Quotulatiousness

January 30, 2017

From the Overton Window to the Overton Bubble

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

John Ringo posted this to Facebook, commenting on an article on the Overton Bubble:

This is seriously esoteric and worth reading (and even rereading bits) til you get it.

I’ll add one thing. An axiom a friend of mine came up with watching the fall of Saddam Hussein.

‘Crazy regimes get crazier under stress.’

The ‘Overton Window’ and that axiom explain everything going on in US politics at the moment.

I’ll add one thing that he missed as a possible end game. One I hadn’t seen until quite recently.

As he noted (deep in the article) the elites within an Overton Bubble occasionally shift conditions of ‘proper thought’ so as to find and exclude those who should not be within the ‘elite’ faction. Thus the occasional purges evident throughout history of ‘elite’ groups.

As the faction comes under greater stress, it shifts more and more, tossing more out into the wilderness.

Thus the whole issue of a ‘woman’s march’ which would only accept women who supported a narrow series of causes but was okay with pro-Islam because: Reasons. (Notably, ‘pro-Islam’ was inside the accepted ‘good’ but ‘it’s okay to be feminine and a strong woman’ types were ‘outside’ the ‘good’.)

So one potential effect I’m starting to see is so many groups who were previously ‘okay’ to the Progressive Elites are being tossed out… their supporters are getting smaller and smaller.

Think about Jim Webb, one of the Democrats who unsuccessfully ran in the Democratic Primary.

Military veteran. Moderate economically. Pro-welfare state. Pro-big government. Believer in Global Warming.

In 2000 he’d have been a viable Democratic candidate.

In 2016, he was worse than Trump.

But he’s actually just fine with most of America.

So the ‘elites’ are making ‘acceptable’ so narrow… they’re doing what the Japanese are demographically. If the Japanese don’t start breeding, hard, soon enough Halsey will be right. Japanese will be spoken only in the afterlife.

If the ‘elites’ keep tossing every group that doesn’t match their current ‘conforming’ form to the wolves…

Pretty soon ‘Progressive’ will be spoken only in hell.

QotD: Everyone has prejudices

Filed under: Business, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’ve told before the story of how my husband and I went car shopping and took along our best friends, both taller, blue eyed, and one of them blond. Inevitably, at whichever dealership we landed in (this was a lazy Saturday pursuit. You know what I mean) the salesman gravitated towards our friends who a) weren’t shopping for a car. b) were far less financially solvent than we were.

Racism? Oh, heck no, heuristics. Dan might or might not be as white as advertised, but outwardly he’s all white (nickname Count Dracula due to his inability to tan.) (Well, maybe the eyes give some clue to other genetic origins as in Portugal everyone assumes he’s from Macau and some level of cross breed. Meh.) And I can pass provided I haven’t been outside in a couple of weeks and don’t open my mouth. So, racism was highly unlikely. But we’re both short, overweight, dark haired, and were dressed almost terminally relaxed. Our friends fit the “double income” couple look better than we did, so salesmen gravitated to them.

Privilege? No. We got the chance to poke around at cars while our friends distracted pushy salespeople. BUT prejudice? You bet. Even though the two couples were superficially “white” you bet the sales people had an image of what “affluent” or relatively affluent (it was used dealerships) looked like, and it wasn’t Dan or I.

Sarah Hoyt, “The Privilege Of Not Caring”, According to Hoyt, 2015-05-17.

January 29, 2017

Native Americans In WW1 – Superstitions – Paint Jobs I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Published on 28 Jan 2017

Another exciting episode of Out Of The Trenches – this week Indy talks about Native Americans in the war, soldier superstitions and custom paint jobs for vehicles.

January 27, 2017

Nivelle’s Spring Offensive – Royal Conspiracy In Greece I THE GREAT WAR Week 131

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, Greece, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 26 Jan 2017

Germany is about to unleash unrestricted submarine warfare again which might draw the United States into the conflict – but the Germans are not worried. The German Kaiser is instigating with his sister in Greece and Nivelle has big plans for a decisive battle in spring.

