Jan 06 2009

Great Myths of the Great Depression

Category: economy — harmonicminer @ 10:42 am

Click the link to read more and have an opportunity to download a free pdf on great myths of the Great Depression. A brief intro:

Many volumes have been written about the Great Depression of 1929-1941 and its impact on the lives of millions of Americans. Historians, economists and politicians have all combed the wreckage searching for the “black box” that will reveal the cause of the calamity. Sadly, all too many of them decide to abandon their search, finding it easier perhaps to circulate a host of false and harmful conclusions about the events of seven decades ago. Consequently, many people today continue to accept critiques of free-market capitalism that are unjustified and support government policies that are economically destructive.

How bad was the Great Depression? Over the four years from 1929 to 1933, production at the nation’s factories, mines and utilities fell by more than half. People’s real disposable incomes dropped 28 percent. Stock prices collapsed to one-tenth of their pre-crash height. The number of unemployed Americans rose from 1.6 million in 1929 to 12.8 million in 1933. One of every four workers was out of a job at the Depression’s nadir, and ugly rumors of revolt simmered for the first time since the Civil War.

“The terror of the Great Crash has been the failure to explain it,” writes economist Alan Reynolds. “People were left with the feeling that massive economic contractions could occur at any moment, without warning, without cause. That fear has been exploited ever since as the major justification for virtually unlimited federal intervention in economic affairs.”[1]

Old myths never die; they just keep showing up in economics and political science textbooks. With only an occasional exception, it is there you will find what may be the 20th century’s greatest myth: Capitalism and the free-market economy were responsible for the Great Depression, and only government intervention brought about America’s economic recovery.

Since our new president seems to want to be another FDR, this seems very timely.

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Jan 06 2009

One last compassionate conservative act

Category: Uncategorized — harmonicminer @ 10:38 am

Bush to Protect Vast New Pacific Tracts – NYTimes.com

President Bush will designate vast tracts of American-controlled Pacific Ocean islands, reefs, surface waters and sea floor as marine national monuments on Tuesday, limiting fishing, mining, oil exploration or other commercial activity, White House officials said Monday.

Working on the legacy, I see.

Sigh.

Jan 05 2009

Cut from what?

Category: economy,media,Obama,taxes — harmonicminer @ 10:37 am

Doing its usually spectacularly incompetent job of reporting comprehensible information, the AP says that Obama supports $300B tax cut plan

President-elect Barack Obama, commencing face to face consultations with congressional leaders Monday, is embracing an unexpectedly large tax cut of up to $300 billion. Obama said the country faces an “extraordinary economic challenge.”

Besides $500 tax cuts for most workers and $1,000 for couples, the Obama proposal includes more than $100 billion for businesses, an Obama transition official said. The total value of the tax cuts would be significantly higher than had been signaled earlier.

The huge question, completely unaddressed by the AP in its report: what is the “starting line” from which the tax cuts will be calculated?

Is the tax cut going to take the current situation, with the Bush tax cuts still in place till 2010 or so, as the starting line from which to do further tax cutting?  Or are the tax cuts only to be calculated from the state of play after the Bush tax cuts expire?

Keep in mind that it is the Democrats who have always called it a “cut” in spending when the actual increase in spending is simply reduced from what had been planned.  Only in Washington DC Democrat-speak can you call it a “cut” when you’re increasing spending by 2% instead of 4%.

Is this really going to be a tax “cut”?  Or is this Dem-speak for less of a tax increase than they had planned?  And is it going to be calculated from the lower tax rates in force under Bush?  Does this mean the Bush tax cuts are going to be extended, with new cuts in addition?  The AP may be forgiven for not having answers to these questions, but to pretend the questions aren’t there by ignoring them is risible.

Of course, to report on this would require reporters who actually understand the subject, and who want us to know what’s going on, and aren’t just shilling for Obama during the honeymoon.  Obama had better move fast:  the honeymoon isn’t going to last forever

UPDATE:  This report from the Wall Street Journal is more comprehensive but still does not mention the fate of the Bush tax cuts when their current authorization expires in a year or so.

