Dispatches from District 48
I saw Randal O'Toole (known to bloggers at the "anti-planner") speak at the Goldwater Institute last night on transportation. He is on a book tour for his new book "Gridlock" and he is really a fascinating speaker. Highly recommended if he should be speaking near you in the coming weeks. The really crappy cell phone picture below is of O'Toole on the left talking to Byron Schlomach of the Goldwater Institute.
Exclusionist Conservatives in Arizona are quick to defend themselves against charges of racism. While I tend to be an pro-immigration hawk, I accept that there are issues, such as the conflict of immigration and the welfare state, where reasonable people can disagree as to solutions without any hint of racism charging the debate. I really, really resist playing the race card on anyone.
However, if Conservatives really want to discourage charges of racism, they need to stop playing on fears of immigrant crime as a main argument in their case (example from Expresso Pundit). Such fears of minority group violence are part and parcel of every racist position in history. The out-group is always vilified as criminal, whether it be blacks in the 60's or Italians and Eastern Europeans earlier in the century or the Irish in the 19th century.
There is no evidence either recently or throughout history of immigrant-led crime waves, and in fact as I wrote the other day crime rates in Arizona are improving throughout this "invasion" at a faster rate than the US average. So when Conservatives grab a single example, such as the Pinal County shooting (for which no suspects have been identified) as "proof" we need immigration reform, they are no different than Al Sharpton grandstanding based on the Tawana Brawley case (and possibly these cases could be even more similar, update: or perhaps not).
Stop trying to manufacture a crime spree that does not exist. Sure, illegal immigrants commit some murders. So do every other group. There is no evidence they commit such murders at a disproportionate rate. And yes, I understand there are violent, paramilitary gangs roving Northern Mexico, which currently is in a state of chaos, that we really don't want to spill over into Arizona. But this has been a threat for years, and for all the fear, there is no evidence that they are somehow increasing their activities here. And even if they were, laws that give Joe Arpaio additional power to harass day laborers in Phoenix are sure as hell not going to scare them off.
Repeat after me: There is nothing wrong, immoral, evil, or even unsavory about short-selling. No one gets mad at you for selling an over-valued security which you actually own, so there should be no ethical difference in selling an over-valued security you don't actually own. Somehow people who are traditionally long in the market (e.g. corporate executives) have convinced the world that short-sellers should be vilified. I don't understand it. If you love the stock and short-sellers drive it down, you should treat it as a gift that the stock you love can now be bought more cheaply.
So I thought this was particularly awesome:
On Oct. 8 and 9, 2008"”as the Federal Reserve was bailing out American International Group Inc."”an account Sen. Isakson held invested more than $30,000 in ProShares UltraShort 7-10 Year Treasury and UltraShort 20+ Year Treasury, the records show. These are "leveraged short" funds, designed to gain $2 for each $1 drop in the daily value of U.S. Treasury bonds.
Isakson claims he was not actively managing the account, a claim that is probably true given the ethics rules in Congress (not that anyone follows those). My response in his place would have been, "F*cking-A right I was shorting government bonds. Haven't you been paying attention over the last 12 months?"
Unfortunately, Isakson falls out of my hero category into my "hypocritical goat" category for this:
In February, Sen. Johnny Isakson (R., Ga.) argued on the Senate floor that "we don't need those speculating in the marketplace to take unfair advantage of the values of equities that are owned by Americans all over this country for the sake of making a buck on a short sale."
Again this unaccountable bias that somehow people who are long are morally superior, and somehow more entitled, than people who are short.
It's either this one, via Flowing Data
Can't you picture some Federal bureaucrat with purview somehow over wood pallet fires trying to fan the flames of public opinion in the interests of his or her job security and budget?
The other candidate is this from an outstanding XKCD post on a color naming survey he did (via TJIC).
The whole post is hilarious and worth you time.
This is lifted from an email I got from America Outdoors
A little noticed provision in the recently passed health care reform bill will require every payment to corporations over $600 to be reported on a Form 1099 to the IRS, including payments for the purchase of merchandise and services. This provision takes effect in 2012.
The current law requires a Form 1099 to be submitted to the IRS when your business pays more than $600 for rent, interest, dividends, and non-employee services if the payments are made to entities other than corporations. Currently, payments made to a corporation and payments for merchandise are not required to be reported.
To file the required 1099, a business will have to obtain and keep track of a Taxpayer Information Number (TIN) from every vendor before submitting the 1099 to that business and the IRS. Under current tax law, one copy of the form is sent to the IRS, and another copy is sent to the person to whom the business made the payments.
Rep. Dan Lungren (CA-3) introduced "The Small Business Paperwork Mandate Elimination Act" (H.R. 5141). The legislation would repeal the expanded 1099 reporting requirement. Lungren correctly asserts that the burdens placed on small businesses by this reporting requirement would be overwhelming.
Call your U.S. Representative today and ask them to cosponsor H.R. 5141. The House switchboard number is 202-225-3121. Ask to be connected to your Representative's office.
My small business has over a thousand vendors. I would have to hire someone full time for a month to do this. And it would be to zero purpose. The IRS would be so flooded with forms that there would be no way they could pull any useful information from the blizzard. This is yet another example of legislators operating with absolutely no idea how commerce actually works. We have coined a name for it within our firm -- we call it arrogant ignorance.