Il Donalduce as a political Sir Jackie Fisher

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Richard Fernandez suggests that the election of Donald Trump has changed the political scene in the same way that Fisher’s Dreadnought changed the naval world in 1906:

With America’s closure to mass uncontrolled immigration the pressure inevitably be on Europe to accept the Middle Eastern millions. Can Europe stand by and watch as Trump strikes separate deals? Which country wants to be the last to maintain open borders AND welfare in a world where America is in frank pursuit of energy dominance, security and trade? Cecilia Malmstrom appears to be volunteering Europe. Can it do it?

By moving first and quickly Trump may have initiated the political equivalent of a 21st century Dreadnought race. The HMS Dreadnought, readers will recall, was a warship whose building forced a paradigm shift in Naval Affairs by rendering all previous naval vessels obsolete. It changed the game for everyone.

    Her entry into service in 1906 represented such a paradigm shift in naval technology that her name came to be associated with an entire generation of battleships, the “dreadnoughts”, as well as the class of ships named after her. The generation of ships she made obsolete became known as “pre-dreadnoughts”.

The Trumpian revolution could have the same effect. The choice before Europeans is whether to make the shift and build policy “dreadnoughts” of their own or to plod along building PC-era pre-dreadnoughts. The suddenness of developments has caught the media by surprise though it shouldn’t have. As Dennis Prager pointed out the sustainability of the old paradigm has been been in question for a long time. “It is time for our society to acknowledge a sad truth,” Prager said, “America is currently fighting its second Civil War.” The Left had long been saying this as had conservatives, but the party of Washington plodded serenely on.

January 26, 2017

How Democrats can recover from the Trumpening

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Megan McArdle says it’s quite possible for the Democrats to come back strongly, but to do it they’ll have to give up some of their recent favourite political toys:

Why are the left’s public demonstrations more impressive than its voter turnout? Because there are a whole lot of Democrats in the large population centers where such demonstrations are generally held. People can join a protest simply by getting on the subway; it’s an easy show of force.

But there are a lot of small towns in America, and as Sean Trende and David Byler recently demonstrated, those small towns are redder than ever. Effectively, the Democratic coalition has self-gerrymandered into a small number of places where they can turn out an impressive number of feet on the ground, but not enough votes to win the House. Certainly not enough to win the Senate or the Electoral College, which both favor sparsely populated states and discount the increasingly dense parts of the nation.

The Senate map in 2018 is brutal for Democrats. If Democrats want to get their mojo back, they’re going to need to do more than get a small minority of voters to turn out for a march. They’re going to need to get back some of those rural votes.

To do that, they’re probably going to have to let go of the most soul-satisfying, brain-melting political theory of the last two decades: that Democrats are inevitably the Party of the Future, guaranteed ownership of the future by an emerging Democratic majority in minority-white America. This theory underlay a lot of Obama’s presidency, and Clinton’s campaign. With President Trump’s inauguration on Friday, we saw the results.

Autarky is not the answer

Filed under: Economics, History, Japan, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Warren Meyer on the idiocy of Trump’s economic nationalist notions:

Think about the corollary of Trump’s economic nationalism, particularly if everyone followed this same approach. If one skews all the rules and taxes and prohibitions so everything must be sourced domestically, then if a country does not have some particular resource or skill domestically, it is out of luck. No domestic rare earth metals? Sorry.

But governments and powerful people seldom calmly accept that something they critically need is not available. They will be tempted to go and take it. The worst, most violent empire building of the last 100-150 years has occurred when countries have pursued economic nationalism. Think of the colonialism of the late 19th century. Today we happily trade with South Africa and other countries for valuable resources, but in that time of economic nationalism, if a country wanted access to these resources, it felt it had to control the land and the people. Hitler in the 1930’s wanted to make Germany self-sufficient in agricultural goods and certain other resources, and the only way to do that was to go and grab other people’s land and resources.

