Quotulatiousness

January 14, 2014

Noam Chomsky – TPP is an “assault” that furthers corporate “domination”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is perhaps the most secretive “free trade” deal ever negotiated. It’s apparently so important that the details be kept from the electorate that even our elected representatives are not being given much information on what has been discussed or agreed. It’s not just libertarian and free market advocates that find this lack of transparency disturbing, as this piece in the Huffington Post shows:

The Obama administration’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal is an “assault,” on working people intended to further corporate “domination,” according to author and activist Noam Chomsky.

“It’s designed to carry forward the neoliberal project to maximize profit and domination, and to set the working people in the world in competition with one another so as to lower wages to increase insecurity,” Chomsky said during an interview with HuffPost Live.

The Obama administration has been negotiating the TPP pact with 11 other Pacific nations for years. While the deal has not been finalized and much of it has been classified, American corporate interest groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have already voiced strong support for the TPP, describing it as a free trade deal that will encourage economic growth. The Office of U.S. Trade Representative has also defended the talks, saying the TPP will include robust regulatory protections. But labor unions and a host of traditionally liberal interest groups, including environmentalists and public health advocates, have sharply criticized the deal.

Chomsky argues that much of the negotiations concern issues outside of what many consider trade, and are focused instead on limiting the activities governments can regulate, imposing new intellectual property standards abroad and boosting corporate political power.

“It’s called free trade, but that’s just a joke,” Chomsky said. “These are extreme, highly protectionist measures designed to undermine freedom of trade. In fact, much of what’s leaked about the TPP indicates that it’s not about trade at all, it’s about investor rights.”

January 13, 2014

Chris Christie discovers that there are no allies in politics

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:34

L. Neil Smith thinks that the national media have abandoned New Jersey governor Chris Christie as the political equivalent of the Washington Generals (that is, the preferred token Republican to lose against the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate):

By now, I’m confident you’ve all heard, seen, or smelled the story about New Jersey’s RINO Governor Chris Christie, whose administration allegedly closed down several lanes on the George Washington Bridge as political retribution of some kind against Fort Lee’s Mayor Mark Sokolich.

“RINO” stands for “Republican In Name Only”. Before the bridge incident, Rush Limbaugh was predicting that Christie would go over to the Democrats day after tomorrow. Now I doubt they’d let him in the clubhouse.

[…]

Of all Christie’s dubious accomplishments, and they are many, the one he’s most proud of and famous for is his moderation. In practice, this means that he has absolutely no discernable philosophy. Those are his principles, by God, and if you don’t like them … he’ll change them. Which enables him, he would tell you, to reach out to the “other side of the aisle”, and make compromises with them, so stuff can get done.

Even when it shouldn’t.

Now you would think, when their moderate Republican buddy came under attack, that some of these Democrats he’s been reaching out to all these years might have something to say in his defense: “Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt,” or something. But listen to the crickets.

Instead, they’re already calling for a Congressional investigation which, translated into Russian and translated back again, means “show trial”.

Also, there are other Republican moderates who share whatever serves Christie for values. You might expect them to stand up with him.

Nope … more crickets.

Finally, there are the media (plural noun again) who have been pimping Christie for so long, not only as an ideal politician, but the very fellow who ought to get the Grand Old Party’s next available nomination for President. They were the first to start snapping at his heels. They never really wanted him as President, They wanted him to be a losing Republican candidate for President, the GOP equivalent of Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis.

But now he’s no longer useful to them, even for that.

January 11, 2014

Proportionality in media coverage

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:41

Jonah Goldberg makes a good point about what the media chooses to focus their attention on, and how it can downplay or amplify the actual importance of a given issue:

You have to wonder how some of the folks in the media can look at themselves in the mirror. The three network news shows have devoted orders of magnitude more coverage to a story about closed lanes on the George Washington Bridge than they have to the IRS scandal. I know this is not a new insight, but WHAT THE HELL!?

The sheer passion the New York Times-MSNBC mob is bringing to a partial road closure is a wonder to behold. What about the children! The chiiiiillllldrennnn!!!!!

But using the IRS to harass political opponents — one of the charges in the articles of impeachment for Richard Nixon — well, that’s complicated. The president didn’t know. The government is so vast. I had a flat tire! A flood! Locusts! It wasn’t his fault! Besides Chris Christie joked about putting down the cones himself! The cones, man! The cones!

