Author: VD

Anti-republican Republicans

Keep this Kentucky Senate in mind the next time the Republican Party asks you for money to stop the growth of government. Because they don’t mean it. Not even a little. And they never have:

The prospect of a Paul victory scares some Republicans. Former Vice President Dick Cheney endorsed Mr. Grayson last month after conservatives in Washington circulated an e-mail message about what they called Dr. Paul’s “troubling” views on national security. Mr. Grayson’s supporters note that Dr. Paul once argued for closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay and that he said detainees who cannot be convicted should be sent back to Afghanistan….

Mr. Grayson argues that some of Dr. Paul’s ideas (getting rid of the Departments of Energy, Education and Commerce) are too “weird” for Kentucky. And in increasingly sharp ads, he argues that Dr. Paul is downright dangerous when it comes to foreign policy. “Here’s a guy who is outside of the Republican mainstream,” Mr. Grayson said in an interview here.

Given the disaster that mainstream Republicans proved themselves to be from 2000 to 2006, to say nothing of the Banking Bailout of 2008 that was orchestrated by mainstream Republicans, one would logically conclude that being outside of the Republican mainstream is exactly what is required for both Kentucky and the nation. And needless to say, “troubling views” means nothing more than a refusal to endorse the Imperial America approach to foreign policy.

There is nothing conservative about Imperial America or its self-styled conservative advocates. Nor is it possible to support the Iraqi and Afghanistan occupations while simultaneously claiming to support small and limited government.

Technofascism part III

You can’t say I didn’t warn you about Apple’s ideological evil. Adobe’s Flash Blogger goes off:

By now you have surely heard about the new iPhone 4.0 SDK language that appears to make creating applications in any non-Apple-approved languages a violation of terms. Obviously Adobe is looking into this wording carefully so I will not comment any further until there is an official conclusion.

[Sentence regarding Apple’s intentions redacted at request from Adobe]. This has nothing to do whatsoever with bringing the Flash player to Apple’s devices. That is a separate discussion entirely. What they are saying is that they won’t allow applications onto their marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create them. This is a frightening move that has no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control over developers and more importantly, wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe….

Speaking purely for myself, I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment. Go screw yourself Apple.

Now, I disdain Apple products anyhow, since I despise their attempt to exert control over the way their users are permitted to use their hardware. I don’t develop for them except as an afterthought since it’s neither my business nor my concern what hardware and software any of our users happen to use; that’s why we will soon have hundreds of custom modes available for download that are designed specifically for whatever bizarre purpose our users have in mind. But if I was an Apple software developer, I would have to be very inexperienced indeed not to see the writing on the wall. Apple is now a console system, not a PC, so it won’t be long before they are imitating Nintendo and charging the developer a larger share per unit for the right to sell something developed for their platform than the developer makes himself.

NB: Before you leap to the wrong conclusion, I am most certainly NOT a fan of Flash. I think it is a very effective way to ruin the utility of a useful website and have it turned off in Firefox by default. But that doesn’t excuse Apple’s actions here.

Poland’s president dead

It’s strange, isn’t it, how one nationalist-inclined European leader after another has met with fatal accidents. First Haider, now Kaczynski:

Polish president Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria have been killed after their plane crashed on approach to Smolensk airport in western Russia.

Needless to say, David Cameron has absolutely nothing to worry about.

The limits of written law

It doesn’t matter how perfectly you attempt to tie it down, government will always find a means of expanding its power:

Minnesota’s Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, says the new federal health care law is unconstitutional. DFL Attorney General Lori Swanson says it’s not.

If the legal question gets to the U.S. Supreme Court, it may be decided with the help of a long-gone small-time Ohio farmer who once was fined $117 for growing too much wheat.

A key question about the health care bill involves just how far the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce reaches. For nearly 70 years, one influential precedent on that issue has been the peculiar case of farmer Roscoe Filburn, whose crop was deemed to influence commerce “among the several states” — the kind of commerce the Constitution permits Congress to regulate — even though none of the excess wheat left his farm.

The dangers of journalistic knowledge

To me, the amusing thing about this eye-opening experience is that it is apparently the first time this journalist has ever experienced the phenomenon. To those who actually possess more than a modicum of knowledge about anything, it is distinctly clear on nearly every page of every newspaper every single day:

Unlike most of the journalists covering the event, I was not an expert on that particular industry. It wasn’t my normal “beat.” The reason I was there was because I’d been interviewing the company’s CEO over the previous several months for a book project. But that also meant that while I wasn’t an expert about the industry in general, I was in the odd position of knowing more about the company’s “secret” product than any other journalist in the room.