Chris Edwards at Cato had more on this a while back.
I'm stunned that there wasn't a broader debate before such a costly mandate was enacted. If it goes into effect, it will waste vast quantities of human effort in filling out forms, reworking computer systems, collecting and organizing data, and fighting the IRS. The struggling American economy can't afford anymore suffocating tax regulations. This mandate is a giant deadweight loss. It should be repealed.
This is from the national ID card portion of the Democrat's immigration proposal:
Tough penalties will be put in place for fraud in procurement of a fraud-proof social security card.
Jim Harper has a thorough analysis of the proposal at the link. My fear is the Republicans and Democrats will one day realize how similar they are on this issue and agree to an authoritarian compromise.
Conservatives often attack global warming alarmists for using individual outlier events at the tails of the normal distribution (e.g. Katrina) to fan panic about climate change. So it is interesting to see them doing the same thing themselves on immigrants and crime in Arizona. [sorry, forgot the link to Expresso Pundit]
Of course, the whole story fell apart when Wagner had to introduce this fact.
While smugglers have become more aggressive in their encounters with authorities, as evidenced by the shooting of a Pinal County deputy on Friday, allegedly by illegal-immigrant drug runners, they do not routinely target residents of border towns.
Sure, that's the ticket, violence hasn't increased in actual border towns...of course, roving drug smugglers just used an AK 47 to gun down a deputy in PINAL County a hundred miles north of the border. But other than that...and the rancher they killed last month...the border towns themselves are pretty calm.
Excuse me, but has anyone on any side of the immigration debate ever claimed that immigrants have never committed a crime? Forget for a minute that the guilty parties in these two cases are mere supposition without any charges filed yet -- particularly the case of the rancher last month. In 2008 there were about 407 killings in the state. So, like, one a month were maybe by immigrant gangs and this is a crisis?
From the link above, I looked up AZ and US crime states in 2000, 2005, and 2008. I was too lazy to do every year and 2009 state stats don't appear to be online yet. Here is the crisis in Arizona in violent crime rates:
Oh Noz, we seem not only to have drastically reduced our violent crime rate right in the teeth of this immigrant "invasion" but we also have reduced it below the US average. This actually understates the achievement, since Arizona is more highly urbanized than the average state (yeah, I know this is counter-intuitive, but it was true even 20 years ago and is more true today). Urban areas have higher crime rates than rural areas, particularly in property crime as below:
So our property crime rate is high, but not totally out of line from other highly urban areas. But the real key here is that during this supposed immigrant invasion, again Arizona has improved faster than the national average. This is seen more clearly when we index both lines to 2000.
One may wonder why climate change alarmists only wave around anecdotes rather than averages. If we really are seeing more drought or floods, show us the averages. The problem is that their story can't be seen in the averages, so they are forced to rely on anecdotes to inflame the population. The same appears to be true of our Arizona immigration panic.
Update: Some doubts emerge about Pinal County deputy shooting update: or perhaps not
Apparently the nations of Europe have committed their citizens to helping pay the inflated salaries of a bloated Greek public workforce to the tune of $146 billion.
The package is predicated on the Greeks getting their spending under control, which almost certainly will not happen since the bailout establishes the precedent that if Greece fails to act rationally, it will get bailed out.
I guess I could have predicted this, but I didn't know until this weekend that a variety of conspiracy theories were circulating about the BP oil platform fire and spill, including the incredibly absurd notion that the platform was torpedoed by a North Korean submarine.
I am not a military analyst, though my sense is that a North Korean submarine would have difficulty even sailing reliably to the Gulf of Mexico. But I do know petroleum operations. And I can say that any petroleum facility is a playground for fire, and only unwavering, intelligent management can prevent disaster (and even then sometimes shit happens).
It seems that, like the 9/11 truthers, the arguments are based on statements that sound plausible to laymen but in fact are meaningless. An example:
Many have concluded that the platform sunk due to sabotage of some nature. No oil spills happened when Hurricane Katrina hit the area in 2005, they note.
While hurricanes are dangerous to oil rigs, they are something rigs are designed for. This kind of blowout likely was due to forces at work down in the borehole, meaning that the problem was thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean, where one would not even know a hurricane was present.
This piece of evidence is funny
This conclusion has been spurred by alleged Kremlin reports that the Obama Administration has ordered a news blackout, preventing reporters from gaining access to the area or discovering information that would confirm or disprove the charges
LOL, the Obama Administration ordered a news blackout of gay protesters around the corner from the White House.
This post and this post came up back to back in my feed reader this morning. The first explored per capita GDP between Greece and Germany, and wonders why the published numbers can be so close when visual evidence is that the average Greek is far less prosperous than the average German. Brian Caplan explains the largest difference between Greece and Germany in terms of public sector productivity, with 10% of the workforce in Germany working for the state while a third of Greeks do so.
Knowing the Germans, it's easy to believe that its government employees accomplish as much as the Greeks' despite their smaller population share. This implies that 25% of the Greek labor force is, contrary to official stats, producing nothing.
