Quotulatiousness

October 29, 2009

Sometimes better technology can lead to trouble

Filed under: Middle East, Military, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:20

In this case, along the not-fully-marked borders of Saudi Arabia:

In the last few weeks, tensions have been rising between Saudi Arabian border guards and Yemeni tribesmen who live along the border. The source of the tension is a fence that the Saudis are building. The problem is that neither country has agreed on exactly where the border is. Moreover, the tribesmen do not want a fence blocking their way, as the border has never been recognized by the tribes that live astride it. The big problem is that Saudi Arabia’s land borders are mostly sand. The dunes keep moving as the winds blow this way and that. Historically, the local warlords used the few obvious landmarks to establish a vague border. But now there is GPS, and most countries in Arabia are ready to establish precise borders. The problem is that each country has a different idea of where the real border, as precisely marked by GPS, is.

The negotiations proceed, but the tribesmen living astride the border are often not willing to negotiate. In that case, force must be used. But first, both nations involved have to agree to apply force. That is not a problem on the Yemen border, because those Yemeni tribesmen that have been shooting at the Saudi fence builders, are already at war with the Yemeni army. But throughout Arabia, there will be more disputes like this, probably for decades, until all the borders are agreed on.

October 26, 2009

Must be “British military” week – MoD backs down on Territorial Army cutbacks

Filed under: Britain, Military, Politics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 17:11

Sometimes, calling attention to a stupid move can cause the government to reconsider. As I mentioned several days back, the British Ministry of Defence was considering huge training cutbacks for the army’s reserve formation, the Territorial Army. The opposition in Parliament appear to have forced the government to at least a partial backdown:

Ministers have scaled back planned cuts to the Territorial Army and made concessions over their training after fierce criticism from the opposition.

The Ministry of Defence wanted to cut £20m from the TA budget and halt all training for six months except for those due to be sent to Afghanistan.

But it now says every unit will get one night’s training a month while the TA budget will not be cut by as much.

The Conservatives said the plans were a “shambles” and should be dropped.

The Lib Dems said the government had shown poor judgement and that the move could do long-term damage to the TA.

One night per month is still less than what is necessary, but at least it provides some continuity. Back in the mid-1970s, the Canadian government tried something similar with their reservists. Our officers and senior NCOs paraded without pay for months to ensure that the junior ranks were paid for training. It was a sacrifice on their part that shouldn’t have been necessary, but it did eventually force the government to re-instate something more like normal training activity.

October 22, 2009

Wage controls for high earners

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:44

As if the government hadn’t inserted itself into too many things already, they’re now retroactively deciding that some corporate executives need a pay cut:

The Obama administration plans to order companies that have received exceptionally large amounts of bailout money from the government to slash compensation for their highest-paid executives by about half on average, according to people familiar with the long-awaited decision.

The cuts will affect 25 of the most highly paid executives at each of five major financial companies and two automakers, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plan has not been made public. Cash salaries will be cut by about 90 percent compared with last year, they said.

Oh, this is going to go just great, because — of course — there’ll be no negative effects of this bold move, right? Nobody will make different decisions in future out of fear of the government second-guessing them after the fact and reversing or modifying the call.

Uncertainty is the worst enemy of a free economy: you have to have some confidence in the stability of the legal structure in which you have to work in order to make rational long-term business decisions. As I wrote back in March,

The economic picture is unsettled, which sharply reduces the dependability of long-term and even short-term forecasting. Businesses depend on forecasting to make investments, create jobs, increase or decrease production, and pretty much every other part of their operations. Uncertainty is normal, but high levels of uncertainty act to depress all economic activity . . . and the US government playing kingmaker with the heads of major corporations is a hell of way to create more uncertainty.

The specific merits of the Richard Wagoner dismissal are unimportant compared to the extra measure of uncertainty injected into the economy as a whole. If President Obama and his team can dismiss Wagoner, why not the heads of any bank accepting government funding? Why not other corporate officers (corporate directors have already been ousted at government whim)? At what level does the government’s self-created new power stop?

The direction the US federal government has set will do nothing to settle economic worries, and much to increase them. The clear belief on the part of the administration is that they are better able to pick the winners and losers of economic activity of which most of them have no practical experience. That is a modern definition of hubris.

Brain farts like this latest one just introduce huge amounts of uncertainty into the long-term plans of every company. This is no way to encourage recovery.

As several people have noted, if Barack Obama’s administration was determined to destroy the US economy . . . what would they have done differently?

October 20, 2009

FTC guidelines require me to inform you that . . .

