Princess Diana = Queen of Hearts?

Princess Diana wanted to be known as the Queen of Hearts. Had she never read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ("Off with their heads!")?

If you subsidize something, you get more of it

— and that applies to unemployment too.

...which means that Democratic efforts to reduce unemployment are counterproductive. I usually believe unemployment isn't the government's fault, but it looks like they've got what they paid for.

Any real cost containment is pure fantasy

Via CARPE DIEM

The federal government wants to require young, healthy people to buy insurance because if they don't, premiums for everyone else will go up. Insurance companies need low-maintenance, young customers on their rolls so they can raise money to cover benefits for less-healthy people the health care bill will require them to insure.

...

But both houses passed two other reforms that create an incentive not to buy insurance.

First, the bills allow patients to basically purchase insurance whenever they want.

"You can literally buy an insurance policy in the ambulance on the way to the hospital," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "You could imagine a situation in which you would pay the fines, stay out of the insurance pool, and at the moment when you need it, you go out and buy it."

The other disincentive is that both houses change how much older customers can be charged relative to younger customers. Analysts agree this will drive up the cost for young people, though it's not clear by how much.

...

The Senate tries to make it easier on the young by offering them a bare-bones insurance plan that would be less expensive than all the others. This is perhaps the keystone for the entire reform effort, because if young healthy people don't get into the insurance pool, everything else -- especially cost containment -- could fall apart.

The wheels of China's corruption grind exceedingly fine

...the Communist Party secretary is king. He has the final say in all personnel decisions and the interpretation of central government policy. He runs the bureaucracy like a giant franchise system.

The 12 members of his standing committee vie for his favour rather than hold him to account. Below them are the party departments and government bureaus, whose rank and status are determined mainly by the amount of money flowing through them from above.

The Organisation Department is on top. Smith says all the township party secretaries paid money for their posts, as did the heads of 80 per cent of government bureaus. Lower officials pay lower sums to ''show their appreciation''.

Based on Graeme Smith's Political Machinations in a Rural County.

Liberals and conservatives agree:

Whenever the government fails, give it greater power.

This is a common liberal impulse. The public schools aren’t educating students adequately? They need more money. The stimulus didn’t rev up job creation? Pass another one.

But when it comes to national security and law enforcement, the same tendency afflicts many conservatives. They expect [the federal government] to perform with flawless efficiency in finding murderous fanatics. And if it fails, they look to expand its authority to do the job it botched.

To stop global warming, we've got to live as we did in 1870

The U.K.-based Carbon Footprint consultancy claims that to stop global warming each person on Earth should be limited to emitting only two tons of carbon per year. The average American emits more than 20 tons annually while going about his business in a highly productive, developed society...

What countries already keep per capita carbon dioxide emissions below two tons a year? Climate champions include Togo (per capita GDP: $900), Bangladesh ($1,500), Ethiopia ($800), Uganda ($1,100), and Mali ($1,200). The last time Americans emitted as little as 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide per capita was in 1870.

President Will Push Today for Intelligence Community to Constantly Challenge Its Assumptions

It's probably a good idea, but I can't help wondering what kind of assumptions they're going to challenge:

• air is not breathable, water burns: in short, scientific "laws" are all wrong
  
• we are the bad guys; terrorists are the good guys
• democracy is a mistake
  
• capitalism is a mistake
  
• the bill of rights is the bill of wrongs
• Obama is not the president
• WAR IS PEACE
• FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
• IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
• we are not real
• etc.
  

Sigh...

As the world begins to emerge from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, there is growing concern that a rising tide of tit-for-tat protectionism is slowing the recovery.

Folly, greed and denial

I disagree with Denis Dutton when he cites terrorism as one of the "real problems...needing intelligent attention" that apocalyptic scenarios divert our attention from in It’s Always the End of the World as We Know It. As a matter of fact, when politicians focus their attention on the other problems he mentions (poverty & "broken financial systems") they can cause a lot of harm, too. But I can only agree with an example of earlier hysteria:

The Y2K catastrophe was promoted with increasing shrillness toward century’s end: headlines proclaimed a “computer time bomb” or “a date with disaster.” Vanity Fair’s January 1999 article “The Y2K Nightmare” caught the sensationalist tone, claiming that “folly, greed and denial” had “muffled two decades of warnings from technology experts.”