UPDATE: One of my more cynical emailers suggests that there will be NO real tax cuts of any duration (maybe very short term only), because he expects that the Democrats will let the Bush tax cuts expire shortly, so that they can take credit for “cutting” taxes that would stay lower if Democrats simply made the Bush cuts permanent.  This seems possible to me, given the nature of Washington doublespeak.

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Jan 04 2009

The year in review

Category: humor — harmonicminer @ 5:43 pm

You’ve probably seen this, but I couldn’t resist.

Uncle Jay Explains: Year-end! 12-22-08

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Jan 04 2009

It ain’t all pinatas and margaritas

Category: Mexico — harmonicminer @ 2:11 am

ThreatsWatch.Org: RapidRecon: Mexican Violence Continues to Unfold

Last week in Ciudad Juarez Mexico, four police officers were murdered in four separate attacks. This brings the 2008 murder toll in Juarez alone (across the border from El Paso) to 1,300; in all of Mexico, the death toll has reached more than 5,300, more than twice 2007. This is based on government figures.

All of this happens in a year following the deployment of over 20,000 military troops across the country by President Calderon in an attempt to quell the violence of the drug cartels. The change in Administration will not change the danger posed to Americans by the continuing and expanding drug cartel violence. At the same time, reports of drug cartel-related violence crossing the border to Arizona, New Mexico and Texas continue. Further, the blending of the drug cartels with youth gangs now threatens to spread to border cities. The question of border (in)security is much more than the continuing flow of illegal immigrants.

If it wasn’t such a serious situation it might not be believable. In an unrelated crime, last week anti-kidnapping consultant Felix Batista was kidnapped in Mexico.

In high school, I lived for a year in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and we used to go to Juarez just to do something different, see the world, etc. I’m thinking that wouldn’t be such a great idea this year. Mexico seems not only to be a third world country, it seems on the way to becoming another Somalia, characterized by factions at war, kidnapping, the inability of the central government to keep the factions under control, the whole nine yards.

Build the fence, Mr. President-elect. Yesterday.

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Jan 04 2009

Lionizing the rodent

Category: Cuba,Russia — harmonicminer @ 2:01 am

The president of Russia congratulates Communist Cuba on it’s huge success on the 50th Anniversary of the revolution.

Dmitry Medvedev, President of the Russian Federation, congratulated the President of the State Council and the Council of Ministers of Cuba, Raul Castro, and the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, Fidel Castro, on the occasion of the national holiday marking the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Cuba.

The Russian head of state said, among other things: “Today the tried and tested relationship of mutual understanding and cooperation between Russia and Cuba is newly reinvigorated. The deep tradition of friendship between our two peoples is one of the fundamental bases for the broadening of bilateral action and the co-ordination of our efforts on the international stage.”

In his message to Fidel Castro, Dmitry Medvedev said, “The Cuban revolution, your life’s work, opened a new path to freedom for the Cuban people. It entered the history books as a legendary example of the struggle for the high ideals of social justice. I am convinced that the new momentum in Russian-Cuban cooperation will henceforth work both to benefit the populations of Russia and Cuba, and also in the interests of ensuring a stable and multilateral world order.”

One can only wonder:

How many Cubans feel “liberated”?  Is that why so many of them have tried to get to the USA?

Why is Cuba still Communist, but Russia isn’t?  How is it that Russia congratulates Cuba for being something it no longer is, at least theoretically?

Is Russia planning to install more missiles in Cuba?  Venezuela?

If Cuba was on a “path to freedom”, why were there tens of thousands of political prisoners, most of whom died in prison?

Do Leftist Americans really think that the “high ideals of social justice”, as exemplified by Cuba, are all that admirable?  Are they all brainwashed by Michael Moore?  Does it make them nervous to use the same terminology for supposedly good goals as totalitarian dictatorships?

