Quotulatiousness

November 23, 2010

Wendy McElroy: This rumour has “legs but no body”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:19

After reading one of the several stories about the TSA considering (or already having) an exemption from the invasive “pat-down” for Muslim women, Wendy McElroy tried to find the truth of the matter:

“Sexual assault” and “child molestation” are just some of the accusations leveled at the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) revealing scanners and full-body pat-down procedures, which were introduced on November 1.

At long, long last, the public is saying no to the savaging of personal liberty.

But a bizarre attack from a different direction should cause concern for at least two reasons. First, the particular accusation against the TSA is almost certainly incorrect and could dilute the credibility of other criticisms. Second, the attack seems rooted in anti-Muslim fears and feeds back into them.

The rumor: The Department of Homeland Security may exempt Orthodox Muslim women from the sexually invasive scanners and physical exams that others must undergo as a prerequisite of air travel.

On what evidence is the rumor based?

November 22, 2010

David Nolan, co-founder of the US Libertarian Party

Filed under: History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:33

Dave Weigel has an appreciation of the late David Nolan:

The 66-year-old libertarian activist David Nolan died on Saturday; he had a stroke while driving, then crashed his car.

Some of the vital history of anti-statist politics dies with him. In the 1960s, Nolan was a YAF and Students for Goldwater activist. 1971, Nolan was watching Richard Nixon on TV with some like-minded friends when the president announced that he’d be introducing wage controls and price controls. The Libertarian Party was born in his living room; its first national convention was held months later, in Nolan’s Denver. He built it, according to Brian Doherty’s essential history Radicals for Capitalism, by tapping a list of disgruntled libertarian-minded YAFers for funds, and then relentlessly promoting the party with cast-aside libertarians around the country.

[. . .]

It’s unusually difficult to say what Nolan’s legacy will be. He leaves behind a small “l” libertarian movement that is more powerful, with greater control over the levers of the GOP and more footing in popular culture, than at any time in living memory. (Witness the current, libertarian-driven backlash against the TSA if you want proof.) He also leaves behind a Libertarian Party that, like almost every third party in American history, struggles for relevance and has its best ideas co-opted by major party politicians who go on to disappoint their supporters. But if the measure of an activist’s success is bringing attention to his ideas, and bringing them from the fringe of respectability to the center, David Nolan was a success. After all, in 1971, the “crazy” guy was the one who thought price controls were a bad idea.

US Army suddenly discovers that women are shaped differently

Filed under: Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:07

It’s things like this that reinforce the impression that the military still hasn’t grown used to the fact that women are serving in combat zones:

Over the past seven years, the U.S. Army has responded to complaints from the troops about the combat uniform (ACU, or ACUPAT, for Army Combat Uniform camouflage pattern). But now the army is fixing a set of problems that have long been ignored; how the ACU fits women. Up to fifteen percent of the troops in combat zones are women, and the new uniform recognizes this. The older ACU just assumed female troops were one of the guys, which they are not. Women have a different shape, and that is very true when it comes to ACUs, and their placement of the waistline, many pockets and pouches for things like knee pads. What worked for the male body, did not work for female troops. Everything was just a little bit (or a lot) off, making the ACU much less comfortable for women doing the same jobs as the guys. So the army simply designed an ACU version based on the shape of the female body. The first prototypes were given to women to try out, and after a few hours, all the female troops asked where they could buy some more of them. Unfortunately, the female ACU won’t be available for another two years. Lots of additional tests have to be performed to make sure all the details are correctly incorporated.

Perhaps the physical variation among “average” women is relatively greater than that among “average” men, but it’s still surprising that the US Army is only now taking that into account.

November 21, 2010

Iowahawk: Comply with me

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:17

Airline execs will hate to see these results translated into dollars

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:47

Reuters has a poll up with current numbers that will send a chill down the spine of airline executives:

Yes, yes . . . self-selected poll . . . non-scientific . . . etc, etc. Even so, it might be a good time to review your stock portfolio in case you’re over-exposed to airline share prices.

November 15, 2010

Iowahawk provides some suggested new slogans for the TSA

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:12


If you aren’t following Iowahawk on Twitter, you’re missing a lot of funny stuff.

Art Carden calls for the abolition of the TSA

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:27

Has the TSA finally gone too far? Art Carden certainly thinks so:

Full Frontal Nudity Doesn’t Make Us Safer: Abolish the TSA

The Republicans control the House of Representatives and are bracing for a long battle over the President’s health care proposal. In the spirit of bipartisanship and sanity, I propose that the first thing on the chopping block should be an ineffective organization that wastes money, violates our rights, and encourages us to make decisions that imperil our safety. I’m talking about the Transportation Security Administration.