So using Sumner's other numbers - and assuming output is roughly proportional to labor force - per-capita GDP is more than 50% higher in Germany than Greece. First-hand observation tells me that's still an understatement, but it still closes a big chunk of the gap between official stats and reality. How's that for a mental image?
UPDATE: The NY Times apparently overstated the 1/3 figure, see here.
Right after reading that piece, I read this from Jim O'Brien via Tad DeHaven:
Back in 1990, Halstein Stralberg coined the term "automation refugees" to describe Postal Service mail processing employees who were assigned to manual operations when automation eliminated the work they had been doing. Since the Postal Service couldn't lay off these employees, they had to be given something to do, and manual processing seemed to have an inexhaustible capacity to absorb employees by the simple expedient of reducing its productivity. The result was a sharp decline in mail processing productivity and a sharp increase in mail processing costs for Periodicals class. Periodicals class cost coverage has declined steadily since that time.
O'Brien then tells of visiting seventeen mail processing facilities as part of a Joint Mail Processing Task Force in 1998. During those visits he noted that the periodical sorting machines always happened to be down even though the machines were supposed to be operating seventeen hours a day. Although the machines weren't working, manual operations were always up and running.
A decade later, O'Brien points out that the situation apparently hasn't changed:
More Periodicals mail is manually processed than ever, and manual productivity continues to decline. Periodicals Class now only covers 75% of its costs. How can this dismal pattern of declining productivity and rising costs continue more than two decades after it was first identified, especially when the Postal Service has invested millions of dollars in flats automation equipment?
Years ago, I briefly consulted to the SNCF, the French national railroad. I say briefly, because thought they technically asked us to benchmark them against US firms, its clear they did not really want to hear the results. The one figure that sticks in my mind is that they had something like 100,000 freight cars, but 125,000 freight car maintenance employees. I remember observing to a highly unamused SNCF executive that they could assign one maintenance worker to his very own freight car and still lay off 20% of the staff. And apparently France is an order of magnitude better on stuff like this than Greece.
There is a report circulating right now, which -- if true -- confirms what many Arizona residents have been dreading for years: Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio will run for governor of the state of Arizona.
ABC 15 is reporting that Arpaio already has made the decision to take the plunge and will announce his candidacy on Monday.
According to "several high-ranking sources within the Sheriff's Department," all the necessary paperwork "has been filled out and is ready to file."
Unfortunately, he may well win. There are two things an outsider needs to know about people in Arizona
Yes, Arpaio is not only liked here, he is freaking beloved by a near majority of the population. He is the single most potent Republican name in the state -- one only has to look at the number of candidates seeking his endorsement. For example, we have people running for the US Congress in this state who tout Arpaio's endorsement on their every poster. Think of that -- US Congressmen running around seeking a sheriff's endorsement.
Just check this out. A local Republican privately thinks Arpaio is a dangerous idiot, but he still seeks his backing in the election
Bill Montgomery, the candidate for Maricopa County Attorney backed by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, strongly questions Sheriff Joe Arpaio's mental fitness and leadership ability in a secret tape made by county officials....
To Stapley [one of the county officials at the taped meeting], the Republican candidate made himself out to be a real Arpaio critic.
But, as we learned, Montgomery later teamed up with Arpaio in hopes of giving a boost to his campaign. Montgomery mailed a letter from Arpaio to the sheriff's supporters a couple of weeks ago, in which Arpaio praises the candidate and pledges to help him get elected.
We sort of feel bad for Montgomery in this situation -- no one likes to have a private conversation recorded without their knowledge. Yet getting beyond the ethics (and politics) of why the tape was made, Montgomery does come off looking fairly two-faced.
He's willing to take every cent Arpaio can raise for him, yet described the sheriff to Stapley as kind of a dottering old fool.
He also said he's not thrilled with Thomas' monolithic focus on illegal immigration. Yet that focus, of course, is shared by Arpaio.
Fellow Arpaio-haters will love this:
Montgomery related how he'd been talking about serious issues during a meeting with Arpaio when the conversation suddenly turned to "stories about his family, past Valentine's Days, that sort of thing."
An aide popped in to prompt the sheriff out of his daydreaming, and "it was a little bit like -- I don't want to disparage him -- but a little bit like someone coming into a nursing home and saying visiting hours are over now."
The most important news, I suppose, is that Arizona has made its new immigration law more palatable with a few changes.
The first concerns the phrase "lawful contact," which is contained in this controversial portion of the bill: "For any lawful contact made by a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency"¦where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person"¦" Although drafters of the law said the intent of "lawful contact" was to specify situations in which police have stopped someone because he or she was suspected of violating some other law "” like a traffic stop "” critics said it would allow cops to pick anyone out of a crowd and "demand their papers."
So now, in response to those critics, lawmakers have removed "lawful contact" from the bill and replaced it with "lawful stop, detention or arrest." In an explanatory note, lawmakers added that the change "stipulates that a lawful stop, detention or arrest must be in the enforcement of any other law or ordinance of a county, city or town or this state."
"It was the intent of the legislature for "˜lawful contact' to mean arrests and stops, but people on the left mischaracterized it," says Kris Kobach, the law professor and former Bush Justice Department official who helped draft the law. "So that term is now defined."