It was an eye-opening experience. A lot of major news outlets and publications were represented at the press conference following the announcement. A few very general facts about the product had been released, but the reporters had only been introduced to details about it a half hour earlier. There was still a lot about how it worked, how it differed from other emerging products, and why the company felt so confident about its evolution and economic viability, that remained to be clarified.

But the reporters’ questions weren’t geared toward getting a better understanding of those points. They were narrowly focused on one or two aspects of the story. And from the questions that were being asked, I realized–because I had so much more information on the subject–that the reporters were missing a couple of really important pieces of understanding about the product and its use. And as the event progressed, I also realized that the questions that might have uncovered those pieces weren’t being asked because the reporters already had a story angle in their heads and were focused only on getting the necessary data points to flesh out and back up what they already thought was the story.

Almost every single time a major media outlet has done a story on me, someone related to me, or something related to me, there has been at least one factual error. Sometimes it is a big one, usually it is something pretty trivial, but it’s always there. Naturally, this renders me somewhat skeptical about the factual reliability of all the other stories I read in the media. Think about the last time a travel magazine or the New York Times wrote an article about a place you know well. Did they nail it or did they write about a few well-known places that are known to every tourist and no local actually goes?

On the Austrian analysis

In which SM asks me to respond to a post by Financial Times writer Martin Wolf:

I think we can say that conventional neo-classical equilibrium economics did a poor job in predicting the crisis and in suggesting what should be done in response. We can also say that neo-Keynesians pointed out some important precursors of the crisis, in particular, the destabilising role of huge private sector financial deficits in countries with large external deficits, such as the US, and the Keynesian view certainly played a big part in the post-crisis response, as did that of Milton Friedman.

Yet some would argue that economists working in the Austrian tradition were more nearly right than anybody else. In particular, they have argued that: inflation-targeting is inherently destabilising; that fractional reserve banking creates unmanageable credit booms; and that the resulting global “malinvestment” explains the subsequent financial crash. I have sympathy with this point of view. But Austrians also say – as their predecessors said in the 1930s – that the right response is to let everything rotten be liquidated, while continuing to balance the budget as the economy implodes. I find this unconvincing. Mass bankruptcy is extremely costly. Moreover, it is impossible to separate what is healthy from what is unhealthy during a general economic collapse triggered by an implosion of the financial system.

Anyway, what do readers think of the Austrian analysis? In particular, what does it imply about the future of the global monetary and global financial systems and about the right way to respond to financial crises when they occur?

1. Yes, Austrian economics does understand financial crises better than other schools of thought, even if one includes Hyman Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis as a distinct economic school. The Austrian analysis is broadly correct because it a) provides a means of understanding one of the core components of modern economics that no other major economic school provides. None of the Neo-Classical, Marxian, Neo-Keynesian, or Monetarist theories of economics consider debt to be a primary aspect of economics and therefore their policy interpretations and prescriptions are all largely irrelevant with regards to modern economies with debt-based financial systems. Austrian school theory is also more robust and comprehensive, in my opinion, than the new empirical Post-Keynesianism which also attempts to account for debt and therefore is also vastly superior to the four major schools.

2. As I predicted both in 2002 and in my 2009 book, The Return of the Great Depression there is no future for the present global monetary and financial systems. The giant international banks are insolvent and the monetary systems are doomed to collapse. This means that in the interest of avoiding this collapse, the monetary systems will be unified, first on a regional and then eventually on a global basis when the regional moneys begin to break down. The correct response would be to let all of the “full faith and credit” moneys fail and be replaced by the gold standard or some other monetary standard less subject to the bank-driven inflate-and-collapse cycle that has been witnessed five times in the United States alone, but that is not going to happen at this point in time.

3. The right way to respond to financial crises is to let them play out. When a building is burning, it doesn’t matter how much damage is being inflicted by the fire, it is never the correct response to attempt extinguishing it by pouring something inflammable on it. Mass bankruptcy is certainly costly, but the only relevant point is that it is much less costly than the greater number of bankruptcies that will eventually follow combined with the immense costs of the futile atttempts to stave it off that will do little more than delay it for a time.

Moreover, it is ALWAYS impossible for a central authority to separate what is healthy from what is unhealthy, during a general economic collapse triggered by an implosion of the financial system or at any other time. Central economic planning does not work any more effectively or efficiently with regards to money and credit than it does with regards to goods and services.

Hope, Change, and Murdering American Citizens

I don’t think this is what the Obamatrons had in mind. And I’m not sure which is more appalling. The news that Barack Obama has just decided to start killing American citizens without granting them the benefit of an arrest, a trial, or a conviction, or the fact that writers at National Review are actually supporting his dictate:

The Obama administration has authorized operations to capture or kill a U.S.-born Muslim cleric based in Yemen, who is described by a key lawmaker as Americas’s top terrorist threat, officials said on Tuesday. The decision to add Anwar al-Awlaki, of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, to the target list followed a National Security Council review prompted by his status as a U.S. citizen.