But forget about the IRS scandal. Obama’s whole shtick is to pretend that he’s above politics while being rankly political about everything, including his stated desire to “punish our enemies.” By comparison, Chris Christie looks like Diogenes and Cincinnatus rolled into one. From inauguration day forward, this whole crew has behaved like Chicago goons dressed in Olympian garb, and the press has fallen for it.

We don’t need to recycle the whole sordid history of the sequester and the shutdown to remember that this White House sincerely, deliberately, and with malice aforethought sought to make things as painful as possible for millions of Americans. Traffic cones on the George Washington Bridge are a stain on the honor of New Jersey. (Stop laughing!) But deliberately pulling air-traffic controllers to screw with millions of people is just fine? Shafting World War II vets and vacationing families at National Parks is something only crazy right-wingers on Twitter would have a problem with? And keep in mind, it is at least plausible Christie didn’t know what his staff was doing. It is entirely implausible that the president didn’t know about the WWII memorial closure, after the news appeared in the president’s daily briefing (a.k.a. the New York Times).

I’d say I just don’t get it, but I do get it. For the mainstream media, skepticism comes naturally when a Republican is in the crosshairs. It comes reluctantly, slowly, and painfully — if at all — when it’s a Democrat.

The press would be much more useful to the country if it was equally critical of politicians regardless of party affiliation, rather than acting as a propaganda arm for one side. In Canada, replace “Chris Christie” with “Rob Ford” and the story is pretty much the same … everything Ford does goes under the microscope to detect evil intent, wrongdoing, malice, and (blatantly hoped-for) criminality. Other politicians, both on city council and at the provincial level, get so much benefit of the doubt that the press sometimes acts as unpaid PR staff.

Update: David Friedman points out the only evidence in Christie’s favour and does a bit of quick math to point out the costs imposed on New Jersey commuters by this little flexing of the arm of power:

There is only one piece of evidence that I can see in Christie’s favor—the fact that he would have had to be terminally stupid to think he could get away with it.

Of course, that leaves the conclusion that the two people known to be responsible, a high up Christie aid whom he has just fired and the Port Authority official actually responsible for closing down the lanes who has now resigned, both close to Christie, were terminally stupid as well as criminally irresponsible. […]

One other point is suggested by the story, not about Christie but about the Port Authority and government actors more generally. Average weekday traffic volume eastbound on the bridge, found with a little googling, is a bit over 150,000 vehicles. Assume a third of them got delayed by the traffic jam for an hour each. Assume their occupants value their time at ten dollars an hour. Assume one person per vehicle. On those very conservative assumptions, a single Port Authority official, acting in effect on a whim, imposed a cost of two million dollars on New York commuters and it took four days for anyone else in the organization to notice and do something about it. More generous assumptions could easily push the number up to five or ten million.

January 10, 2014

QotD: Teddy Roosevelt

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:02

In the face of such acute military imbecility it is not surprising to discover that all of the existing biographies of the late Colonel Roosevelt — and they have been rolling off the presses at a dizzy rate since his death — are feeble, inaccurate, ignorant and preposterous. I have read, I suppose, at least ten of these tomes during the past year or so, and in all of them I have found vastly more gush than sense. Lawrence Abbott’s Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt and William Roscoe Thayer’s Theodore Roosevelt may well serve as specimens. Abbott’s book is the composition, not of an unbiased student of the man, but of a sort of groom of the hero. He is so extremely eager to prove that Roosevelt was the perfect right-thinker, according to the transient definitions of right-thinking, that he manages to get a flavor of dubiousness into his whole chronicle. I find myself doubting him even when I know that he is honest and suspect that he is right. As for Thayer, all he offers is a hasty and hollow pot-boiler — such a work as might have been well within the talents of, say, the late Murat Halstead or the editor of the New York Times. This Thayer has been heavily praised of late as the Leading American Biographer, and one constantly hears that some new university has made him Legum Doctor, or that he has been awarded a medal by this or that learned society, or that the post has brought him a new ribbon from some literary potentate in foreign parts. If, in fact, he is actually the cock of the walk in biography, then all I have said against American biographers is too mild and mellow. What one finds in his book is simply the third-rate correctness of a Boston colonial. Consider, for example, his frequent discussions of the war — a necessity in any work on Roosevelt. […]

Obviously, Roosevelt’s reaction to the war must occupy a large part of any adequate biography of him, for that reaction was probably more comprehensively typical of the man than any other business of his life. It displayed not only his whole stock of political principles, but also his whole stock of political tricks. It plumbed, on the one hand, the depths of his sagacity, and on the other hand the depths of his insincerity.