Bipartisan support should be immediate. For fiscal conservatives, it’s hard to come up with a more wasteful agency than the TSA. For privacy advocates, eliminating an organization that requires you to choose between a nude body scan or genital groping in order to board a plane should be a no-brainer.

But won’t that compromise safety? I doubt it. The airlines have enormous sums of money riding on passenger safety, and the notion that a government bureaucracy has better incentives to provide safe travels than airlines with billions of dollars worth of capital and goodwill on the line strains credibility.

Russian “sleeper” agents apparently betrayed by “middle management”

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

If you remember the foofaraw about the ten Russian sleeper agents who were in the news earlier this year, Strategy Page says they were actually unmasked long before it became public knowledge:

According to Russian officials, the ten Russian spies arrested in the United States last June were betrayed by a Russian espionage official (identified only as “colonel Shcherbakov”) in the SVR (Russian CIA). The U.S. claimed they had been watching the ten sleepers for several years, which may indicate that Shcherbakov has revealed a lot more if he was on the American payroll all that time. Shcherbakov was in charge of the SVR sleeper cell operation. The Russians use military ranks in the police and intelligence services, and colonels are middle-management. There is political pressure to on the head of SVR to resign, indicating that the damage was greater than anyone wants to admit.

Last July, after Shcherbakov was safely in the U.S., American and Russian officials conducted a spy swap in Vienna, Austria. This was the largest such swap since the Cold War. Russia pardoned and freed four Russians, including two former intel officers who had revealed the identities of numerous Russian agents in the West. These two are believed to have more information and insights of value. The U.S. released the ten Russians who had, for the last decade, been trying to pass themselves off as Americans, and operate as “illegals” (spies without diplomatic cover and protection). As part of the deal, the ten Russians had to admit their guilt. The FBI said that they caught on to this bunch early on, and have been watching them for years, trying to obtain more information on how Russian espionage operate in the United States. The FBI finally arrested these ten when it became apparent that the Russians had detected that they were being watched. Or because colonel Shcherbakov believed his SVR bosses were on to him, or because the colonel believed it was time to retire to that secret condo in the United States. Russian government officials are indicating that SVR assassins have been sent to kill Shcherbakov.

Some have speculated that these agents were actually just a cover for “real” sleeper agents who were doing actual espionage work — it’s as viable an explanation as the SVR deliberately placing ineffective agents.

November 14, 2010

QotD: The lost election

Filed under: Government, Humour, Politics, Quotations, USA — Nicholas @ 11:19

I think we lost the election on November 2. Every race was won by a politician. True, we elected some angry nuts. These are preferable to common politicians. Their anger provokes honesty, and their mental illness prevents honesty from being obscured by charm. [. . .] We also elected some amateur politicians. However, politics is like vivisection — disturbing as a career, alarming as a hobby. And we may have elected a few reluctant politicians. But not reluctant enough.

We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren’t there.

In a free country government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference. The teacher is a pompous twit. Our child is a lazy pain in the ass. We undertake this social obligation with weary reluctance. And we only do it at all because the teacher (political authority) deserves cold stares, hard questions, and maybe firing, and the pupil (that portion of society which, alas, needs governing) deserves to be grounded without TV and have its Internet access screened and its allowance docked.

America’s elected and appointed officials ought to be longing to return to their personal lives and private interests. They should feel burdened by their powers, irked with their responsibilities, and embarrassed at their prominence in the public eye. When they say they want to spend more time with their families, they should mean it.

P.J. O’Rourke, “I Think We Lost the Election: How about politics without politicians?”, Weekly Standard, 2010-11-13

November 11, 2010

More on gerrymandering

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:41

Zombie explains the weird and distorted results of gerrymandering:

Not every state redraws its district lines according to gerrymandering principles. Some have independent supposedly bipartisan commissions to do the job. But most states, alas, leave it up to power-hungry politicians. Republican, Democratic, it doesn’t matter: given half a chance they will gerrymander the hell out of their constituents. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about it, because the system is self-perpetuating: the politicians we elect through these gerrymandered districts (and that includes state-level gerrymandered districts) are the ones making the rules, and they’re not likely to give up their grip on the controls.