The best example of all of this phenomenon is, I think, Japan in the 1930’s. Japan felt that it was resource poor and under Trump’s theory of economic nationalism, it felt it had to control oil and other resources it did not have domestically. So it plotted to go take it. When the US instituted a trade embargo in these very goods to punish Japan’s aggressiveness in China, it just accelerated Japan’s thinking in this area, convincing it for good it had to control these resources, and it was soon invading the oil-rich islands of what is now Indonesia. This example is all the more telling because Japan actually found true prosperity after the war when it traded peacefully for these resources. Unfortunately, it adopted economic nationalism, via MITI, of another form and helped manage themselves into a 20-year recession, but that is another trade-related story for another day.

QotD: Why government intervention usually fails

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We saw in an earlier story that the government is trying to tighten regulations on private company cyber security practices at the same time its own network security practices have been shown to be a joke. In finance, it can never balance a budget and uses accounting techniques that would get most companies thrown in jail. It almost never fully funds its pensions. Anything it does is generally done more expensively than would be the same task undertaken privately. Its various sites are among the worst superfund environmental messes. Almost all the current threats to water quality in rivers and oceans comes from municipal sewage plants. The government’s Philadelphia naval yard single-handedly accounts for a huge number of the worst asbestos exposure cases to date.

By what alchemy does such a failing organization suddenly become such a good regulator?

Warren Meyer, “Question: Name An Activity The Government is Better At Than the Private Actors It Purports to Regulate”, Coyote Blog, 2015-06-12.

January 25, 2017

Protectionism can save jobs … at the cost of even more jobs than it “saves”

Filed under: Business, Economics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Perry provides some context to the claim that protectionist policies can save American jobs:

According to Team Trump’s website, we’re told that “blue-collar towns and cities have watched their factories close and good-paying jobs move overseas, while Americans face a mounting trade deficit and a devastated manufacturing base. By fighting for fair but tough trade deals, we can bring jobs back to America’s shores, increase wages, and support U.S. manufacturing.”

Actually, it’s been capital investments in labor-saving technologies like robotics and increasing worker productivity that have led to the large majority of US factory job losses, not trade or outsourcing, as I documented recently here. And there’s been no devastation of America’s manufacturing base; to the contrary, real US manufacturing output has reached all-time high levels in recent quarters.

What’s Trump’s solution to the loss of US manufacturing jobs? America’s “first authentic protectionist to win the White House since the 1920s” has outlined a series of protectionist trade measures including tariffs (30-40-50%), “tougher trade deals” (likely trade deals to protect US manufacturers from foreign competition), “Buy American” policies, and border adjustment taxes, among other strategies to “save American jobs.”

Here’s a relevant question to ask: How have protectionist trade policies in the past worked out for the US economy and how expensive is it to save American jobs with the protectionist trade policies Trump is proposing? We can find some answers to those questions in a Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis research article published in 1988 by three economists “Protectionist Trade Policies: A Survey of Theory, Evidence and Rationale,” which presented a summary of the empirical evidence on trade protectionism from the 1986 book published by the Institute for International Economics Trade Protection in the United States: 31 Case Studies. Even though the research and empirical results are from the 1980s, this article and book provide useful empirical evidence on the costs of protectionism to bring some much-needed sanity to the debate on trade policy to counterbalance the favorable treatment being given to protectionism these days.

Click to see full-size table.

The “right to repair” gets a boost in three states

Filed under: Business, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Cory Doctorow reports on a hopeful sign that we might be able to get rid of one of the more pernicious aspects of the DMCA rules:

Section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it both a crime and a civil offense to tamper with software locks that control access to copyrighted works — more commonly known as “Digital Rights Management” or DRM. As the number of products with software in them has exploded, the manufacturers of these products have figured out that they can force their customers to use their own property in ways that benefit the company’s shareholders, not the products’ owners — all they have to do is design those products so that using them in other ways requires breaking some DRM.