Fundamentally, I am convinced, he was quite out of sympathy with, and even quite unable to comprehend the body of doctrine upon which the Allies, and later the United States, based their case. To him it must have seemed insane when it was not hypocritical, and hypocritical when it was not insane. His instincts were profoundly against a new loosing of democratic fustian upon the world; he believed in strongly centralized states, founded upon power and devoted to enterprises far transcending mere internal government; he was an imperialist of the type of Cecil Rhodes, Treitschke and Delcasse. But the fortunes of domestic politics jockeyed him into the position of standing as the spokesman of an almost exactly contrary philosophy. The visible enemy before him was Wilson. What he wanted as a politician was something that he could get only by wresting it from Wilson, and Wilson was too cunning to yield it without making a tremendous fight, chiefly by chicane — whooping for peace while preparing for war, playing mob fear against mob fear, concealing all his genuine motives and desires beneath clouds of chautauqual rhetoric, leading a mad dance whose tune changed at every swing. Here was an opponent that more than once puzzled Roosevelt, and in the end flatly dismayed him. Here was a mob-master with a technique infinitely more subtle and effective than his own. So lured into an unequal combat, the Rough Rider got bogged in absurdities so immense that only the democratic anaesthesia to absurdity saved him. To make any progress at all he was forced into fighting against his own side. He passed from the scene bawling piteously for a cause that, at bottom, it is impossible to imagine him believing in, and in terms of a philosophy that was as foreign to his true faith as it was to the faith of Wilson. In the whole affair there was a colossal irony. Both contestants were intrinsically frauds.

H.L. Mencken, “Roosevelt: An Autopsy”, Prejudices, Second Series, 1920.

January 9, 2014

Oh, that’s okay then – Congress has the same constitutional protections as other Americans (i.e., none whatsoever)

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:59

Like Andrew Napolitano, I’m sure all members of congress heaved a sigh of relief when the NSA said that they have exactly the same constitutional right to privacy from surveillance as every other American does. Wait, what?

Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., wrote to Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Administration (NSA), and asked plainly whether the NSA has been or is now spying on members of Congress or other public officials. The senator’s letter was no doubt prompted by the revelations of Edward Snowden to the effect that the federal government’s lust for personal private data about all Americans and many foreigners knows no bounds, and its respect for the constitutionally protected and statutorily enforced right to privacy is nonexistent.

[…]

All of this is background to the timing of Sanders’ letter. That Clapper perjured himself before, and Alexander misled, Congress is nothing new. And the punishments for lying to Congress and for misleading Congress are identical: five years per lie or per misleading statement. Hence, the silence from the NSA to Sanders.

Well, it wasn’t exactly silence, but rather a refusal to answer a simple question. The NSA did reply to Sanders by stating — in an absurd oxymoron — that members of Congress receive the same constitutional protections as other Americans: that is to say, none from the NSA.

The NSA’s refusal to answer Sanders’ question directly is a tacit admission, because we are all well aware that the NSA collects identifying data on and the content of virtually every email, text message and phone call sent or received in the U.S. In fact, just last week, the secret FISA court renewed the order authorizing massive records collection for the 36th time. If members of Congress are treated no differently than the American public, then the NSA is keeping tabs on every email, text and phone call members of Congress send and receive, too.

That raises a host of constitutional questions. Under the Constitution, Congress and the executive branch are equals. The president — for whom the NSA works — can no more legally spy on members of Congress without a search warrant about the members to be spied upon than Congress can legally spy on the president. Surely the president, a former lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, knows this.

There was a time when the NSA’s failure to answer such a straightforward question as Sanders has asked would have led to hearings and bipartisan investigations. However, Democrats are largely silent, choosing party and personality over principle, and Republicans know all of this started under President George W. Bush and are afraid to open a can of worms — except for King, who apparently likes to be spied upon.

January 8, 2014

David Harsanyi on Colorado’s recent marijuana legalization

Filed under: Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:45

On the one hand, he’s delighted that something he advocated for years finally came to pass. On the other, well, he’s still also in favour of adults being allowed to make decisions on what they put into their bodies (and owning the consequences of their actions), so perhaps we only need the one hand after all.