Adding to the craziness: There are federal rules in place to ensure that ethnic minorities don’t get completely disenfranchised by racial gerrymandering, so states often have to also incorporate race into the mix, going to extreme lengths to create districts populated mostly by this-or-that racial group — federally mandated “packing.”

What makes things complicated is that not every state is consistently under the control of the same party census after census. So while the Republicans in a given state may have gerrymandered the district boundaries after the 1980 census, the Democrats may have had a majority after the 1990 census and counter-gerrymandered the existing districts; in 2000 a divided legislature may have argued over and re-re-counter-gerrymandered those districts, and so on. The end result is often what we see today: ludicrous, labyrinthine district boundaries that are the detritus of decades of back-and-forth gerrymandering attempts.

Although this is a generally informative article, a bit of careful juxtapositioning is required:

End of the article: “Is this the end of real democracy?”

Start of the article: “Gerrymandering is not a new phenomenon. It’s been around since the very beginnings of our nation, so long that one could fairly say that the United States has been built on the principle of gerrymandering. The very first congressional districts were somewhat gerrymandered, and it’s been downhill ever since. The phenomenon was finally noticed and properly named in 1812“

November 9, 2010

The real disconnect between Obama and the economy

Filed under: Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:08

Victor Davis Hanson points out the way in which Barack Obama’s worldview does not reflect economic reality:

[. . .] what troubles me is that the president seems unaware of this old divide — that what allowed the pre-presidential Obamas, respectively, to make quite a lot of money as a legislator, author, professor, lawyer, or hospital representative was a vibrant private sector that paid taxes on profits that fueled public spending and employment or made possible an affluent literary and legal world. All that was contingent upon the assurance that an individual would have a good chance of making a profit and keeping it in exchange for incurring the risk of hiring employees and buying new equipment.

Instead, Obama seems to think that making money is a casual enterprise, not nearly so difficult as community organizing, and without the intellectual rigor of academia — as if profits leap out of the head of Zeus. I say that not casually or slanderously, but based on the profile of his cabinet appointments, his and his wife’s various speeches relating Barack Obama’s own decision to shun the supposed easy money of corporate America for more noble community service in Chicago, and a series of troubling ad hoc, off-the-cuff revealing statements like the following:

As a state legislator Barack Obama lamented the civil rights movement’s reliance on the court system to ensure equality-of-result social justice rather than working through legislatures, which were the “actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.” To Joe Wurzelbacher, he breezily scoffed that “my attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” When Charlie Gibson pressed presidential candidate Obama on his desire to hike capital gains taxes when historically such policies have decreased aggregate federal revenue, a startled Obama insisted that the punitive notion, not the money, was the real issue: “Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.” And as President Obama, again in an off-handed matter, he suggested that the state might have an interest on what individuals make: “I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

In other words, for most of his life Barack Obama has done quite well without understanding how and why American capital is created, and has enjoyed the lifestyle of the elite in the concrete as much as in the abstract he has questioned its foundations.

November 8, 2010

We’d love to talk about this First Amendment case, but we’re not allowed to

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:08

I sometimes wonder if there was ever any point in the US founding fathers putting that pesky Bill of Rights in place, when it’s so easy for those rights to be circumvented:

Liptak, who has seen part of the secret 10th Circuit order that keeps the amicus brief sealed, says one reason the appeals court gave for its decision is that allowing distribution of the brief would help I.J. and Reason publicly make their case that Reynolds is being persecuted for exercising her First Amendment rights. One of their goals, the Court said, “is clearly to discuss in public amici’s agenda.” Obviously, we can’t have that.

It bears emphasizing that the I.J./Reason brief is based entirely on publicly available information. It does not divulge any confidential grand jury information, protection of which is the rationale for sealing the documents related to Reynolds’ case. The only purpose served by sealing it is to make talking about the case harder.

Discouraging public dissent, of course, is how this case got started. Tanya Treadway, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Stephen and Linda Schneider, was so irked by Reynolds’ public defenses of the couple that she unsuccessfully sought a gag order telling Reynolds to shut up. Later Treadway initiated a grand jury investigation that resulted in subpoenas demanding documents related to Reynolds’ activism as head if the Pain Relief Network (PRN), including a Wichita billboard defending the Schneiders and a PRN documentary about the conflict between drug control and pain control. Those subpoenas, supposedly aimed at finding evidence of obstruction of justice, are the subject of Reynolds’ First Amendment challenge.

First there were those secret laws in the wake of 9/11, now you’ve got courts ordering information on First Amendment cases to be kept from the public. One fears to ask “what’s next” for fear that they’ll already have an authoritarian answer teed up and ready to go.

