Coyote Blog

Many of the very same folks who are vocal critics of the war in Iraq have "Save Darfur" banners on their web site.  I followed one, and clicked around a lot to find out what the hell they thought should be done.  They have some woman on the home page "running for Darfur" but I am not sure that is much of a practical solution.  I see they also want to send in the UN peacekeepers, but they seem to imply the problem is that the government needs to go, and I have never known UN peacekeepers to overthrow any governments (or to do anything really, other than maybe participate in some of the looting themselves).  And I can't believe that any adult really thinks sending aid money to this area with a rapacious government is going to help one bit.

Isn't the only real solution to send in troops, overthrow the old boss, and hang around for a decade or so until the new boss is stable?  And how is that any different than Iraq.

Seriously, I thought opposition to Iraq was about not engaging in wars we don't have to for mainly humanitarian reasons.  I am very sympathetic to this position, but it means that you are just going to have to watch and weep when the inevitable Darfurs come along.  But all this Darfur stuff is making me think that the opposition to Iraq is more about wars started by our guy vs. wars started by your guy.  I think it is perfectly valid to have a discussion about whether we want to try to take on by military force every bad government in the world (see: Cleaning the Augean Stables).  Unfortunately, I think the discussion is instead devolving into whether we should use our army to attack governments George Bush doesn't like vs. those Bono doesn't like.

$400,000

Amount the University of Michigan paid Appalachian State to come up and kick its ass.

Postscript:  I remember a while ago there was a item on eBay where you could pay a guy to come to your house and kick your ass.  The whole marketing pitch was hilarious, but I remember the final price was a lot less than $400,000.  Update:  Found the eBay item archived here.

Apparently leading technocrat and Mussolini-style-economic-dictator Robert Reich is at it again, arguing the path to freedom requires more government coercion.  Ronald Bailey reminds us that Reich was the one who advocated the US adopt Japanese MITI-style economic management, just before the American economy took off for 25 years and Japan's spiraled into stagnation.  Now, he is arguing that capitalism is the enemy of democracy:

As Freedom House points out the number of countries that qualify as free rose from just 44 in 1972 to 89 in 2005,
even as capitalism expanded around the globe. It has been hypothesized
that as incomes increase in a country (rise of a middle class), the
demand for democratic governance becomes irresistible. This seems to
have been the pattern in South Korea, Chile, and Taiwan. Will the same
thing happen in China? As a negative leading indicator---whatever Reich
predicts, the opposite occurs-don't be surprised if China becomes a
democracy in the next decade.

Reader Robert Hammond, who always sends me good stuff, pointed out this article from the Evening Standard about proposed new health care rules in England.  Frequent readers will know that I have long argued that nationalized or single-payer health care is a Trojan Horse for fascism (and much more here) in the form of micro-management of individual decisions.  If your personal choices that in the past only put yourself at risk now cost other taxpayers money, then those other taxpayers are going to try to redirect your choices.

Failing to follow a healthy lifestyle could lead to free NHS treatment being denied under the Tory plans. 

Patients would be handed "NHS Health Miles Cards" allowing them to earn
reward points for losing weight, giving up smoking, receiving
immunisations or attending regular health screenings.

Like a
supermarket loyalty card, the points could be redeemed as discounts on
gym membership and fresh fruit and vegetables, or even give priority
for other public services - such as jumping the queue for council
housing.

But heavy smokers, the obese and binge drinkers who
were a drain on the NHS could be denied some routine treatments such as
hip replacements until they cleaned up their act.

Those who
abused the system - by calling an ambulance when a trip to the GP would
be sufficient, or telephoning out of hours with needless queries -
could also be penalised.

The report calls for a greater
emphasis on the "citizen's responsibility" to be healthy and says no
one should expect taxpayers to fund their unhealthy lifestyles.

Here is the real problem:  This is absolutely logical.  There is nothing at all incorrect about the last statement for example.  This is not an abuse or an excess.  This is a completely predictable result of single-payer health care.  Any single-payer is going to have these incentives, but when the single-payer is the government, they not only have the incentives but the full coercive power to do something about it.  I am exhausted with the statist defense against such outcomes that "well, its just the particular individuals in charge -- if we could get the right guys in there, it would work great."  No.  The right guys are never in there, despite technocrats' big dreams, in part because the incentives in place turn even the right guys into the wrong guys. 

One of the reasons we spend so much on health care today is because most of us can do so without any personal financial cost.  Few of us (I am an exception, with a very high deductible policy) actually have to make cost-benefit trade offs in each of our health care purchases like we do in contrast for ... absolutely everything else we buy except health care.   The results are predictable.  We get pissed off when our insurance company denies coverage on some procedure or cost, we is part of the base-level of discontent that health care "reformers" draw on.  But it is stunning to me that people who have discontent with their current insurer feel like things will be better with the government!

Hey, this sounds like a women's issue!

What this article really shows is that by going with a single-payer government system, each of us would be ceding the decisions about our health care, our bodies, and even lifestyle to the government.  So surely women's groups, who were at the forefront of fighting against government intrusion into our decisions about our bodies, is out there leading the fight against government health care.  WRONG!  Their privacy arguments stand out today as sham libertarian arguments that applied only narrowly to abortion.  It's clear that as long as they can get full access to abortion, women's groups are A-OK with government intrusion into people's decisions about their bodies.

So please, dedicated feminists are urged to comment.  How do I relate this T-shirt from the NOW web store:

With this button from the NOW home page:

And a bit of text from their site:

People need and deserve universal, continuous,
and accessible health coverage that is provided by a single payer and
does not require full-time employment and a beneficent employer.
Learn more with our action toolkit....