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 17:46

. . . I have received no free materials, no payment, and no promised service in exchange for blogging. Others, like Daniel Kalder may end up having to splash nonsense like the start of this post across all their book reviews posted online:

In a fascinating interview conducted with Richard Cleland of the FTC, books blogger Edward Champion exposed the manifold incoherencies in the guidelines. Read the whole thing, for yea verily, it abounds in absurdity. What leapt out at me was the blanket assertion made by Cleland that “when a publisher sends a book to a blogger, there is the expectation of a good review”.

To which Champion replies: “I informed him that this was not always the case and observed that some bloggers often receive 20 to 50 books a week. In such cases, the publisher hopes for a review, good or bad. Cleland didn’t see it that way.”

“If a blogger received enough books,” said Cleland, “he could open up a used bookstore.”

Got that? Good Lord, the man’s a genius! I never realised this criticism lark could be so lucrative! Yes indeed, in Cleland’s brave new world a review copy is compensation, and a review from a blogger is a priori an endorsement, even if negative. Mysteriously the FTC does not require newspapers to disclose how they come by the books they review, or any other freebies their journalists might receive. And yet to pick one obvious example, almost all travel journalism actually is built on the kind of payola/payback system Cleland ascribes to book reviewing, so I can’t see why not.

October 19, 2009

QotD: Freedom is slavery

Filed under: Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

One of the most remarkable features of our age is the propensity toward changing the meaning of political terms. A semantic revolution converts the sense traditionally attached to words into its opposite. George Orwell has ingeniously described this tendency in his 1984. The second of the three slogans of Oceania’s party says, “Freedom Is Slavery.”In the opinion of the “progressive” intellectuals, Orwell’s dictum is the talk of a hysteric; nobody, they shout, has ever ventured to utter such a nonsensical proposition.

Unfortunately the facts belie their denial. There prevails in the writings of many contemporary authors the disposition to represent every extension of governmental power and every restriction of the individual’s discretion as a measure of liberation, as a step forward on the road to liberty. Carried to its ultimate logical conclusion, this mode of reasoning leads to the inference that socialism, the complete abolition of the individual’s faculty to plan his own life and conduct, brings perfect freedom. It was this reasoning that suggested to socialists and Communists the idea of arrogating to themselves the appellation liberal.

Ludwig von Mises, “Freedom Is Slavery”, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1953-03-09

October 16, 2009

Olympia Snowe: Mighty Morphing Power Republican!

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:26

David Harsanyi discusses the recently discovered bi-partisan super powers of Olympia Snowe:

It is always curious to hear irascible members of one political party accuse members of the opposing party of “playing politics” as if it were a bad thing. Can you imagine? Politics. In Washington, no less.

As you know, Democrats claim to be above such petty, divisive and low-brow behavior, especially on those days they are running both houses of Congress and the White House. What this country really needs, we are incessantly reminded, are more mavericks. Well, Republican mavericks. Folks who say “yes.”

How starved is the White House to unearth some imaginary bipartisanship on the health care front?

Consider that for possibly the first time in American history, a vote in a Senate committee was the lead story for news organizations across the country, simply because the ideologically bewildered Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, used her inconsequential vote to move forward a government-run health care bill.

Judging from the coverage, you might have thought that Snowe had nailed her 95 theses to the door of the Republican National Committee headquarters rather than sit in a safe seat and habitually vote with Democrats.

“Forget Sarah Palin,” remarked The Associated Press. “The female maverick of the Republican Party is Sen. Olympia Snowe.” CNN’s rational, reasonable, moderate Democrat, Paul Begala, called Snowe the “last rational, reasonable, moderate Republican.”

October 15, 2009

Nobel committee had reservations, was not unanimous

Filed under: Europe, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

Apparently, it’s not just the cranky centrists, paranoid rightists and lunatic libertarians who thought the Nobel Peace Prize award to Barack Obama was incorrect: so did a majority of the committee itself:

Three of the five members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee had objections to the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to US President Barack Obama, the Norwegian tabloid Verdens Gang (VG) reported Thursday.

“VG has spoken to a number of sources who confirmed the impression that a majority of the Nobel committee, at first, had not decided to give the peace prize to Barack Obama,” the newspaper said.

October 11, 2009

QotD: Silvio Berlusconi

Filed under: Europe, Italy, Politics, Quotations — Nicholas @ 11:29

As Silvio Berlusconi yesterday tried to shore up his position by declaring himself irreplaceable as Italy’s head of government, a court in Milan was told it had been “amply demonstrated” that he was guilty of bribery.