My favorite line here:  “a stable and multilateral world order.”   That’s code for “we plan to keep our power over our populations” and “we plan to take America down as many notches as possible.”

Smile, soon-to-be President Obama:  these guys are even slicker with language than you are, and can put more hidden meanings in a sentence than all your speechwriters combined.  You’re just purely going to love sitting across the table from them.

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Jan 02 2009

Self-defense is your duty and a form of community service

Category: education,national security,society — harmonicminer @ 10:43 am

When you don’t defend yourself from attack (when that option is available to you), you are a co-dependent with your attacker, and bear at least some responsibility for the fate of future victims of your attacker. Doug Giles has an interesting article about giving his daughters martial arts lessons here. It’s all very interesting. The money quote:

If you decide to attack your aggressor, do so quickly and with complete conviction. Attackers are most often cowards and prefer to attack easier and more submissive targets.

In the article, Giles interviews the martial arts trainer of his daughters, and it’s all pretty good advice, not Hollywood unrealistic, just straightforward common sense, highly recommended.

I think this is something most parents should consider providing for their children. And parents should teach children to be aware of their surroundings, by sharing with their children what they are thinking when they’re out and about. Sadly, most parents have been taught to be victims by schooling and television/movies, where any sort of weapon waived around is thought to be a magic wand causing complete paralysis in the victim, and where only heroes with black belts can successfully defend themselves.

If you can possibly do so, put your kids into training in something that is not oriented to “dojo ballerinas” but is more practically oriented to getting the job done, without what Bruce Lee called “the flowers”, i.e., moves that look pretty but are complicated, hard to remember, and depend on your opponent doing what you expect in order for your counter to work.

My personal recommendations: 

1)  JKD (Jeet Kune Do), Bruce Lee’s “system” (it isn’t, exactly) that borrows the most practical aspects of many different arts

2)  Krav Maga, an Israeli adaptation with enormous amounts of real world experience backing it up

3)  Jiu Jitsu –  a Brazilian adaptation of Judo and other arts

These are all “current generation” arts, i.e., they are not essentially the same as they were 300 years ago (or 1300!), but represent evolutionary adaptations and blending of multiple streams and traditions, a blending that took place in the last few decades, and represents the best of the best.

My kids study JKD.  We were lucky enough to live near one of the few students of Bruce Lee.

And, to requote:

If you decide to attack your aggressor, do so quickly and with complete
conviction. Attackers are most often cowards and prefer to attack
easier and more submissive targets.

This has a certain bearing on foreign policy and war-fighting, does it not?  I have wondered more than once what would have happened in Iraq if we had shot looters from the beginning, and responded forcefully to the first couple of terrorist acts, especially in Fallujah, Mosul and such.  Our weak initial response to these events left the populace feeling that we would not or could not protect them, and left the Islamofascist cretins with the impression that we could be had.  And that was very nearly true, before the surge.  If we had taken early, very stern action, showing we just would not tolerate looting, terrorism, or people who provided safe haven for terrorists, we would have been criticized for harshness, but consider the tens of thousands of lives, mostly Iraqi, that would have been saved.

When your enemy (the one who has decided HE is YOUR enemy) is allowed to think, even for a moment, that he can proceed with minimal resistance, you have just multiplied your problem by an order of magnitude.  It is still possible to defeat a confident enemy who thinks victory is assured…  but it’s lots harder, and costs more.

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Jan 02 2009

the Impossible dream?

Category: science,space — harmonicminer @ 9:43 am

For 50 years we’ve been Waiting for ET to phone us.

West Virginia. It is 6 am on an April morning in 1960 and Frank Drake is freezing cold. He peers up towards the focal point of the radio telescope. He mounts a flimsy ladder to the top and climbs into a space about the size of a garbage can. For the next 45 minutes, he tunes the receiver inside, which feels like starting an old car. He climbs back down and begins to listen.