The subhead to the Vanity Fair article includes Dutton's quoted phrases:

Will the millennium arrive in darkness and chaos as billions of lines of computer code containing two-digit year dates shut down hospitals, banks, police and fire departments, airlines, utilities, the Pentagon, and the White House? These nightmare scenarios are only too possible, Robert Sam Anson discovers as he traces the birth of the Y2K "bug," the folly, greed and denial that have muffled two decades of warnings from technology experts, and the ominous results of Y2K tests that lay bare the dimensions of a ticking global time bomb.

In the article itself, Anson writes,

No one will know the extent of its consequences until after they occur. The one sure thing is that the wondrous machines that govern and ease our lives won't know what to do. Some will freeze, electronically paralyzed; others will become imbecilic, giving idiot. answers and issuing lunatic commands; still others, overwhelmed, will simply die -as will the blind faith the world has placed in them... The product of this folly is a looming disaster with an immovable deadline that will touch the entire world.

As to greed:

Holding on to old format was rationalized as a cost-cutter, particularly in computer memory-at the time the cost was $761 to store the equivalent of the information contained in a Danielle Steel novel. Considering that the same amount of memory now costs less than a thousandth of that, it was pound-foolish writ gigantic... Had the mischief been contained, the impact would have been negligible. But in the name of "downsizing" and "productivity," computers were increasingly running everything. And how they ran never stopped changing, as business kept demanding better, faster, cheaper thises and thats.

More hysteria:

Things will be infinitely worse overseas, where Y2K's impact on the delivery of food, seed, and fertilizer could result in between 10 million and 300 million deaths.

The Middle East, where half the oil companies expect at least one critical breakdown, is in particularly bad shape-as are Japan, which has the world's largest banks, and China, where much of the software was pirated, not to mention Indonesia. "Asia," said Deutsche Bank Securities chief economist Edward Yardeni, "is toast. In the year 2000, Asia will be burnt toast." But the biggest jitters are over Russia, which possesses not only 11 Chernobyl-type power plants, 22,500 nuclear warheads, and the funds to fix none of them, but also an attack-warning system so vulnerable to Y2K that the Pentagon has proposed stationing officers in each other's command centers New Year's Eve 1999.

...and what actually happened?

Savers are never losers

Fear is the foundation of most governments

From Glenn Greenwald, but the whole thing is great.

The citizenry has been trained to expect that our Powerful Daddies and Mommies in government will -- in that most cringe-inducing, child-like formulation -- Keep Us Safe. Whenever the Government fails to do so, the reaction -- just as we saw this week -- is an ugly combination of petulant, adolescent rage and increasingly unhinged cries that More Be Done to ensure that nothing bad in the world ever happens. Demands that genuinely inept government officials be held accountable are necessary and wise, but demands that political leaders ensure that we can live in womb-like Absolute Safety are delusional and destructive. Yet this is what the citizenry screams out every time something threatening happens: please, take more of our privacy away; monitor more of our communications; ban more of us from flying; engage in rituals to create the illusion of Strength; imprison more people without charges; take more and more control and power so you can Keep Us Safe.

What makes all of this most ironic is that the American Founding was predicated on exactly the opposite mindset. The Constitution is grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more important than mere Safety. Even though they knew that doing so would help murderers and other dangerous and vile criminals evade capture, the Framers banned the Government from searching homes without probable cause, prohibited compelled self-incrimination, double jeopardy and convictions based on hearsay, and outlawed cruel and unusual punishment. That's because certain values -- privacy, due process, limiting the potential for abuse of government power -- were more important than mere survival and safety. A central calculation of the Constitution was that we insist upon privacy, liberty and restraints on government power even when doing so means we live with less safety and a heightened risk of danger and death. And, of course, the Revolutionary War against the then-greatest empire on earth was waged by people who risked their lives and their fortunes in pursuit of liberty, precisely because there are other values that outweigh mere survival and safety.

These are the calculations that are now virtually impossible to find in our political discourse. It is fear, and only fear, that predominates. No other competing values are recognized.