The second change concerns the word "solely." In a safeguard against racial profiling, the law contained the phrase, "The attorney general or county attorney shall not investigate complaints that are based solely on race, color or national origin." Critics objected to that, too, arguing again that it would not prevent but instead lead to racial profiling. So lawmakers have taken out the word "solely."
"There were misstatements by the opponents of the law that this was written to permit some consideration of race in the enforcement of this law," says Kobach, "and that's not the case at all."
It is hard for me to separate in my mind whether the problem I have with what remains is really with this law or with the individuals whom I know to be tasked with its enforcement. Sheriff Joe Arpaio has a history of pulling over every Mexican he runs into with a broken tail light on his crime sweeps, so in actual practice, the requirement of there being some other crime involved doesn't do much to make me fear profiling any less. But its hard for me to say that checking immigration status of people arrested or detained is unreasonable, so it may be I am just uncomfortable with the overzealous enforcements and Sheriff Joe's patented crime sweeps. (I am still opposed to the socialist definition of property rights that conservatives have adopted in the law).
I thought Megan McArdle had an interesting point:
If the immigration problems in Arizona are really so serious that they merit deep intrusions upon the liberty of citizens who happen to resemble illegal immigrants, than they are serious enough to intrude on the liberty of everyone. Don't make the cops check the status of anyone who they "reasonably suspect" is illegal; make them check the status of everyone, no matter how blond-haired, blue-eyes, and fluent in standard American english they may be. If you forget your license at home, the police detain you, just like they detain anyone of mexican descent, while someone fetches it. If you can't produce a birth certificate, passport, or similar, then you wait in the pokey until they can verify your legal status. No police discretion. No profiling.
We can illustrate McArdle's point with an example, where our sheriff's descended on a local business and zip-tied and detained anyone who looked Hispanic until they could produce proof of immigration status. No Anglos at this location were treated the same way:
Deputies from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office raided a Mesa landscaping company early Wednesday morning, arresting nearly three dozen people suspected of being in the country illegally.
The raid on offices of Artistic Land Management, on Main Street just west of Dobson Road, happened about 4:30 a.m., according to one worker who was handcuffed and detained before being released when he produced documentation that he was in the country legally"¦.
Juarez estimated about 35 workers were handcuffed with plastic zip-ties while deputies checked for documents. Those who could provide proof they were in the country legally were released, while others were put on buses and taken away.
This is something the bill supporters just don't want to deal with -- the ugly sight of all the brown skinned workers at a location separated out from their peers and zip-tied until they can produce the proper government papers.
Daniel Griswold of Cato offered what I thought was an excellent framework for thinking about immigration and immigration reform:
Requiring successful enforcement of the current immigration laws before they can be changed is a non sequitur. It's like saying, in 1932, that we can't repeal the nationwide prohibition on alcohol consumption until we've drastically reduced the number of moonshine stills and bootleggers. But Prohibition itself created the conditions for the rise of those underground enterprises, and the repeal of Prohibition was necessary before the government could "get control" of its unintended consequences.
Illegal immigration is the Prohibition debate of our day. By essentially barring the legal entry of low-skilled immigrant workers, our own government has created the conditions for an underground labor market, complete with smuggling and day-labor operations. As long as the government maintains this prohibition, illegal immigration will be widespread, and the cost of reducing it, in tax dollars and compromised civil liberties, will be enormous.
It turns out that after excoriating the Arizona law as being too intrusive, Democrats have responded with ... something even more intrusive.
Sometimes I just love the Democrats. After fomenting a near meltdown over the Arizona immigration law, with charges of nazism and cries of "show me you papers!" flying hither and yon, the Democrats introduce an immigration framework with what?
Improved papers, of course.
Yes, the Dems screwed the pooch and included a national ID card in their proposed legislation. And a biometric one at that. As someone characterized it, it's a "super Social Security card". Remember when you were assured that your SS card/number was not for identification purposes and never would be. Well Bunky, that was as true as most of the promises politicians make.
Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.
As a final note, for years I have asked strong exclusionist conservatives how they square their opposition to immigration with their desire for freedom of contract and exchange. After all, if commerce is free, do I not have the right to hire anyone I want for a job, no matter where that person was born. Why do Conservatives want to require that all workers have government licenses before they can be hired? It turns out that the ACLU makes the same point in response to the above proposal (from the link above, emphasis added):
"Creating a biometric national ID will not only be astronomically expensive, it will usher government into the very center of our lives. Every worker in America will need a government permission slip in order to work. And all of this will come with a new federal bureaucracy "” one that combines the worst elements of the DMV and the TSA," said Christopher Calabrese, ACLU legislative counsel.
Note to Conservatives-- when the ACLU, founded by Marxists and which to this day resists recognizing property rights, gets out ahead of you on the rights to free exchange and commerce, you are in trouble.
Update: More from Brad Warbiany and Matt Welch
Rep. Jose Serrano is firing a brushback pitch at the state of Arizona for passing a strict new immigration law
Seeking Major League retribution, the Bronx Democrat will ask big-league baseball Commissioner Bud Selig to move the 2011 All-Star Game from Phoenix. Serrano will make his request to the commissioner in a letter to be sent later today.
