) was down 17 points before trouncing Dukakis. Still, one wonders why the Bush campaign doesn't do a better job of counter-spinning the crap that Kerry sends out. Kerry has all but accused Bush of treason. Sure, you can read the counter spin on NRO and TownHall, but who reads that stuff other than the already converted?

I'm beginning to think that Bush is not going to be able to go over the heads of the media the way Reagan did, nor to effectively marginalize Kerry (who is, in my opinion, extremely vulnerable) the way Atwater did Dukakis. And if that's the case, maybe the GOP will think twice before nominating an establishment candidate. I love my tax cuts (especially the $1000 child credit, which Oxana just doubled for us), but do you think McCain would be in this situation now?

I don't mean to sound too pessimistic, and I don't want to blame Bush's bin Laden/Al Queda burden on Bush. But I don't think McCain would have cranked up spending this way and effectively neutralized the chief differentiator between the party of Reagan and the party of LBJ.

Maybe they thought they could "triangulate", but that's a bullshitter's tactic (ie. Klinton). Did Reagan triangulate? Reminds me of Jay Nordlinger's plea that candidates break with cynical
tradition and actually run as their real selves. E.g. Kerry: don't pretend to be tough on defense when we all know you are anti-military.

Andrew Sullivan disparaged Bush for pushing the marriage amendment, saying that it is anti-gay. I don't agree with the anti-gay part. Pro-marriage is not anti-gay. His analysis is that this is Bush/Rove's way of sewing up the base and making sure that the religious right is motivated to come out on Election Day. It might work. I saw a sign in front of an evangelical church on our way home from the hospital with our new baby urging people to call our Senators in support of the FMA. I'm fairly certain both Florida Senators Graham and Nelson, in concert with the Democratic minority, voted against cloture.

I see this as an unfortunate way of sewing up the base. Is it necessary? Won't it hand Kerry a bludgeon? OTOH, it probably gains him more votes than it loses (I'm sure that's their calculation).

I'm for the FMA (despite my liberal leanings). The way I look at it, marriage really ought to be defined as one man and one woman forever and for always. I don't begrudge gay men and women their happiness. I'll even go so far as to suggest that states permit gay unions of some kind and assign them equal parity with marriage.

Just don't call it marriage. Call it queeriage. Or larriage for women and fairyage for men, but don't call it marriage. Marriage already has a definition. This is the computer age, it's really easy to create 3 check boxes to demarcate which category of union a couple belongs to. If the US gov't can keep track of

An accreditation body accrediting third parties who certify manufacturing systems as fastener quality assurance systems

as described in section 5402(7)(B)(iii)(US Code, ch. 80), they can keep track of three distinct types of monogamous unions, don't you think?

Anyway, I don't know as Bush really gains more voters than he loses with this. I suppose it's a good example of standing up for something he actually believes in, so that's a good thing.