“I am, and not only in my own opinion, the best prime minister who could be found today,” he told a press conference. “I believe there is no one in history to whom I should feel inferior. Quite the opposite.”

The problem, he explained, was that “In absolute terms, I am the most legally persecuted man of all times, in the whole history of mankind, worldwide, because I have been subjected to more than 2,500 court hearings and I have the good luck — having worked well in the past and having accumulated an important wealth — to have been able to spend more than €200m in consultants and judges . . . I mean in consultants and lawyers.“

John Hooper, “Silvio Berlusconi: I am inferior to no one in history”, The Guardian, 2009-10-10

Will Cameron be the last PM of the United Kingdom?

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

Jackie Ashley (almost alone among British commentators, according to Charles Stross) examines the likely consequences of both the next British election and the promised-by-Tory-leader referendum on the European Union:

So the question facing the Tory leadership is quite clear: if, by next May, the Lisbon treaty has come into force and Europe has a new president, quite possibly Tony Blair, will Cameron keep his promise to hold a referendum? Yes or no? It’s a straightforward question. He knows that to do so would risk a huge row with the rest of Europe, and a fully operational treaty would be harder to unpick than one not yet signed. That’s why until now he has used the weaselly words that, if the treaty is signed, he would “not let matters rest there”.

Cameron also knows that many in his party, not least his would-be successor Boris Johnson, will push for a referendum and have the support of much of the media too. If Cameron appears to want to renege on his promise, he will provoke fury and rebellion on his own side. For now, his “wait and see” gambit is beginning to look indecisive. If he were Gordon Brown, he would undoubtedly be accused of dithering.

At the same time, Cameron is worrying about another referendum, one which may prove no less momentous for the future shape of Britain. He faces a two-sided constitutional struggle, looking south towards Europe — but also north towards the Scots.

The nightmare for Cameron is that, once George Osborne has revealed details of the cuts imposed by Tory Westminster on Scottish budgets, the SNP start to gain momentum for their proposed independence referendum. Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister and nobody’s fool, has been watching the Conservative agendas on cuts and on Europe with fascination.

The Scots will be having their own referendum on independence in 2011, and the Tories barely poll north of the River Tweed. Up in Scotland, it’s Labour and the Scottish Nationalist Party as the top two. Scotland is in an odd situation of having its own parliament, but also sending MPs to Westminster, where they can vote on issues affecting the rest of Britain, but non-Scottish MPs do not get to vote on Scottish issues.

Charles provides the odds:

The current government is a minority one (yes, we’ve got a hung parliament): the Scottish National Party are in charge, although they rely on other parties to get legislation passed. The SNP are formally in favour of outright independence for Scotland, as an EU member nation; and they’re committed to holding a referendum on independence in 2011, before the next election. (Labour and the Lib Dems oppose this. The Tories do too, but they’re so marginal that nobody pays any attention to them.)

Here’s the rub. As things stand, the SNP would lose a vote on independence at this point. But under a conservative government in Westminster — especially one that’s wielding the axe of public service cuts, which is going to happen whoever wins the election and which will disproportionately hit the less well off, which includes a lot of Scots — well, I’d handicap things by giving the pro-independence vote an automatic bonus of 10%.

A sensitive, caring, next-generation Conservative government will therefore be at pains to tread lightly north of the border, and to attempt to defuse nationalist sentiment. Or will it?

On the one hand, to give them their full title, they’re the Conservative and Unionist Party, dedicated to preserving the union. But if they cut Scotland loose, then, in a 650 seat parliamentary system, they lose 80 seats, 78 of which belong to their rivals. Leave aside the fact that Cameron is committed to reducing the number of constituency seats in the UK: the 10% of them elected by Scotland are overwhelmingly not conservative. Ditching them will give the Conservatives an electoral lift that will last for a generation.

That’s got to be a temptation, even to a leader who “loathes the idea of being the last ever prime minister of the United Kingdom”.

October 9, 2009

What was the Nobel Peace Prize jury thinking?

Filed under: Europe, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

They award it to Barack Obama? For what tangible results over a period of time? He’s been in office less than a year, but has almost nothing to show for it (and, to be fair, a year isn’t a long time in American politics). But I’m not the only doubter, as Benedict Brogan is equally flabbergasted at the decision:

Nobel prize for President Obama is a shocker. He should turn it down.