As a Denver Post columnist from 2004-2011, I spent a considerable amount of time writing pieces advocating for the legalization of pot. So I was happy when the state became one of the first to decriminalize small amounts of “recreational” marijuana. I believe the War on Drugs is a tragically misplaced use of resources; an immoral venture that produces far more suffering than it alleviates. And on a philosophical level, I believe that adults should be permitted to ingest whatever they desire — including, but not limited to, trans-fats, tobacco, cough syrup, colossal-sized sodas, and so on — as long as they live with the consequences.

You know, that old chestnut.

Unrealistic? Maybe. But less so than allowing myself to believe human behavior can/should be endlessly nudged, cajoled and coerced by politicians.

So, naturally, I was curious to see how marijuana sales in Colorado would shake out. According to the Denver Post, there are nearly 40 stores in Colorado licensed to sell “recreational” pot. Medical marijuana has been legal for more than a decade. (And, having spent time covering medical pot “caregivers” — or, rather, barely coherent stoners selling cannabis to other barely coherent stoners, a majority of whom suffer from ailments that an Excedrin could probably alleviate — it will be a relief to see that ruse come to end. I’m not saying marijuana doesn’t possess medicinal uses. I’m saying that most medicinal users are frauds.)

Not surprisingly, pot stores can’t keep up with demand for a hit of recreational tetrahydrocannabinol. Outside of Denver shops, people are waiting for up to five hours to buy some well-taxed and “regulated” cannabis. The pot tourists have also arrived. All this, the Denver Post estimates, will translate into $40 million of additional tax revenue in 2014 — the real reason legalization in Colorado became a reality.

“Silicon Valley was … collateral damage in the war on terror”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

In Wired, Steven Levy explains how the NSA nearly killed the internet:

On June 6, 2013, Washington Post reporters called the communications depart­ments of Apple, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and other Internet companies. The day before, a report in the British newspaper The Guardian had shocked Americans with evidence that the telecommunications giant Verizon had voluntarily handed a database of every call made on its network to the National Security Agency. The piece was by reporter Glenn Greenwald, and the information came from Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old IT consultant who had left the US with hundreds of thousands of documents detailing the NSA’s secret procedures.

Greenwald was the first but not the only journalist that Snowden reached out to. The Post’s Barton Gellman had also connected with him. Now, collaborating with documentary filmmaker and Snowden confidante Laura Poitras, he was going to extend the story to Silicon Valley. Gellman wanted to be the first to expose a top-secret NSA program called Prism. Snowden’s files indicated that some of the biggest companies on the web had granted the NSA and FBI direct access to their servers, giving the agencies the ability to grab a person’s audio, video, photos, emails, and documents. The government urged Gellman not to identify the firms involved, but Gellman thought it was important. “Naming those companies is what would make it real to Americans,” he says. Now a team of Post reporters was reaching out to those companies for comment.

It would be the start of a chain reaction that threatened the foundations of the industry. The subject would dominate headlines for months and become the prime topic of conversation in tech circles. For years, the tech companies’ key policy issue had been negotiating the delicate balance between maintaining customers’ privacy and providing them benefits based on their personal data. It was new and contro­versial territory, sometimes eclipsing the substance of current law, but over time the companies had achieved a rough equilibrium that allowed them to push forward. The instant those phone calls from reporters came in, that balance was destabilized, as the tech world found itself ensnared in a fight far bigger than the ones involving oversharing on Facebook or ads on Gmail. Over the coming months, they would find themselves at war with their own government, in a fight for the very future of the Internet.

Inequality and the American elite

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:25

Victor Davis Hanson diagnoses what he calls the “Modern Psychological Disorder of Elite Liberalism”:

The result of cosmic disappointment in the ability of progressive politics to correct human disparities has given birth to the modern psychological disorder of elite liberalism, which is mostly about squaring the circle of maintaining privilege while deploring inequality. Say America is unfair ten times a day, and the BMW in the garage and the new putter are no longer sins.

Barack Obama cannot finish a sentence without lamenting unfairness; but he proves to be no Jimmy Carter in scouting out the most exclusive of golf courses, and the richest of fat cats to putt with. Elizabeth Warren talks of oppressed minorities, but then invents a pseudo-Native-American identity to get a leg up on the elite competition in order to land at Harvard. The fact is that the elite who champion the poor and the poor themselves are not the players of the 1930s; the former usually make about the same amount of money and enjoy the same privileges as those they damn, while the latter have access to appurtenances and privileges denied the royalty of old.