I have made it pretty plain I don't like AZ's new immigration law, but this is silly. While overly authoritarian, it is no more so than any number of cash confiscation or stop and search laws on the books in other states. I am pretty sure Arizona could remain standing in a head-to-head fight between AZ and NY on whose laws are the most authoritarian. A Representative of a city that bans trans fats, zones to exclude certain fast food restaurants, has proposed a salt ban and initiated a campaign against soft drinks needs to get his own authoritarian house in order.
The Tonya Craft trial seems to be a throwback to the bad old days of sexual molestation panic. All the old Janet Reno "Miami method" techniques have been revived, including weeks of intensive interviews of small children where prosecutors would not relent until children started giving them the stories they wanted. This case gets bonus points because it was brought originally by someone with an ax to grind
according to testimony on Monday from Craft's ex-husband, the allegation that Craft abused her own daughter first came from his new wife, who herself had been reported to child services by Craft for regularly showering with the girl (which she admitted doing). During a videotaped interview, the girl said, "My mom [the stepmother, apparently] told me which is which and where they touched me."
I sat on a jury of a similar trial in the early 90's. It became clear that the little girl who was supposedly the victim was hounded for months into finally accusing daddy of something, only to recant by the time it got to trial. The whole case was started by a baby-sitter who had just watched Oprah and saw another baby-sitter lauded as a national hero for supposedly sniffing out a molestation and this baby-sitter very clearly had aspirations of riding the case to an Oprah invitation as well. We acquitted the poor guy in about 35 minutes, which is how long it took us to convince to idiots who kept saying "it might have happened" exactly what "reasonable doubt" means.
I don't know that I have ever seen a clearer example of the disconnect of thinking between libertarians and authoritarian political thinking than in this brief paragraph from Dahlia Lithwick. She is writing about a court case reviewing whether it should be a crime to deny police your identification. She writes, making fun of libertarians:
It would be easier to credit the Cato and ACLU arguments if we didn't already have to hand over our ID to borrow a library book, obtain a credit card, drive a car, rent videos, obtain medical treatment, or get onto a plane. So the stark question then becomes this: Why are you willing to tell everyone but the state who you are? It's a curious sort of privacy that must be protected from nobody except the government.
Really?? It is strange to her that we would treat privacy uniquely with the one and only organization in this country that can legally use force against us, legally take our money without our permission, and legally throw us in prison? Is she really so blinded by a love for state authority that she can't tell the difference between a transaction at Blockbuster, which we can choose not to patronize if we don't like their terms of sale, and an interaction with police, where there is not even a hint of it being an arms-length, consensual, balanced interaction.
There is an largeand growing body of evidence that police take advantage of their power mismatch with citizens and abuse their power in multiple ways, large and small. These abuses have likely always existed, but were covered up by police officers standing up for each other. Only the advent of portable video cameras has started to really document what really goes on in these interactions. Just read a few posts at this site to get a flavor. And cops sure don't like when you ask them for their ID, as they hate anything that might impose accountability on them:
And in today's daily contempt-of-cop story, Ft. Lauderdale Police Officer Jeff Overcash did not appreciate a man asking him for his badge number, so he pulled out his handcuffs and arrested him.And it was all caught on video.
The video shows Brennan Hamilton walking up to Overcash in a calm manner with a pen and notepad in his hand. Overcash, who is leaning against his squad car with other cops, then pulls out his handcuffs and arrests Hamilton.
Overcash charged him with resisting arrest without violence and disorderly intoxication.
Alex Tabarrok makes a good point. Based on these arguments, Lithwick must be A-OK with Arizona's new immigration laws, right?
Update: It is interesting that while sneering at slippery slope arguments, she proves their merit.
The slippery-slope arguments"”that this leads to a police state in which people are harassed for doing nothing"”won't really fly, although I guarantee that you'll hear more and more of them in the coming weeks.
But in the immediately proceeding lines she wrote:
Is there something about stating your name or handing over a driver's license that differs from being patted down or frisked, which is already constitutional for Terry purposes?I, for one, would rather hand over my driver's license to a cop than be groped by one.
This is a perfect illustration of the slippery slope, almost textbook. Libertarians certainly opposed current pat down and frisking rules, but since these are legal, Lithwick uses their legality to creep the line a little further. And then the legality of these ID checks will in turn be used to justify the legality of something else more intrusive.
While Adobe's Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.
LOL. Substitute "Apple" for "Adobe" and "i____" for "Flash" and the sentence still works fine.
Do you remember the State Science Institute report on Rearden Metal? If you were like me, you thought that this ridiculous report was an exaggeration, a literary device to make a point. But as in so much of Atlas Shrugged, I am finding that it was no exaggeration at all.
Check out this real life example of "science." From the real state science folks at the Interagency Working Group on Climate Change and Health.