The conversion of companies’ commercial preferences into legally enforceable rights has been especially devastating to the repair sector, a huge slice of the US economy, as much as 4% of GDP, composed mostly of small mom-n-pop storefront operations that create jobs right in local communities, because repair is a local business. No one wants to send their car, or even their phone, to China or India for servicing.

[…]

Three states are considering “Right to Repair” bills that would override the DMCA’s provisions, making it legal to break DRM to effect repairs, ending the bizarre situation where cat litter boxes are given the same copyright protection as the DVD of Sleeping Beauty. Grassroots campaigns in Nebraska, Minnesota, and New York prompted the introduction of these bills and there’s more on the way. EFF and the Right to Repair coalition are pushing for national legislation too, in the form of the Unlocking Technology Act.

January 24, 2017

“In fact, Trump’s basically gaslighting [the press]”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds on the relationship between Trump and the media:

First, the thing to understand is that, as I’ve said before, one of the changes going on with Trump generally is the renegotiation of various post-World War II institutional arrangements. One of those is the institutional arrangement involving the press and the White House. For decades, the press got special status because it was seen as both powerful, and institutionally responsible. (And, of course, allied with the Democrats who were mostly in charge of setting up those postwar institutional arrangements). Now those things have changed. If the press were powerful, it would have beaten Trump. If it were responsible, it wouldn’t be running away with fake news whenever it sees a chance to run something damaging to Trump. And, of course, there’s no alliance between Trump and the media, as there was with Obama.

So things will change. The press’s “insider” status — which it cherishes — is going to fade. (This is producing waves of status anxiety, as are many other Trump-induced institutional changes). And, having abandoned, quite openly, any pretense of objectivity and neutrality in the election, the press is going to be treated as an enemy by the Trump Administration until further notice.

In fact, Trump’s basically gaslighting them. Knowing how much they hate him, he’s constantly provoking them to go over the top. Sean Spicer’s crowd-size remarks are all about making them seem petty and negative. (And, possibly, teeing up crowd-size comparisons at next week’s March For Life, which the press normally ignores but which Trump will probably force them to cover).

A nation divided against itself

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Bretigne Shaffer on the intensely partisan American political scene:

It’s been a weird couple of months. I’ve seen more people unfriend each other on FaceBook than in the past few years combined; There have been several reports of both Trump supporters and minorities being physically attacked; I’ve been asked to wear a safety pin to proclaim to the world that I am not a racist, because the presumption now is that everyone is a racist and you have to (secretly – only not so secretly) announce to everyone if you’re not; and the senior editor of ThinkProgress is afraid of his plumber. (This, based solely on whatever profiling techniques they use over at ThinkProgress – “…a middle-aged white man with a southern accent who seemed unperturbed by this week’s news.” – rather than anything resembling a conversation with the man.)

Here’s the thing: I’m a libertarian. I’ve been surrounded by people who don’t agree with me for as long as I can remember and it has never occurred to me to isolate myself from everyone because of our political differences. Certainly not to assault them. Nor am I filled with anxiety by the thought that people who work in my home might have different political views than mine. To me, you’re all a bunch of fascists. But I’ve somehow learned to live with you.

For me, watching people unravel over this election has been instructive. The – yes, I’m going to say it – bigotry of many on the left, in their caricaturing of Trump supporters, has never before been so blatant. Nor has the jaw-dropping, mass-hypnosis level of selective partisan-driven outrage. I understand that a lot of people are worried, upset, even frightened over the prospect of a Trump presidency. Good. They should be. But they should have been worried eight years ago, or at the very least, four years ago.

QotD: Token ownership to game government mandates

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I was researching energy shorts and had a ton of discussions with former regulatory types in the U.S. I was stunned to discover that there was widespread acknowledgement on the regulatory side that many regulations were impossible to comply with and so “compliance trump cards” were built into the system.

