Nothing Else Fit

by Andrew

One of the first comments to my first post asked whether or not I could elaborate a little on my military background. So I’m responding to that request here. But since I have no idea how significant the interest is in it, I’m keeping it below the fold so you can slip past it if you’re not interested.

I know…Israel’s at war, Iraq’s getting uglier by the day, and the new guy wants to talk about himself. What an ego.

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by hilzoy

Had I known that I would be moving tomorrow, I would never have agreed to be a marshal at commencement today. And had I known before yesterday that I would be moving tomorrow, I would have had the nice people come in to pack stuff up earlier. As it was, however, they arrived at 8:30 and were done just in time for me to leap into my cap and gown and arrive at commencement on time, after which I got to stand around for an interminable amount of time while people lined up, etc., and then go to commencement. It was fun, especially when someone produced beach balls that we all batted around while all the names were read. Somehow, this evening, I have to pack everything else up — “everything else” being all the stuff on various counters, etc., that I told the packers just to leave.

Yikes!

A few notes:

* I am glad that Lay and Skilling were convicted, both because they deserved it and because I gather there was a real question about whether the case would be too complicated for the jury. I’m always glad when the answer to those questions is “no!” — both intrinsically and because it would be bad for corrupt CEOs to conclude that incredibly complex accounting gave them immunity from conviction.

* Dennis Hastert is under investigation by the FBI.Have we reached the point where it becomes appropriate to prosecute the Republican House membership under RICO?

* As the Republican party implodes before our eyes, I want to remind people of this post by Mark Schmitt, which I think is absolutely right, and one of many reasons why I’m glad my party does not have the kind of discipline the Republicans had. (It might need more discipline, but not that much, or that kind.)

“A command-control system like the White House-led Republican congressional system can be absolutely formidable for a certain period of time. But when it breaks down, it breaks down completely. The collapse is sudden, and total. Signals get crossed, backs get stabbed, the suddenly leaderless pawns in the system start acting for themselves, with no system or structure to coordinate their individual impulses.

Is this happening? I don’t know, but it’s getting close. I thought I’d seen it before, but each time they’ve pulled it back together. This time, I think there’s too much happening at once.

The irony of all this for conservatives is that if they actually read Hayek and got anything out of it other than “government sucks,” they would know this. Hayek’s libertarianism was very pragmatic. Centrally controlled systems are flawed above all because they have no mechanism to correct their own errors, unlike distributed, self-organized systems. The Democrats in the Clinton years always operated in chaos, no one followed the party line, and there was a cost to that, but in the chaos and improvisation they found ways to get out of the holes that they had dug for themselves. The Rove/DeLay/Frist system doesn’t have any means for correcting its mistakes — look at the blank, lost looks on the faces of Senators Lugar and Chafee yesterday when they just had no idea what to do with a nomination that had fallen apart and couldn’t fulfill their promises.

The Republicans accomplished unimaginable feats through the centralization of power. Three tax cuts, a prescription drug plan that will make Americans hate government, an insane war. But if the goal was long-term power, it is a strategy they will come to regret, if not today, someday.”

* The American Prospect has a very interesting article on the history of our refusal to negotiate with Iran. (To those of you who don’t read the Prospect, you should. It’s really, really good, and its policy articles, while liberal, present the evidence and arguments clearly, without ducking inconvenient objections. It’s everything a liberal magazine should be.)

In any case, I don’t know whether that article would be available if I weren’t a subscriber, so I’m reproducing a key section below the fold.

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by hilzoy

Jackmormon tagged me with the state meme. It’s below the fold.

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by Charles

There was a really good dKos diary on Africa, but my computer automatically updated Windows and re-booted, and it was lost it before I could bookmark it. Dang it! I tried to find it and failed, not realizing there are around 200 dKos diaries posted every day, and that dKos has a clunky search function. Oh, well. Another good work into oblivion. Too bad, because it was a gold nugget in a morass of angry partisanship.  [Update:  Tim found the link (thanks), and more narrative is below the fold at the end.]