There are potential impacts on cancer both directly from climate change and indirectly from climate change mitigation strategies. Climate change will result in higher ambient temperatures that may
increase the transfer of volatile and semi-volatile compounds from water and wastewater into the atmosphere, and alter the distribution of contaminants to places more distant from the sources, changing subsequent human exposures. Climate change is also expected to increase heavy precipitation and flooding events, which may increase the chance of toxic contamination leaks from storage facilities or runoff into water from land containing toxic pollutants. Very little is
known about how such transfers will affect people's exposure to these chemicals"”some of which are known carcinogens"”and its ultimate impact on incidence of cancer. More research is needed to determine the likelihood of this type of contamination, the geographical areas and populations most likely to be impacted, and the health outcomes that could result.Although the exact mechanisms of cancer in humans and animals are not completely understood for all cancers, factors in cancerdevelopment include pathogens, environmental contaminants, age, and genetics. Given the challenges of understanding the causes of cancer, the links between climate change and cancer are a mixture of fact and supposition, and research is needed to fill in the gaps in what we know.
One possible direct impact of climate change on cancer may be through increases in exposure to toxic chemicals that are known or suspected to cause cancer following heavy rainfall and by
increased volatilization of chemicals under conditions of increased temperature. In the case of heavy rainfall or flooding, there may be an increase in leaching of toxic chemicals and heavy metals
from storage sites and increased contamination of water with runoff containing persistent chemicals that are already in the environment. Marine animals, including mammals, also may suffer
direct effects of cancer linked to sustained or chronic exposure to chemical contaminants in the marine environment, and thereby serve as indicators of similar risks to humans.64 Climate impact
studies on such model cancer populations may provide added dimensions to our understanding of the human impacts.
Remember, the point of this all is not science, but funding. This is basically a glossy budget presentation, probably cranked out by some grad students over some beers, tasked to come up with scary but marginally plausible links between health issues and climate change. Obama has said that climate is really, really important to him. He has frozen a lot of agency budgets, and told them new money is only for programs that supports his major initiatives, like climate change. So, every agency says that their every problem is due to climate change, just as every agency under Bush said that they were critical to fighting terrorism. This document is the NIH salvo to get climate change money, not actual science.
In the movie Wag the Dog, and American president and a movie producer faked a war in Albania to divert political attention form a domestic scandal. They created fake but riveting film of desperate Albanians caught up in the war. I always wondered how confused the people of Albania, sitting in their peaceful homes, were by these images if they saw them on CNN.
I live in Arizona, not Albania, but I am just as confused. I have lived in Phoenix for 10 years. I run a public contact business all over the state, including at least one location in sight of the Mexican border. And I am confused as can be when I read stuff like this:
Nevertheless, here it goes from a supporter of legal immigration: how are we to make sense of the current Arizona debate? One should show concern about some elements of the law, but only in the context of the desperation of the citizens of Arizona. And one should show some skepticism concerning mounting liberal anguish, so often expressed by those whose daily lives are completely unaffected by the revolutionary demographic, cultural, and legal transformations occurring in the American Southwest.
WTF? I read this all the time. I am told there is a war going on around me and people are being devastated, but I never see it. And nobody I know ever sees it directly. It is always a "someone else" (maybe, as I suggested in an earlier post, it is all happening to that lady who put her cat in the microwave to dry.")
I won't spend all day with VDH's post, but there are a couple of other things he writes that seem nuts, given his reputation for being pretty smart
Why Wave the Flag of the Country I Don't Wish to Return To?
Have you ever been to a Saint Patrick's Day parade in Boston or Chicago? To Columbus Day parade in New York? So its OK for Europeans to show some affinity for the mother country even as they reside in the US, but not Mexicans?
Look, I get irritated to no end by people who come here for freedom and prosperity and then immediately start advocating for and voting for steps that undermine both. But that's not an immigrant issue, its a Constitutional one, where we have allowed courts to rewrite protections against government encroachment.
Substitute New York in 1860 for Arizona in 2010 and Irish for Mexican, and you would see the exact same dynamics at work, except that Arizona in 2010 is a lot more peaceful than New York in 1860.
California's meltdown is instructive. If about half the nation's illegal aliens reside in the state, and its problems are in at least in some part attributable to soaring costs in educating hundreds of thousands of non-English-speaking students, a growing number of aliens in prison and the criminal justice system, real problems of collecting off-the-books income and payroll taxes, expanding entitlements, and unsustainable social services, do we wish to avoid its model?
Really? One word: Texas. Texas has the same immigration issues and a MUCH longer border than California. California's problems are its profligate and anti-business government, something that Conservatives tend to point out a lot in about a million comparisons with Texas, except of course when they want to blame it all on immigration instead.
First, there is the simplicity of the argument. One either wishes or does not wish existing law to be enforced. If the answer is no, and citizens can pick and chose which laws they would like to obey, in theory why should we have to pay taxes or respect the speed limit? Note that liberal Democrats do not suggest that we overturn immigration law and de jure open the border "” only that we continue to do that de facto.
This is hilarious in the context of Arizona. While the AZ legislature has been passing this law, it has been passing a series of other laws to give the big FU to federal law. These bills include not enforcing federal insurance mandates in AZ, not enforcing EPA CO2 regulations in AZ, ignoring federal law on commercialization of rest areas, ignoring the REAL ID act etc. For God sakes this is the state whose Republican governor in the 1990's sent the national guard to take over the Grand Canyon from the feds. To piously assert this is all about enforcing federal law and that it is wrong to ignore some laws but enforce others is absurd. This country has a long history of popular nullification of bad laws -- the 55-mile an hour speed limit was nullified by rampant non-compliance long before it was repealed.