The wealthier and more secluded an Oprah, the most desperately she searches for evidence of bias and inequality, finally reduced to the caricature of whining about racially driven poor service over a $38,000 crocodile handbag. If most in California don’t care what people do in their bedrooms, or if gays have on average higher incomes than non-gays, or if gay marriage is now de rigeur, the search for cosmic equality continues at an even brisker pace, resulting in transgendered bathrooms in the public schools (crede mihi: the ten-year-old daughters of the Yahoo elite will not encounter transgendered fifteen-year-old boys in the female Menlo School restrooms).

It is not perverse, but logical that Obamacare architects don’t want Obamacare coverage. It is understandable that Washington young-gun liberals know exactly where DuPont Circle or Georgetown gets iffy. Modern liberalism provides the necessary mental mechanisms to ensure the enjoyment of privilege. Al Gore was the classical liberal of the age, crafting an entire green empire predicated on opposing the very values that he later embraced to become, and preserve staying, very rich.

[…]

It is past time to forge a new populist approach without the theatrics of shutting down the government or playing on the same keyboards as Pajama Boy Obamacare spivs. The liberal elite runs the culture, from universities and entertainment to government bureaucracies and the media, but it nonetheless is predicated on loudly condemning in the abstract the very creed that they embrace in the concrete.

January 7, 2014

“Boomer Classic” and “Boomer Reboot”

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

Chronologically speaking, I’m a late Baby Boomer, but I’ve never felt I was a Boomer culturally. In the New York Times, Richard Pérez-Peña helps to explain why this is:

This year the youngest of the baby boomers — the youngest, mind you — turn 50. I hit that milestone a few months back. But we aren’t what people usually have in mind when they talk about boomers. They mean the early boomers, the postwar cohort, most of them now in their 60s — not us later boomers, labeled “Generation Jones” by the writer Jonathan Pontell.

The boom generation really has two distinct halves, which in my mind I call Boomer Classic and Boomer Reboot. (Take this quiz to see where you stand.) The differences between them have to do, not surprisingly, with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — and economics and war. For a wide-ranging set of attitudes and cultural references, it matters whether you were a child in the 1940s and ‘50s, or in the 1960s and ‘70s. And it probably matters even more whether you reached adulthood before or after the early ‘70s, a time of head-spinning changes with long-term consequences for families, careers and even survival.

[…]

Late boomers like me had none of that — no war, no draft, no defining political cause, and most of our fathers were too young for World War II. I remember, as a teenager, seeing old footage of the riots outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, and thinking, “People my age don’t feel that strongly about anything.”

People raised in the immediate postwar years had more faith in their government, and an idealistic view of America that curdled in the ‘60s and ‘70s. My childhood memories of the evening news, on the other hand, include the war, protests, Watergate and the dour faces of Johnson and Nixon, not the grins of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy.

In this way, I think we late boomers have more in common with the jaded Generation X that followed: we had less idealism to spoil. No, I don’t remember where I was when Kennedy was killed and innocence died (I was an infant), but I sure remember where I was when Nixon resigned and cynicism reigned. Older boomers may have wanted to change the world; most of my peers just wanted to change the channel.

H/T to Kathy Shaidle for the link.

January 6, 2014

Police killed in line of duty – the good news and the not-so-good news

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:32

The good news is that in the United States, the number of police officers killed in the performance of their duties dropped to a level last seen in 1959. The bad news is that the number of people killed by the police didn’t drop:

The go-to phrase deployed by police officers, district attorneys and other law enforcement-related entities to justify the use of excessive force or firing dozens of bullets into a single suspect is “the officer(s) feared for his/her safety.” There is no doubt being a police officer can be dangerous. But is it as dangerous as this oft-deployed justification makes it appear?

    The annual report from the nonprofit National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund also found that deaths in the line of duty generally fell by 8 percent and were the fewest since 1959.

    According to the report, 111 federal, state, local, tribal and territorial officers were killed in the line of duty nationwide this past year, compared to 121 in 2012.

    Forty-six officers were killed in traffic related accidents, and 33 were killed by firearms. The number of firearms deaths fell 33 percent in 2013 and was the lowest since 1887.

This statistical evidence suggests being a cop is safer than its been since the days of Sheriff Andy Griffith. Back in 2007, the FBI put the number of justifiable homicides committed by officers in the line of duty at 391. That count only includes homicides that occurred during the commission of a felony. This total doesn’t include justifiable homicides committed by police officers against people not committing felonies and also doesn’t include homicides found to be not justifiable. But still, this severe undercount far outpaces the number of cops killed by civilians.