Credit where it’s due

Filed under: Economics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:22

When I posted an article last week about the people in the bubble, I linked to and credited Margaret Wente as the original author. I didn’t realize she was basing her column to a large extent on an article by Charles Murray in the Washington Post from about a week earlier than that. She mentioned his “recent column”, but that didn’t really illustrate how much of her article was built on his.

As you can tell, Wente used Murray’s model and wrote a Canadianized version of the same story:

When they leave college, the New Elite remain in the bubble. Harvard seniors surveyed in 2007 were headed toward a small number of elite graduate schools (Harvard and Cambridge in the lead) and a small number of elite professional fields (finance and consulting were tied for top choice). Jobs in businesses that provide bread-and-butter goods and services to individual Americans, which make up the overwhelming majority of entry-level openings for aspiring managers, attracted just 1.7 percent of the Harvard students who went to work right after graduation.

When the New Elite get around to marrying, they don’t marry just anybody. One of the funniest and most bitingly accurate parts of “Bobos in Paradise” was Brooks’s analysis of the New York Times‘s wedding announcements. Go back to 1960, and the page was filled with brides and grooms who grew up wealthy but whose educations and occupations did not offer much indication that they were going to set the world on fire. Look at the page today, and it is studded with the mergers of fabulous résumés.

Three examples lifted from last Sunday’s Times: a director of marketing at a biotech company (Stanford undergrad, Harvard MBA) married a consultant to the aerospace industry (Stanford undergrad, Harvard MPP); a vice president at Goldman Sachs (Yale) married a director of retail development for a financial software firm (Hofstra); and a third-year resident in cardiology (Yale undergrad) married a third-year resident in pathology (Columbia undergrad, summa cum laude).

The New Elite marry each other, combining their large incomes and genius genes, and then produce offspring who get the benefit of both.

[. . .]

We know, for one thing, that the New Elite clusters in a comparatively small number of cities and in selected neighborhoods in those cities. This concentration isn’t limited to the elite neighborhoods of Washington, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and San Francisco. It extends to university cities with ancillary high-tech jobs, such as Austin and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle.

With geographical clustering goes cultural clustering. Get into a conversation about television with members of the New Elite, and they can probably talk about a few trendy shows — “Mad Men” now, “The Sopranos” a few years ago. But they haven’t any idea who replaced Bob Barker on “The Price Is Right.” They know who Oprah is, but they’ve never watched one of her shows from beginning to end.

Talk to them about sports, and you may get an animated discussion of yoga, pilates, skiing or mountain biking, but they are unlikely to know who Jimmie Johnson is (the really famous Jimmie Johnson, not the former Dallas Cowboys coach), and the acronym MMA means nothing to them.

Charles Murray wrote the at-the-time highly controversial The Bell Curve with Richard J. Herrnstein, so his insight into social and demographic changes deserve attention.

H/T to Terry Teachout, who uncharacteristically mistakes Murray’s description of a general case and tries to prove that he himself doesn’t fit that mould.

November 7, 2010

Gerrymandering

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:15

November 6, 2010

The geeks are not the “elite”

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:27

Virginia Postrel looks at TV and what it reveals about popular culture:

American culture is experiencing one of those periodic waves of anti-elitism that have roiled and defined the country ever since Andrew Jackson’s day. Intellectuals, symbol manipulators, universities and people who think they’re so damned smart are out. Regular folks are in.

Yet “The Big Bang Theory,” the CBS sitcom featuring Sheldon and his three almost-as-elite geeky friends, is among the most popular shows on TV. Kicking off the network’s now-dominant Thursday-night lineup, it attracts about 15 million viewers a week. Now in its fourth season, it’s the top-rated Thursday-night program among adults 18 to 49 years old and those 25 to 54.

[. . .]

Something more is going on. Surveying the fall TV lineup for Harvard Business Review’s blog, the anthropologist and marketing consultant Grant McCracken suggests a trend behind the show’s success. “Our heroes used to be the people who stole lunch money,” he observes. “Increasingly, they are the people from whom it was stolen. This has got to have something to do with the rise of Silicon Valley and people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.”

[. . .]

As anyone who has been abroad knows, American culture exists. But rather than a monolith, it’s best understood as a set of overlapping subcultures. Assume yours is the norm, the “real,” or the best expression of true Americanness and you miss a lot of important aspects of the culture as a whole, making it much less interesting and devaluing a lot of other people’s lives.

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