They could have awarded it to Kylie Minogue and I wouldn’t have been half as surprised as I am watching the television screens around me proclaiming that Barack Obama has been awarded the 2009 Nobel peace prize. The whole business of a bunch of Scandinavian worthies doling out the profits of a long-gone dynamite maker’s fortune has always smacked of the worst sort of self-satisfied plutocratic worthiness. But this takes the biscuit. President Obama remains the barely man of world politics, barely a senator now barely a president, yet in the land of the Euro-weenies (copyright PJ O’Rourke) the great and the good remain in his thrall. To reward him for a blank results sheet, to inflate him when he has no achievements to his name, makes a mockery of what, let’s face it, is an already fairly discredited process (remember Rigoberta Menchu in 1992? Ha!). That’s not the point. What this does is accelerate the elevation of President Obama to a comedy confection, which he does not deserve, and gives his critics yet another bat to whack him with.

Update: Radley Balko sent this twitter post:

Nobel committee also gives Obama Physics prize, citing shirtless beach photo as example that he’s “quite the physical specimen.”

Update, the second: The Whited Sepulchre points out that

it was just a few weeks ago that The Teleprompter Jesus ordered a dozen Bunker-Busting Bombs for a potential attack on Iran. (Bunker-Busters are the most devastating weapons available without going nuclear.) [. . .]

I heard the folks on NPR fumbling around this morning, trying to explain the Nobel committee’s decision. Even that gang of White House Sock Puppets were bewildered. They decided that it was probably awarded for Obama’s desire for “Multilateral Approaches” to world conflicts. [. . .] I wonder if Iran is worried about France building up Bunker-Buster stockpiles…..

Everyone knew Obama would get this award, but I figured they would have the decency to wait until he was out of office, the way they did it with Jimmy Carter or The Goracle Of Music City and any other Democrats that I may have overlooked.

Update, the third: Crikey, even the Guardian thinks it was a premature award.

The citation describes his “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples” in his outreach to the Muslim world and efforts to end nuclear proliferation.

Which is all very well, except that Obama is fighting wars in two Islamic states — Iraq and Afghanistan — and his efforts at international diplomacy, notwithstanding his powerful desire to achieve quick results, has thus far shown almost no progress in pushing forward peace talks in the Middle East and only very partial progress on Iran. It is true that he has made real advances in “resetting” US-Russian relations, not least over his decision to cancel an anti-missile shield that was to be based in eastern Europe, but the consequences of that engagement are too early to judge.

The reality is that the prize appears to have been awarded to Barack Obama for what he is not. For not being George W Bush.

October 8, 2009

Not quite the solution they were looking for

Filed under: Health, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:40

Jacob Sullum looks at a not-very impressive result in clinical testing:

A study reported this week in the Archives of General Psychiatry found that an experimental “cocaine vaccine” was mostly ineffective at reducing consumption of the drug. Less than two-fifths of the subjects injected with the vaccine, which is supposed to stimulate production of antibodies that bind to cocaine molecules and prevent them from reaching the brain, had enough of an immune system response to significantly reduce their cocaine use (as measured by urine tests). Even among those subjects, only half cut back on cocaine by 50 percent or more.

[. . .]

Vaccine boosters think the real money lies in an effective anti-nicotine treatment, which they believe would attract “inveterate smokers” who have repeatedly tried to quit with other methods. But as The New York Times notes (in the headline, no less), such a vaccine “does not keep users from wanting the drug.” If all goes well, their cravings are not diminished in the slightest; they just can no longer satisfy them. And that’s assuming the vaccine is fully effective (as opposed to maybe 10 percent effective, like the one in the study); if not, it could actually increase consumption by neutralizing a percentage of each dose. A partially effective nicotine vaccine could be hazardous to smokers’ health if it encouraged them to smoke more so as to achieve the effect to which they’re accustomed. In any case, it’s not clear how appealing the idea of biochemically taking the fun out of smoking will be; the success of such a product hinges on consumers looking for a way to frustrate themselves.

If you take the cynical view, it’s a perfect Puritan drug: take away the benefit without reducing the desire. That way, you see, the sinners would still get all the suffering they’re entitled to without any satisfaction at all. Hell on earth, just the way Puritans like it.

You keep using that word . . .

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:58

Jesse Walker writes:

A writer named Mike Elk has produced an entry in that venerable genre of contrarian-liberal writing, the “We Should Talk with the Right-Wing Grassroots Rather Than Demonize Them” essay. I’m always in favor of open-minded conversations that cross ideological lines, so in theory I applaud what he’s doing, but I had to chuckle at this tone-deaf sentence:

It’s time that we raise up above immature name calling and start talking to the teabaggers.