We should expect the number to always skew in favor of the police. After all, they are fighting crime and will run into dangerous criminals who may respond violently. But to continually claim that officers “fear for their safety” is to ignore the statistical evidence that says being a cop is the safest it’s been in years — and in more than a century when it comes to firearms-related deaths.

US icebreaker dispatched to assist Chinese icebreaker in Antarctic

Filed under: Australia, China, Environment, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

AntarcticaThe Australian is reporting that the US Coast Guard’s Polar Star is enroute to assist the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long and the chartered Russian ship Akademik Shokalskiy:

The US Coast Guard’s Polar Star accepted a request from the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) to help the Russian ship Akademik Shokalskiy, which has been marooned since Christmas Eve.

It will also aid the Chinese icebreaker Xue Long, which was involved in a dramatic helicopter rescue of the Shokalskiy’s 52 passengers last Thursday before also becoming beset by ice.

AMSA confirmed the Polar Star, which was on its way from Seattle for an Antarctic mission, had diverted course and was on its way to help.

It will take about seven days for the icebreaker, with a crew of 140 people, to reach Commonwealth Bay after collecting supplies from Sydney today.

The AMSA spokeswoman said the Polar Star had greater capabilities than the Russian and Chinese vessels.

“It can break ice over six metres thick, while those vessels can break one-metre ice,” she told AAP on Sunday.

“The idea is to break them out, but they will make a decision once they arrive on scene on the best way to do this.” AMSA will be in regular contact with the US Coast Guard and the captain of the Polar Star during its journey to Antarctica.

Twenty-two crew remain on board the Shokalskiy, which sparked a rescue mission after a blizzard pushed sea ice around the ship and froze it in place on December 24.

A U.S. Coast Guard HH-52A Seaguard helicopter landing on the icebreaker USCGC Polar Star (WAGB-10).

A U.S. Coast Guard HH-52A Seaguard helicopter landing on the icebreaker USCGC Polar Star (WAGB-10).

January 5, 2014

In the dictionary, the word “narcissism” is defined as “baby boomer default mental state”

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:22

Okay, it isn’t really (but if you think it is, you’ve probably fallen for the “gullible isn’t in the dictionary” prank as well). In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout discovers that every defining event of the Baby Boom era always comes back to being about the Baby Boomers themselves:

Most “Monty Python” fans are, of course, baby boomers, who have long been a nostalgic lot and are growing more so as they totter toward old age. Witness their tiresomely obsessive fascination with the popular television series of their youth. Likewise their undimmed passion for the rock music of the 1960s and ’70s, which they still love so much that they’ll buy expensive tickets to see wrinkled old codgers play it onstage.

As always with the boomers, this nostalgia contains more than a touch of narcissism. The same narcissism was on display in many of the countless gushy boomer-penned reminiscences occasioned by the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. An indisputably major historical event, to be sure, but there was also something decidedly creepy about the self-centered tone of those suddenly-my-world-changed pieces, which was deftly skewered by this Onion headline: “Area Man Can Remember Exactly Where He Was, What He Was Doing When He Assassinated John F. Kennedy.” Like everything else in the boomers’ world, Kennedy’s death turned out in the end to have been all about them.

[…]

Not surprisingly, my parents’ generation did everything they could to make life easier for their own children. Was that good for us? I wonder. It certainly didn’t do us any good from a cultural point of view. I’m struck by how few boomers have embraced adult culture in middle age. My impression is that they’d much rather watch sitcoms than read novels, go to the opera or listen to jazz. In large part they’re a cohort of Peter Pans, determined not to grow up any more than they can help. Indeed, not a few of them seem to take a perverse kind of pride in their adolescent enthusiasms. I read the other day that a “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids” lunch box from 1973 now sells for $1,200 — and that the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History owns one. I’m not quite sure which of those facts makes me sadder.

If I live long enough, I’ll enjoy finding out how the millennials remember the world of their youth a quarter-century from now. Since they’re having a much harder time earning a living than did their baby-boom parents, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if their attitude ends up being much more like that of the wised-up kids of the Great Depression, especially as regards cultural matters. While I don’t know whether they’ll go in for late Beethoven by the time they reach their 50s, somehow I doubt that watching an ancient episode of “30 Rock” will cause them to recall with fondness the good old bad old days when they were living in crummy studio apartments — or their parents’ basements.