For instance, in Illinois you get favorable treatment as a potential government contractor if you “comply” with all sorts of insane progressive policy strictures. “Woman or minority owned business” or “small business owner”, as an example. Even a small advantage in the contracting process for (for example) the State of Illinois puts you over the edge. Competitors without (for instance) the Woman or Minority Owned Business certification would have to underbid a certified applicant by 10-15% (it’s all a complex points system) to just break even. It got so bad so quickly that the regs were revised to permit a de minimis ownership (1%). Of course, several regulatory lawyers quickly made a business out of offering minority or women equity “owners” who would take 1% for a fee (just absorb how backwards it is to be paying a fee to have a 1% equity partner) with very restrictive shareholder agreements. Then it became obvious that you’d get points for the “women” and “minority” categories BOTH if you had a black woman as a proxy 1% “owner.” There was one woman who was a 1% owner of 320 firms.

The proprietor of the Finem Respice blog, quoted by Warren Meyer, “Diesel Emissions Cheating, Regulation, and the Crony State”, Coyote Blog, 2017-01-14.

January 23, 2017

Five easy fixes to improve US federal health policies

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Scott Alexander finds, to his surprise, that two of the candidates for the post of FDA commissioner in the Trump administration are following his blog or social media profile. To mark that, he offers five easy-to-implement policy fixes that would make a difference:

1. Medical reciprocity with Europe and other First World countries […] Right now, Europe has a licensing agency about as strict as the FDA approving medications invented in Europe. Any pharma company that wants their medication approved in both the US and Europe has to spend a billion or so dollars getting it approved by the FDA, and then another billion or so dollars getting it approved by the Europeans. A lot of pharma companies don’t want to bother, with the end result that Europe has many good medications that America doesn’t, and vice versa. Just in my own field, amisulpride, one of the antipsychotics with the best safety/efficacy balance, has been used successfully in Europe for twenty years and is totally unavailable here despite a real need for better antipsychotic drugs. If the FDA agreed to approve any medication already approved by Europe (or to give it a very expedited review process), we could get an immediate windfall of dozens of drugs with unimpeachable records for almost no cost. Instead, in the real world, we’re cracking down on imported Canadian pharmaceuticals because the Canadians don’t have exactly our same FDA which means that for all we know they might be adding thalidomide to every pill or something. This is exactly the sort of silly anti-competitive cronyist practice that a principled intelligent libertarian could do away with.

2. Burdensome approval process for generic medications […] How come Martin Shkreli can hike the dose of an off-patent toxoplasma drug 5000%, and everyone just has to take it lying down even though the drug itself is so easy to produce that high school chemistry classes make it just to show they can? The reason is that every new company that makes a drug, even a widely-used generic drug that’s already been proven safe, has to go through a separate approval process that costs millions of dollars and takes two to three years – and which other companies in the market constantly try to sabotage through legal action. Shkreli can get away with his price hike because he knows that by the time the FDA gives anyone permission to compete with him, he’ll have made his fortune and moved on to his next nefarious scheme. If the FDA allowed reputable pharmaceutical companies in good standing to produce whatever generic drugs they wanted, the same as every other company is allowed to make whatever products they want, scandals like Daraprim and EpiPens would be a thing of the past, and the price of many medications could decrease by an order of magnitude. […]

3. Stop having that thing allowing companies to “steal” popular and effective drugs that have been in the public domain for years, claim them as their private property, shut down all competitors, and jack up the price 10x just by bringing them up to date with modern FDA bureaucracy.

4. Stop having that thing where drug companies can legally bribe other companies not to compete with them. I like this one because it sounds anti-libertarian (we’re imposing a new regulation on what companies can do!) but I think it’s exactly the sort of thing that the crony capitalists would never touch but which principled intelligent libertarians like O’Neill and Srinivasan might be open to, in order to bring more actors into the marketplace.

5. Stop thwarting consumer diagnostic products and genetic tests […] Srinivasan comes from the genetic testing world himself, so he’s likely to be extra sympathetic to this.

Ironclads The Great Ships Broadside Collection History Channel Documentary

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 13 Oct 2015

Covering some of the same territory is my post on British battleship design from the end of the Napoleonic era to the 1880s.

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