I’m sure Elk was genuinely unaware that the Tea Party marchers consider the word “teabaggers” an especially obnoxious example of “immature name calling.” Nonetheless, he sounds like an earnest Special Olympics volunteer who doesn’t understand why his “Go, retards!” chant isn’t catching on.

October 6, 2009

Parachutes also seen as harmful . . .

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:44

Following up on a report I blogged about a couple of days back, Jacob Sullum uses the same methodology to prove that skydivers would be better off without parachutes:

In Philadelphia, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania find, possessing a gun is strongly associated with getting shot. Since “guns did not protect those who possessed them,” they conclude, “people should rethink their possession of guns.” This is like noting that possessing a parachute is strongly associated with being injured while jumping from a plane, then concluding that skydivers would be better off unencumbered by safety equipment designed to slow their descent. “Can this study possibly be as stupid as it sounds?” asks Stewart Baker at Skating on Stilts. Having shelled out $30 for the privilege of reading the entire article, which appears in the November American Journal of Public Health, I can confirm that the answer is yes.

[. . .]

While the reseachers took into account a few confounding variables related to this tendency (including having an arrest record, living in a rough neighborhood, and having a high-risk occupation), they cannot possibly have considered all the factors that might make people more prone to violent attack and therefore more likely to have a gun as a defense against that hazard. To take just one example, not every criminal has an arrest record. Yet it seems fair to assume that criminals in Philadelphia are a) more likely than noncriminals to be armed and b) more likely than noncriminals to be shot. That does not mean having a gun increases their chance of being shot. Certainly they believe (as police officers do) that having a gun makes them safer than they otherwise would be. Nothing in this study contradicts that belief.

Of course, most people will only see the headline, so the underlying purpose of publishing the “study” has been achieved.

October 4, 2009

Totally unbiased study says “Guns=bad”

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 23:48

In no way should you try to read the data from this study as being anything other than unbiased and objective:

Medical researchers in Philadelphia have conducted out a study which indicates — according to their interpretation — that carrying a gun causes people to get shot more often. “People should rethink their possession of guns,” say the medics.

“This study helps resolve the long-standing debate about whether guns are protective or perilous,” says University of Pennsylvania epidemiology prof Charles Branas. The Penn announcement is headlined “Gun Possession [is] of questionable value in an Assault”, so it’s pretty clear which way he’s leaning.

The Penn researchers carried out their study by randomly selecting 677 people in Philadelphia who had been shot in “assaults”. Apparently five people sustain gunshot wounds every day in the City of Brotherly Love, so there were plenty to choose from.

According to the profs, six per cent of the shooting victims were packing heat when they got plugged. They compared that to a control sample of Philadelphians who had not been shot, and concluded that “people with a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun”.

Of course, there’s no problem with basing your statistically valid sample on people who have already been shot: given the chance of being shot in Philadelphia, they could just have gone round to a few local bars and found the same numbers, right?

You know that the study has a certain, um, preference, when even the folks at The Register are pointing out that the data may not be randomly selected:

There didn’t seem to be any account taken of the fact that people with good reason to fear being shot — for instance drug dealers, secret agents etc — would be more likely to tool up than those with no such concerns.

The profs’ reasoning, however, would seem to be that if someone sticks you up in the street and you haven’t got a gun, you’ll just hand over your valuables and so escape with a whole skin. If you’ve got a gat, however, you might try to draw it and so get shot. Tactically, of course, it might be wiser to first hand over your wallet and then craftily backshoot the robber as he departed, but no matter.

October 2, 2009

Garrison Keillor’s modest proposal

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:39

This idea will sell very well in the coastal areas, not so well in the heartland:

Conservatives and liberals can agree on the basics — that the nation wallows in debt, that it is shortsighted of the states to cut back on the most essential work of government which is the education of the young, and that somehow we have got to become a more productive nation and less consumptive — but the ruffles and flourishes of Washington seem ever more irrelevant to the crises we face. When an entire major party has excused itself from meaningful debate and a thoughtful U.S. senator like Orrin Hatch no longer finds it important to make sense and an up-and-comer like Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty attacks the president for giving a speech telling schoolchildren to work hard in school and get good grades, one starts to wonder if the country wouldn’t be better off without them and if Republicans should be cut out of the health-care system entirely and simply provided with aspirin and hand sanitizer. Thirty-two percent of the population identifies with the GOP, and if we cut off health care to them, we could probably pay off the deficit in short order.

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