Polarized America, not

Filed under: Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:50

In Time, Nick Gillespie goes through the polling numbers and finds that despite frequent claims that the United States is more polarized than ever before, it’s certainly not over the issues you’d expect:

The apparently massive and unbridgeable gulfs between Republicans and Democrats, men and women, gays and straights, secularists and believers, rich and poor, and coastal elites and heartland Americans are belied by data that substantial and growing majorities of folks actually agree on a wide variety of important social and policy issues and attitudes.

Here’s a sampling:

  • Pot legalization. As Colorado and Washington state begin selling legal weed, fully 58 percent of Americans believe the drug should be legal. That’s up from just 12 percent in 1969, says Gallup.
  • Abortion. Few issues are as hotly contested and few issues have generated such consistent support, with 78 percent of us thinking abortion should be legal under either all or some circumstances, and just 20 percent thinking it should be illegal in all circumstances. Those numbers basically haven’t changed since 1975.
  • Homosexuality. In 2001, just 40 percent of Americans thought that that “gay or lesbian relations” were morally acceptable. Last year, 59 percent had no problem with them. And 53 percent now think same-sex marriage should be given equal status to conventional couplings. That’s up almost 20 points from the start of the century.
  • Health Insurance. As Obamacare cranks up, 56 percent believe that it is not “the responsibility of the federal goverment to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage.” That’s up from 28 percent in 2006. Only 42 percent — down from 69 percent in 2006 — think providing health insurance is the government’s responsibility.
  • Trust in Government. Just 19 percent of Americans “trust the government in Washington to do what’s right” all or most of the time. That’s down from 60 percent in 2002. Meanwhile, 81 percent of us don’t expect the government to do what’s right all or most of the time, up more than 40 points in the last decade. And a record-high 72 percent believe government “will be the biggest threat to the country in the future.” During the Obama presidency, 55 percent say that the government “is doing too much.”

Of course, all of these issues — and many others — contain nuances and contexts that need to be taken into account. And most issues show partisan differences too, with Republicans pulling in one direction, Democrats in another, and Independents (who are, at 44 percent, the single-largest bloc of voters by far) somewhere in between. But it’s striking that Americans seem to be becoming more socially liberal and fiscally conservative with every passing year. That just isn’t reflected in the platforms of the major parties, with the GOP only getting more conservative and the Democrats only more liberal.

Excerpt from Glenn Reynolds’ new book

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Education, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:19

The Wall Street Journal has an excerpt from The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education From Itself, the latest book by the Instapundit himself:

Though the GI Bill converted college from a privilege of the rich to a middle-class expectation, the higher education bubble really began in the 1970s, as colleges that had expanded to serve the baby boom saw the tide of students threatening to ebb. Congress came to the rescue with federally funded student aid, like Pell Grants and, in vastly greater dollar amounts, student loans.

Predictably enough, this financial assistance led colleges and universities to raise tuition and fees to absorb the resources now available to their students. As University of Michigan economics and finance professor Mark Perry has calculated, tuition for all universities, public and private, increased from 1978 to 2011 at an annual rate of 7.45%. By comparison, health-care costs increased by only 5.8%, and housing, notwithstanding the bubble, increased at 4.3%. Family incomes, on the other hand, barely kept up with the consumer-price index, which grew at an annual rate of 3.8%.

For many families, the gap between soaring tuition costs and stagnant incomes was filled by debt. Today’s average student debt of $29,400 may not sound overwhelming, but many students, especially at private and out-of-state colleges, end up owing much more, often more than $100,000. At the same time, four in 10 college graduates, according to a recent Gallup study, wind up in jobs that don’t require a college degree.

Students and parents have started to reject this unsustainable arrangement, and colleges and universities have felt the impact. According to a recent analysis by this newspaper, private schools are facing a long-term decline in enrollment. More than a quarter of private institutions have suffered a drop of 10% or more — in some cases, much more. Midway College in Kentucky is laying off around a dozen of its 54 faculty members; Wittenberg University in Ohio is eliminating nearly 30 of about 140 full-time faculty slots; and Pine Manor College in Massachusetts, with dorm space for 600 students but only 300 enrolled, has gone coed in hopes of bringing in more warm bodies.

Even elite institutions haven’t been spared, as schools such as Haverford, Morehouse, Oberlin and Wellesley have seen their credit ratings downgraded by Moody’s over doubts about the viability of their high tuition/high overhead business models. Law schools, including Albany Law School, Brooklyn Law School and Thomas Jefferson Law School, have also seen credit downgrades over similar doubts. And now Democrats on Capitol Hill are pushing legislation to give colleges “skin in the game” by clawing back federal aid money from schools with high student-loan default rates. Expect such proposals to get traction in 2014.