With the recent release of Michael Moore's new movie, "SiCKO", and the
introduction in Congress of a bill to provide health insurance to all
U.S. residents, the movement for universal single-payer health
insurance is gaining momentum. This toolkit is provided to help you
take action on this important issue....

Health care is a right, not a privilege.

This is an interesting study of the intersection of politics and science at NASA:

The new dramatic invention of the inventor of the Internet was to place
a satellite so far that the whole Earth can be observed 24 hours a day.
Isn't it fascinating? Why didn't you think about that? :-) Some
scientists refined the details for him - for example that the satellite
should be located in the L1 Lagrange point. The price? Well, the first
modest estimate was USD 135 million.

If you think about it for a
while, the scientific content of this project is next to nil. It is a
typical idea of a crackpot who has no tools to determine whether a
project is scientifically interesting or not. Already in 1999, during the Clinton-Gore administration, the project - nicknamed GoreSat or Gore's Screensaver - was more or less doomed. NASA Inspector General has also determined that the project is driven by politics, not science. It was found that the budget estimate was underestimated, too.

How
did they ever justify to study that project at all? Did they just tell
NASA that it has appeared in a dream of a prophet? Well, Al Gore wanted
the fresh picture of the whole Earth (well, just one-half, but it's OK)
to be constantly available as a source of inspiration: people could
finally see through the Internet, his other invention, that the Earth
is a little vulnerable child who has a fever. ;-) NASA added some
survey tasks, including measurements of the albedo every fifteen
minutes, that were not really needed and that are effectively performed
by existing devices, for example by CERES.

After more than a decade, the US may finally allow Mexican truckers on US highways, something we actually agreed to in NAFTA:

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco late on
Friday denied an emergency petition sought by the Teamsters
union, the Sierra Club and consumer group Public Citizen to
halt the start of a one-year pilot program that was approved by
Congress after years of legal and political wrangling.

I guess I can understand the Teamsters attempt to have the government shield them from competition -- that has practically become a national sport.  And I presume that the Sierra Club has some environmental concerns with Mexican trucks, though that seems flimsy given trucks must meet US environmental requirements and my guess is that Mexican trucks are at least as fuel efficient as US trucks.   But how can a nominal consumer group possibly justify this action?  Blocking competition in any part of the economy can only increase prices and reduce choices for consumers, particularly in an area like trucking that has almost no impact on the safety of the products actually being shipped.   I wish I could say this was some strange exception, but  consumer groups have for years backed protectionist efforts that do nothing but hurt consumers.

Via Cafe Hayek

I am often asked, "why, if the threat of global warming is really so overstated, does the issue have such legs with politicians, media, and activists?"

Answer:  Because it is the perfect political bludgeon.  One of the reasons I felt like high school debate really was broken (I don't know if it has been fixed since) was because every single debate eventually devolved into which side was more likely to cause a nuclear war.  It didn't matter if you were arguing about energy policy or the presidential primary system, no good debate case stopped short of blaming the other side for nuclear war.

Today, with nuclear weapons mostly forgotten (unfortunately not gone), global warming is the new nuclear war. It doesn't matter what you are arguing about:

There was Clare Short, a member of the British Parliament and Secretary
for International Development under Prime Minister Tony Blair until she
resigned in 2003 over the Iraq war. Claiming that Israel is actually
"much worse than the original apartheid state" and accusing it of
"killing (Palestinian) political leaders," Ms. Short charged the Jewish
state with the ultimate crime: Israel "undermines the international
community's reaction to global warming." According to Ms. Short, the
Middle East conflict distracts the world from the real problem:
man-made climate change. If extreme weather will lead to the "end of
the human race," as Ms. Short warned it could, add this to the list of
the crimes of Israel.

Whose idea was it to rename Division I-AA college football as the "Football Championship Subdivision?"

I often see the stat that US manufacturing employment has shrunk substantially over the last 50 or so years, usually accompanied by much wailing from the left (yes, the same people who criticized manufacturing work as dehumanizing 40 years ago).

The WaPo, via Hit and Run, says that US manufacturing output is at an all time high, and that the only way to reconcile these two is with technology and productivity.  Which is certainly part of the story, and its refreshing to see someone telling this story and not trying to cast the manufacturing numbers as a reason to slam the borders closed against imports.

But isn't there also a measurement problem here?  Eighty years ago, if a Ford Motor factory needed the windows cleaned, a Ford employee did it.  If it needed the parking lot striped, Ford workers did it.  When it needed the bathrooms cleaned at night, Ford janitors did it.  Today, the same Ford factory needs its windows and bathrooms cleaned, but an outside service contractor likely does the work.  In the economic statistics, haven't these workers migrated from "manufacturing" to "service" without anything real on the ground changing?

Back in 2003 when I set up this blog, I knew less than nothing about how to do it.  I mostly did things in a way I am still happy with, but I made one mistake.  In setting up the domain mapping from CoyoteBlog.com to Typepad, I mapped CoyoteBlog.com to my entire Typepad account, not just this blog.  As a result, my permalinks take the form of www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/blahblah.html rather than www.coyoteblog.com/blahblah. 

I now know how to fix it, but when the site republishes, I am pretty sure that anyone who has ever linked to a permalink on the site will get an error, because they will be remapped to the shorter address in the www rather than the /coyote_blog domain.  My question is this, if I access to all the A and MX and CNAME etc. records for CoyoteBlog, is there some way to calls the the www.CoyoteBlog.com/Coyote_blog/ domain to www.CoyoteBlog.com/ ?  If I can do this, I *think* my old permalinks will work.  Maybe. 

I probably will be too scared to try this, unless I can get a good solution for this problem