A few days ago, economics professor William Easterly wrote a piece in the Washington Post titled The West Can’t Save Africa. More accurately, western governments can’t send money to African governments and expect problems to be solved. Easterly makes the case that individual Africans, with the help of accountable non-governmental aid organizations, can make significant improvements to their environs. His more expanded thesis here. An excerpt:

Seventeen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is only one major area of the world in which central planning is still seen as a way to achieve prosperity – countries that receive foreign aid. Behind the Aid Wall that divides poor countries from rich, the aid community is awash in plans, strategies, and frameworks to meet the very real needs of the world’s poor. These exercises only make sense in a central planning mentality in which the answer to the tragedies of poverty is a large bureaucratic apparatus to dictate quantities of different development goods and services by administrative fiat. The planning mindset is in turn linked to previously discredited theories, such as that poverty is due to a "poverty trap," which can only be alleviated by a large inflow of aid from rich country to poor country governments to fill a "financing gap" for poor countries. The aid inflow is of course administered by this same planning apparatus.

This is bad news for the world’s poor, as historically poverty has never been ended by central planners. It is only ended by "searchers", both economic and political, who explore solutions by trial and error, have a way to get feedback on the ones that work, and then expand the ones that work, all of this in an unplanned, spontaneous way. Examples of searchers are firms in private markets and democratically accountable politicians. There is a robust correlation (0.73) between economic and political freedom, on one hand, and economic development, on the other hand.

To describe why centralized aid plans (such as proposed by Jeffrey Sachs) don’t and won’t work, Larry White uses the Underpants Gnomes analogy, courtesy of South Park.

Gnomes Business Plan
Phase 1: Collect underpants
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit

Sachs Africa Plan
Phase 1: US taxpayers give (more) money to sub-Saharan African governments or multinational aid agencies, "directed to specific needs".
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Africa embarks on cumulative growth.

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by Charles

Last Thursday, in another lapse into Hugonoia, the Chavez goverment expelled a U.S. Embassy military official from Venezuela.  Friday, Donald Rumsfeld unhelpfully triggered Godwin’s Law, mentioning that both Chavez and Hitler were "elected legally".  Then the United States responded by expelling a "senior Venezuelan diplomat".  Over the course of his administration, Chavez has used fears of a U.S. invasion to strengthen his military arsenal, and Rumsfeld’s words will give Chavez that much more of an excuse.  Chavez is also not above triggering Godwin’s Law:

"The imperialist, genocidal, fascist attitude of the U.S. president has no limits. I think Hitler would be like a suckling baby next to George W. Bush," Chavez said from a stage decorated with a huge red image of himself as a young soldier.

Why pay attention to Venezuela?  The prime reason is O-I-L.  With the world’s fifth largest proven oil reserves, Venezuela is a geological lottery winner and, because of this, its president has more influence than he otherwise would or should have.  [Update:  To be clear, "should" is my personal opinion.]  A secure oil supply is in the United States’ national interest, and Venezuela has played a major role.  In 2004, the U.S. imported 12.8 millions barrels of crude oil and finished petroleum products per day, of which Venezuela supplied 11.8% (Venezuela is our fourth largest source of imported oil, behind Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia).  At 551 million barrels per year and prices at $60 per barrel, that means the Venezuelan goverment–via its state-owned oil company, PDVSA–receives over $33 billion in revenues from the United States (or more accurately, from oil firms in the U.S.).  Total Venezuelan oil revenues in 2005 were $85 billion, so the amount from the U.S. could be much higher.  We are dependent on oil, so therefore we are dependent on Venezuelan oil.

But looking at it another way, the United States is in Venezuela’s national interest.  The CIA World Factbook:

Venezuela continues to be highly dependent on the petroleum sector, accounting for roughly one-third of GDP, around 80% of export earnings, and over half of government operating revenues.