January 4, 2014

Colorado – pot capital of North America

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

In yesterday’s Goldberg File email “news”letter, Jonah Goldberg talks about the legalized marijuana situation in Colorado:

I should say I’ve long favored the gradual decriminalization and eventual legalization of pot (but not narcotics). My reasons never stemmed from a burning desire to see ganja legalized. I simply recognized that pot is different from hard drugs and lumping them all together created real political problems and real injustices. I wanted it to be gradual for Burkean reasons. Give the culture time to adapt and to create healthy stigmas against being high all the time.

Things are moving a bit too fast for my tastes, but the way it’s happening is still better than many of the alternatives. The worst way to do it would be top-down, from D.C. Colorado (and Washington State) will be test cases. We’ll see how it works out.

I should also say I pretty much agree with David Brooks’s column today. Pot smoking is something to grow out of early, or never start. Yes, I know there are exceptions, but as a general rule I’m convinced pot-smoking — particularly routine pot-smoking — creates potheads, by which I mean fuzzy-minded and slothful people (or people who are more fuzzy-minded and slothful than they would otherwise be). If you are one of the high-functioning exceptions, or if you are a pothead and don’t realize that you are not one of the high-functioning exceptions, I’m sorry if this hurts your feelings.

[…]

A friend pointed out an irony in all of this. Right now, inequality is supposed to be the great bane of our nation. According to liberals like Barack Obama and Bill de Blasio, inequality is a function of systemic problems in the U.S. The have-nots have naught because of the deficiencies of our economic and political system. The victims deserve none of the blame. While that’s obviously true for some people, it’s also obviously untrue for others. For instance, heroin junkies rarely leave the bottom quintile. That’s not because John Locke and Adam Smith duped the Founding Fathers. More important, culture matters more than pure economic arrangements. For instance, as Charles Murray has demonstrated for decades, family structure has an enormous role in economic disparities. Today the data is pretty much in that family structure is a better predictor of economic mobility than inequality. That goes for this tragic symbol of income inequality, too.

It seems obvious to me that in a country where pot is cheap and ubiquitous, kids raised in messed-up families will be more likely to smoke pot — and more of it. Doing so may give temporary respite from the anxieties of a dysfunctional family, but it won’t better prepare them for a successful life. “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure,” Orwell writes, “and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.” Similarly, a teen may take to weed because he feels himself a loser and then become all the more of a loser because he smokes weed.

The irony is that liberals who think inequality is so terrible are cheering a reform that will in all likelihood exacerbate inequality. At least the libertarians celebrating the news from Colorado are consistent. They don’t care about income inequality. They argue legalization will increase liberty and happiness. They are right on the liberty part. The jury is out on the happiness part.

Update: Apparently one of David Brooks’ old toking buddies had a response to the column that Jonah linked to. It’s … well worth reading.

The other part he didn’t tell was about how we got high at lunch. This was back when you could smoke at school. Cigarettes, I mean, but naturally that wasn’t all we smoked. Smokers had to go to an area set up outside the cafeteria, hemmed in by the other wings of the building, sort of like a cell block. Architects must have been stoned or something, or maybe that was back when we didn’t care so much about smoking, but anyway they put the air intake for the second floor in a corner of the cell block. So we were smoking this joint of Jamaican over in that corner and Dave got the bright idea to blow the smoke into the register. “That’ll make everyone up there one of us!” he said. And sure enough when we went up to class the whole floor stank and the vice-principal was hustling up and down the hallway, wrinkling his nose like a bloodhound trying to figure out where the smell was coming from, and then he went into the boys’ room and dragged out one of the only two black boys at Radnor High, yelling at him for smoking pot in school.

I remember the guilty look on Dave’s face when he saw Mr. Santangelo with the kid by the collar. Later on, he told me that he was tempted to confess, but he also happened to know that that boy did smoke pot, that he was a full-on stoner, so if he got in a little trouble, it might be good for him. When I read today that Dave thinks that “not smoking, or only smoking sporadically gave you a better shot at becoming a little more integrated and interesting,” while “smoking all the time seemed likely to cumulatively fragment a person’s deep center,” I thought about that boy and wondered if getting kicked out of school had helped him hold together his deep center, and if his going to juvy was the kind of subtle discouragement that Dave thinks governments should engage in when it comes to the “lesser pleasures.” I suppose he thought he was doing the kid a favor by letting him take the rap.

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