Officials said Awlaki directly threatened the United States. “Awlaki is a proven threat,” said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “He’s being targeted.”

Rep. Jane Harman, chairwoman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, described Awlaki as “probably the person, the terrorist, who would be terrorist No. 1 in terms of threat against us. He is very much in the sights of the Yemenis, with us helping them,” said Harman, who recently visited Yemen to meet with U.S. and Yemeni officials. She told Reuters that Awlaki’s U.S. citizenship made going after him “certainly complicated.”

To his credit, Kevin D. Williamson is among the sane “conservatives” left at NRO:

I hate to play the squish, but am I the only one who is just a little bit queasy over the fact that the president of the United States is authorizing the assassination of American citizens? Andy writes that this is “obviously the right call.” I might be persuaded that this is, in fact, the right call. But obviously? No hesitation there? It seems to me that the fact of U.S. citizenship ought to be a bright line on the political map.

Surely there has to be some operational constraint on the executive when it comes to the killing of U.S. citizens. It is not impossible to imagine a president who, for instance, sincerely believes that Andy McCarthy is undermining the Justice Department’s ability to prosecute the war on terror on the legal front. A government that can kill its citizens can shut them up, no? I ask this not as a legal question, but as a moral and political question: How is it that a government that can assassinate Citizen Awlaki is unable to censor Citizen McCarthy, or drop him in an oubliette? Practically every journalist of any consequence in Washington has illegally handled a piece of classified information. Can the president have them assassinated in the name of national security? Under the Awlaki standard, why not?

Odious as Awlaki is, this seems to me to be setting an awful and reckless precedent. Consider how “interstate commerce” has been redefined over time to cover that which is neither interstate nor commerce, for the sake of political expediency. It is easy to imagine “national security” being treated the same way, particularly in an open-ended conflict against a loosely defined enemy.

No, this is not the right call. This is madness. And it is another step in the descent to open and unmitigated evil. There is no other way to describe it. The sickening thing is that without the ludicrous decision to grant citizenship to so many third worlders possessing zero loyalty to the nation, there would be no excuse for legally painting federal crosshairs on each and every U.S. citizen. This isn’t merely a direct assault on the Constitution, it is far more impeachment-worthy than anything Bill Clinton ever did.

If Citizen Awlaki is deemed worthy of government assassination today, you can be assured that other American citizens will deemed “a proven threat” in the future.

Supercritical

The Market Ticker notices that German banks are threatening the liquidity of the global financial markets as a result of the Greek situation:

The curve blowout this morning in Greek debt has been cataclysmic; of course CNBS is only mentioning it in passing, and so far the European market isn’t reacting “too badly.”

We’ll see about that – how much of their debt is now sitting on bank balance sheets with a mark-to-market loss of how many billions due to the coupon shift upward? Oh no, we better not talk about the black hole opening up on bank balance sheets (again)….. that might be a problem eh?

Just remember that right up until Lehman blew up the market, while it had its ups and downs, didn’t react “too badly” either.

42% worthless assets. Keep that number in mind. It’s going to blow up sooner or later; the market can’t be pumped far enough or fast enough to refloat those underwater properties.

Human evolution observed in the wild

After only 150 years, Man finally witnesses evolution from one distinct species into another:

A dragon-sized, fruit-eating lizard that lives in the trees on the northern Philippines island of Luzon has been confirmed as a new species, scientists reported on Tuesday. Hunted for its tasty flesh, the brightly colored forest monitor lizard can grow to more than six feet in length but weighs only about 22 pounds (10 kg), said Rafe Brown of the University of Kansas, whose team confirmed the find.

“It lives up in trees, so it can’t get as massive as the Komodo dragon, a huge thing that eats large amounts of fresh meat,” Brown said by telephone. “This thing is a fruit-eater and it’s only the third fruit-eating lizard in the world.”

I think it’s remarkable proof of the power of natural selection. And to think that it only takes three generations for homo sapiens to evolve into draco arboris! No doubt the families of those missing Japanese soldiers will not only be relieved to know the ultimate fate of their loved ones, but proud to know that both the Sakurakai and Shintaro Ishihara were right and the Japanese are, in fact, the most highly evolved form of Man on the planet.

Of course, we had better wipe these dragons out at once before the pressure placed upon them by quasi-cannibalistic Philippinos causes them to evolve the ability to breathe fire. And in other evolution news, the Missing Link was found again. What are the odds that it lasts longer than last year’s extraordinary fossil find, Ida?