I understand there are complexities in immigration, the most important of which is the conflict between a generous safety net and open immigration. But note that while many Conservatives will say this, none of them are proposing any changes to safety net eligibility vis a vis immigrants. When all they ask for is for the borders to be locked down, then all these arguments just seem like window dressing to the true desire to say "my family got in, now its time to lock the door."
I have written any number of times about government health care as the excuse to regulate nearly everything, since nearly every individual decision and activity can be argued to affect one's health. If government is paying the health care bills, it now has an interest in regulating behaviors that might raise those bills. Given the US government has been on a 80-year mission to end the concept of individual responsibility, Obamacare is a huge milestone.
You see, Ms. Kaplan obviously thinks it is the role of government to "help Americans eat healthier" even if it means banning things. My guess is she'd not be quite as ready for government bans it they had to do with, oh I don't know, books or something similar.The excuse?
In Santa Clara County, one out of every four kids is either overweight or obese. Among 2- to 5-year-olds from low-income families, the rate is one in three. The county health system spends millions of dollars a year treating kids for health problems related to obesity, and the tab is growing.
If you haven't yet figured out that the passage of ObamaCare has emboldened the nannies at all levels, this ought to make the case. Trust me, this reporter didn't dig this nugget out. It was handed to her by those trying to justify this power grab.
Yeah, I know this is just a local action, but this is just a market test for future similar federal actions. I can just picture John Jay and James Madison arguing in a tavern. "Jimmy, I am just not sure what kind of Constitution we need. Well, John, whatever we do, we absolutely must make sure the Federal government has the power to ban toys from kids meals. Oh, and to regulate salt content too. After all, that's what we fought a war for."
Postscript: My question is, how long are health cost advocates going to nibble at the margins? Childhood obesity costs are probably close to zero, in the grand scheme of things, despite the BS numbers from "advocates." Two individual decisions drive a ton of health care costs - driving (the most dangerous activity we pursue, typically) and sex (not just in disease but in pre and post natal care). And I wonder how long it will be before government health care costs treating gunshot victims will be used to trump 2nd amendment arguments?
Time to short those shares of the Teaching Company. Yale is offering free videos of many of its introductory courses. HT: Carpe Diem
Remember all that BS about the Obama administration only being ruled by facts and science? This is a mythology at the core of the progressive movement, that it is possible to have a wise dictator who uses the heavy hand of government coercion only for the best interests of the country, driven only by science and not by political influence.
This is of course a crock. It was a popular point of view in the early 20th century, and at the heart of efforts like Mussolini's fascism, which in turn was much admired by FDR and emulated in US efforts like the NRA (the blue eagle, not the gun organization). Over time, history has demonstrated folks like Hayek right on the knowlege problem (no one can possibly be smart enough to make optimum decisions for everyone, particularly when everyone has different preferences) while we have plenty of evidence to demonstrate the incentives for politicians are skewed so badly as to make good decisions almost impossible.
But the myth persists, even in the face of obvious counter-examples, like this (emphasis added):
The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama's health care "reform" law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius's staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken."The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote," says an HHS source. "Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think."
The analysis, performed by Medicare's Office of the Actuary, which in the past has been identified as a "nonpolitical" office, set off alarm bells when submitted. "We know a copy was sent to the White House via their legislative affairs staff," says the HHS staffer, "and there were a number of meetings here almost right after the analysis was submitted to the secretary's office. Everyone went into lockdown, and people here were too scared to go public with the report."
In the end, the report was released several weeks after the vote -- the review by the secretary's office reportedly took less than three days -- and bore a note that the analysis was not the official position of the Obama administration.
Wouldn't want to influence a vote with actual facts.
Pursued two guilty pleasures this weekend:
Arizona used to be a state that defended private property rights. But in a single bill, SB1070, we have thrown out private property in favor of community property. We have officially established the principle that the state can tell us who can and can't be on our private property.
A. IN ADDITION TO ANY VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW, A PERSON IS GUILTY OF TRESPASSING IF THE PERSON IS BOTH:
1. PRESENT ON ANY PUBLIC OR PRIVATE LAND IN THIS STATE.
2. IN VIOLATION OF 8 UNITED STATES CODE SECTION 1304(e) OR 1306(a).
Trespassing used to mean presence on property without the owner's permission. Now the owner's permission is irrelevant, and trespassing is redefined as being present on private property without the government's permission. The state takes this new definition so seriously that no parole may be given for people who violate the law.
Conservatives gave up on the sanctity of contracts in this context years ago, making it illegal to hire the person of one's choice for a job if that person does not have the proper licenses and paperwork from the government.
Remember, Conservatives traditionally are not anti-authoritarians anti-big-government, they are just in favor of use and expansion of government authority in other contexts than those favored by Liberals.
From our new SB1070 Immigration Law here in AZ (sorry for the caps)
B. FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE WHERE REASONABLE SUSPICION EXISTS THAT THE PERSON IS AN ALIEN WHO IS UNLAWFULLY PRESENT IN THE UNITED STATES, A REASONABLE ATTEMPT SHALL BE MADE, WHEN PRACTICABLE, TO DETERMINE THE IMMIGRATION STATUS OF THE PERSON. THE PERSON'S IMMIGRATION STATUS SHALL BE VERIFIED WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PURSUANT TO 8 UNITED STATES CODE SECTION 1373(c).