Venezuela produces 3.1 million barrels per day, of which 2.1 million are exported.  That means that nearly 25% of government operating revenues are financed by American-based oil enterprises, and 16% of their GDP can be traced back to the United States.  Venezuela is further invested in the United States because of CITGO, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of PDVSA, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Venezuelan goverment.  The next time you fill your tank at the local 7-Eleven, de facto CEO Hugo Chavez should say gracias to you for adding a few more petrodollars to his government’s coffers.

But rather than gracias, the sentiments Chavez expresses towards the United States are closer to vete a cingar (WARNING:  This R-rated link is not workplace safe).  Chavez’s rhetoric is virtually indistinguishable from Castro’s, and if it just stayed there, Chavez would be just another loudmouth ingrate.  And an entertaining one at that, since he apparently likes to parade American nutters through Caracas such as Harry Belafonte and Cindy Sheehan, giving them media platforms to bash Bush.  But Chavez doesn’t stop just there.

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In response to Macallan’s illuminating post on the passing of Hugh Thompson (the whistleblower who helped expose Lt. James Calley and the My Lai massacre), I wrote in comments that the war crimes we committed at My Lai were atrocious, but they paled before the atrocities of the North Vietnamese, citing as an example the slaughter of 5,500 civilians by the North Vietnamese at Hue during the Tet offensive. The American people have heard plenty of our war crimes but little of the war crimes committed against the Americans and the inhabitants of South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese communists and their southern fellow travelers. A commenter disputed my claim on the number of civilian casualties so, using the free Internet sources I could muster, I investigated.

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by von

Houston.  Business, again.  Disturbed by the unwelcome cell phone ring in the middle of a meeting.  Eyes turn.  But I’ve been expecting it.  It’s my father.  "I have to take this call."  In my mind’s eye, he says only two words:  She’s gone.

I finish the meeting.  What else is there?  I can’t stand the thought of condolences, or warm regards, or compassion, or virtue.  The warm squeeze on the shoulder disgusts me.  The voice that tones real sadness and empathy is an outrage.  I don’t want to hear it.  I know you know, I know you mean well, and I know it happens all the time — but I’d rather not know it right now.

Per her strict instructions, there will be one hell of a cocktail party at the cottage in Maine this summer.  It won’t be the same, because my first kid — a son, due this February — will be there to see it.  She won’t. 

UPDATE:  My grandmother’s obituary is below the fold.  It seems that I got some details wrong in my retrospective, above — all inconsequential, but I’ll correct them nonetheless when I feel up for it. 

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by hilzoy

Naomi Baron has a rather silly op-ed in the LATimes. (Short version: now that students have Google, they don’t have to read books. This threatens their ability to understand sustained arguments. Short answer: Baron is a professor. She can assign papers that require students to construct sustained arguments, and she can require drafts, which would let her tell the students exactly where they’re falling short before the paper is due.)

What makes this interesting is that Kevin Drum and Jeanne d’Arc have similar responses to this piece. Kevin Drum:

“It’s not just that I spend less time reading books, it’s that I find my mind wandering when I do read. After a few paragraphs, or maybe a page or two, I’ll run into a sentence that suddenly reminds me of something — and then spend the next minute staring into space thinking of something entirely unrelated to the book at hand. Eventually I snap back, but obviously this behavior reduces both my reading rate and my reading comprehension.

Is this really because of blogging? I don’t know for sure, but it feels like it’s related to blogging, and it’s a real problem. As wonderful as blogs, magazines, and newspapers are, there’s simply no way to really learn about a subject except by reading a book — and the less I do that, the less I understand about the broader, deeper issues that go beyond merely the outrage of the day.”

Jeanne d’Arc:

“I find that the more I read online, the less I read off. I don’t think it’s even a matter of using up my reading time. It actually destroys brain cells or something, because if I’ve been doing too much online reading, I lose the patience for following a sustained or subtle argument, or reading a complex novel. One of my reasons for frequent blogging disappearances is recovery: I need to get away from the fast and facile and let my brain heal. It actually feels like recovering a bit of humanity that I forgot I had.”

My experience is exactly the opposite of theirs.

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