Banks charge more to cover extra risk

Congress solves the problem.... by creating another:

Banks that lend money to customers with poor credit histories have to charge more to cover the extra risk. If Congress makes this impossible, banks will respond by refusing to lend to such customers, so that it will be harder for them to re-establish their creditworthiness.

more money isn't always the answer

The President believes that regardless of educational path after high school, all Americans should be prepared to enroll in at least one year of higher education or job training to better prepare our workforce for a 21st century economy.

but

most of those who go to college will never graduate with a degree. Moreover, mere “attendance” at a college does little to improve earnings and leaves many in debt. The situation is even worse at community colleges, where politicians at the state and national levels are heavily subsidizing two-year college education.

Kurt Westergaard's cartoon that inspired an ax attack

Kurt Westergaard's cartoon of Prophet Muhammad (Mohammed?)

Remember all those attacks by Christian fundamentalists after Andres Serrano's Piss Christ? Yeah, I didn't think so.

Hanyu Da Cidian

汉语大词典 definitions can apparently be accessed at cd.kdd.cc but only via IE explorer.

Put a tiger in your tank

Many private zoos that serve as tourist attractions

secretly operate as fronts for illegal tiger farming, butchering captive tigers for their parts, National Geographic magazine reports in the January 2010 story "Asia's Wildlife Trade."

And yet many people seem to believe the Chinese are great environmentalists.

myths about keeping America safe from terrorism

Americans are at far greater risk of being killed in accidents or by viruses than by acts of terrorism. In 2008, more than 37,300 Americans perished on the nation's highways, according to government data. Even before H1N1, a similar number of people died each year from the seasonal flu.

Too bad Obama can't say this. Well, he could, but if the most minor incident happened, his opponents would nail him for saying it. Like most other politicians, even if he knows this, he's not brave enough to say it.

Never intended?

Dr. William C. Roberts, M.D. writes

When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores.

"intended"!? I wonder where he found what this intention was. Maybe the intention is for us to kill animals, who then kill us. Or the intention was for him to write that, for me to read it, and then write this....

Ya think?

The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect homeowners from foreclosure has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.

Since President Obama announced the program in February, it has lowered mortgage payments on a trial basis for hundreds of thousands of people but has largely failed to provide permanent relief. Critics increasingly argue that the program, Making Home Affordable, has raised false hopes among people who simply cannot afford their homes.

Wow. The NYT criticizes Obama administration spending. Truly a new decade.

If animals had rights

Björk:

The Buddhists say we come back as animals and they refer to them as lesser beings. Well, animals aren't lesser beings, they're just like us. So I say fuck the Buddhists.

So, if animals were just like us, they'd have rights, including the right to vote. I wonder what slogans we'd hear....

• If chickens could vote: No chickens in anybody's pot!
• If dogs could vote: No leash laws! Follow the leader! Balls to chase!
• If cats could vote: Vote? I am the monarch!
• If flies could vote: Shit!
  

Or maybe I should check the bill of rights:

• freedom of religion (I'm trying to imagine the religion of caterpillars)
  
• freedom of speech (tweet-tweet, buzz-buzz, etc.)
  
• freedom of the press (bulletin: man bites dog!)
  
• the right to petition for redress (if you don't like the turkey's dressing)
  
• freedom of assembly (herding cats)
  
• the right to keep and bear arms (do bears really need automatic weapons?)
  
• no quartering of soldiers in private dwellings in peacetime (not in the chicken coop, not in the doghouse, and not in the cat house)
  
• no unreasonable search and seizure (but you can check me for ticks)
  
• grand-jury indictment for serious offenses, protection against double jeopardy in criminal cases, and prohibition against compelling testimony by a person against himself (the cat indicted by a grand-jury for killing a songbird. I'm guessing any feline testimony would be pretty limited.)
  
• the rights of the accused to a speedy trial and an impartial jury and the right to legal counsel and to the obtaining of witnesses in his favor (the testimony of avian witnesses is for the birds)
  
• the right to trial by jury in serious civil suits and prohibition against double jeopardy in civil cases (no double jeopardy, even for single leopards)
  
• prohibition of excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishment (what's cruelty to nature red in tooth and claw?)