Supporters have said this is not about profiling or harassing people with brown skin. So what, other than skin color, does constitute probably cause in this case? Low rider suspension? Mexican music tapes?
Anyone who things Joe Arpaio will not use this to demand that everyone with brown skin has to show their papers has not been paying attention. I have driven around for 3 years with a broken tail light and never been stopped. Had I had brown skin, I would have been stopped years ago. This is the man who went into tony, lilly white Fountain Hills on a crime sweep and somehow 75% of the those arrested were Hispanic.
Here is one example, where deputies entered a local business, zip-tied and detained everyone who had brown skin, and then later released those who could provide their papers:
Deputies from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office raided a Mesa landscaping company early Wednesday morning, arresting nearly three dozen people suspected of being in the country illegally.
The raid on offices of Artistic Land Management, on Main Street just west of Dobson Road, happened about 4:30 a.m., according to one worker who was handcuffed and detained before being released when he produced documentation that he was in the country legally"¦.
Juarez estimated about 35 workers were handcuffed with plastic zip-ties while deputies checked for documents. Those who could provide proof they were in the country legally were released, while others were put on buses and taken away.
Update: More from the bill, with language Conservatives would tend to oppose on absolutely anything except immigration
E. A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER, WITHOUT A WARRANT, MAY ARREST A PERSON IF THE OFFICER HAS PROBABLE CAUSE TO BELIEVE THAT THE PERSON HAS COMMITTED ANY PUBLIC OFFENSE THAT MAKES THE PERSON REMOVABLE FROM THE UNITED STATES.
Update #2: Steve Chapman also doesn't know how to spot an illegal immigrant. But that's OK, neither does our governor:
After signing the new law requiring police to check out people who may be illegal immigrants, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer was asked how the cops are supposed to know when someone should be screened. "I don't know," she replied. "I do not know what an illegal immigrant looks like."
No kidding. But she has a lot of company in her ignorance. When I called University of Arizona law professor Marc Miller and told him I wasn't sure what some of the law's provisions mean, he replied, "Neither is anyone else on the planet." We will find out what it means after it takes effect, not before.
The last sentence seems awfully reminiscent of the health care bill.
It is increasingly hard to have an immigration discussion here in Phoenix. The vast majority of residents are absolutely convinced, despite evidence to the contrary, that they are in the middle of an apocalyptic version of the Mariel boatlift and have found themselves surrounded by Tony Montana's ready to carve them up save for Sheriff Joe Arpaio's brave intervention.
You never meet anyone who has actually had a problem with immigrants, and most like the immigrants, even the illegal ones, they know. The other night a friend of mine said that we were all victims - I asked, "how?" Everyone seems to have stories of immigrant hijinx, but they are all like the stories of the lady who put her cat in a microwave -- it happened to someone else. And we do have stories of immigrant crimes on TV, but like shark attacks and extreme weather events, we overestimate their frequency because only certain outliers at the edges of the normal distribution get reported.
As an aside, one of the interesting things about the immigration debate for those of us who have read US history is how amazingly similar current arguments against particularly Mexican immigrants (the commit crime, they don't integrate, they take jobs from Americans) are identical to arguments used against the Irish, Italians, and most eastern Europeans at one time or another. I heard a woman at a part a while back of Slav background talking about how here immigrant grandparents were different than these Mexicans. I told her that the exact same arguments she was using were used against Easter Europeans in the early 20th century, and in fact, and in fact the first real immigration quotas in this country were meant to keep her ancestors out.
As a result, I tend to grab the pro-immigration side in debates, even though I think there are some sensible reasons it probably has to be restricted or restructured, just because I really don't like the vibe coming from the immigration opponents around me. When people take positions out of irrational fear and loathing, I am hugely reluctant to make any sort of common cause even if some of our concerns overlap.
Bruce McQuain argues that the main barrier to his advocating open immigration is the welfare state, and I am sympathetic to that argument. I still, however, think we are smart enough to have a safety net and allow much more open immigration. Bruce Pick has some sensible suggestions, and I published my own plan here.
And, as a final thought, the locals are never, ever going to convince me to their side when they trot Joe Arpaio up to the podium to make their case. I have opposed the current immigration law in Arizona less because of any immigration issues and more because Joe does not need any more arbitrary authority. I like what Radley Balko wrote the other day:
Dear Tea Partiers,
Ask Joe Arpaio to be your keynote speaker, and you've lost me.
He's a power-mad thug with a badge, the walking, mouth-breathing antithesis of the phrase "limited government."
Yes, this is but one state chapter in your movement. So distance yourself from them.
It's one thing to have a few idiots and nutjobs show up at your rallies.
It's quite another to invite one to speak.
Yours,
Radley Balko
More good stuff here.
Immigration is a thorny issue. But when we stand around and say "we don't want you here", I have to break ranks. When they say "these immigrants are damaging our economy", I have to break ranks. I don't have all the answers as to how to fix the problem, but I know that I refuse to close our country to people who want to live the American Dream. We have to enforce our laws, but when our laws are contrary to the very fabric of America, those laws need to change.