Drake and colleagues were conducting a seminal experiment: the first modern search for extraterrestrial life. For four months, the researchers used the Tatel Telescope in Green Bank to listen for any intelligent signals from the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani that might be hidden on the same wavelength as radiation emitted naturally by hydrogen. Drake named the effort Project Ozma after the princess in the 0z books by Frank Baum, who wrote that he used a radio to learn of events there.

April 2010 will mark the 50th anniversary of the start of Project Ozma, and those involved in the search for extraterrestrial life, or SETI, will be raising a glass. Not only did the experiment inspire countless people to continue the search, it brought alien-hunting into the mainstream and arguably seeded the science of astrobiology.

Other famous searchers for things that were never found:

   Albert Einstein and Unified Field Theory.

   Don Quixote and defeatable windmills

   Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth

   Isaac Newton and a way to turn lead into gold

   AI researchers and actual machine intelligence

   Modern physics and cold fusion

You get the idea.  Some things just SOUND plausible, even likely.  The argument that “the universe is just so big that there has to be intelligent life out there” is like that.  It just instinctively sounds right.

That doesn’t make it right.

And even if they are there, the aliens are almost certainly far, far ahead of us, so far that we wouldn’t recognize one of their artifacts or communications methods if we saw it.  Or, they are so far behind us that they’re still working on inventing the bow and arrow, or controlling fire.  The odds of intelligent aliens in a detectable state of technological development anywhere near us are so small as to be laughable.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’ll all for funding more SETI, though I’m not acquiescent about more active approaches.  ET may not be nice.

But I don’t expect much to be found.

Jan 01 2009

I knew they were nuts

Category: education,higher education,society — harmonicminer @ 10:43 am

I have recently played a part in the revision of the general studies curriculum at a Christian university. One of the topics of discussion was whether all students should be required to take psychology. Many of us felt that psychology is a “baby discipline” without fully formed content as yet, as witnessed by the “fad of the decade” approach to theories of personality, theories of cognition, etc.  A psychology faculty member argued (incredibly, to me) that half of our incoming students had serious psychological problems, and that we had to address them.  I asked if there was any evidence that students who had taken an introductory college psychology course had better mental health at any point later in life.  (There is none, of course….)  By way of admitting this without admitting it, my faculty friend insisted that the way HE teaches it is different, and he IS effective at teaching the content of “intro to psychology” while also achieving therapeutic goals.  All of this struck me as “special pleading”, of course, but it seems that maybe he was right that half of college students are whacko:

Results Almost half of college-aged individuals had a psychiatric disorder in the past year. The overall rate of psychiatric disorders was not different between college-attending individuals and their non–college-attending peers. The unadjusted risk of alcohol use disorders was significantly greater for college students than for their non–college-attending peers (odds ratio = 1.25; 95% confidence interval, 1.04-1.50), although not after adjusting for background sociodemographic characteristics (adjusted odds ratio = 1.19; 95% confidence interval, 0.98-1.44). College students were significantly less likely (unadjusted and adjusted) to have a diagnosis of drug use disorder or nicotine dependence or to have used tobacco than their non–college-attending peers. Bipolar disorder was less common in individuals attending college. College students were significantly less likely to receive past-year treatment for alcohol or drug use disorders than their non–college-attending peers.

Conclusions Psychiatric disorders, particularly alcohol use disorders, are common in the college-aged population. Although treatment rates varied across disorders, overall fewer than 25% of individuals with a mental disorder sought treatment in the year prior to the survey. These findings underscore the importance of treatment and prevention interventions among college-aged individuals.

Can’t we just put ’em all on Prozac and teach ’em algebra, instead?

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Jan 01 2009

the Impossible dream?

Category: science,space,technology — harmonicminer @ 9:19 am

For 50 years we’ve been Waiting for ET to phone us.

West Virginia. It is 6 am on an April morning in 1960 and Frank Drake is freezing cold. He peers up towards the focal point of the radio telescope. He mounts a flimsy ladder to the top and climbs into a space about the size of a garbage can. For the next 45 minutes, he tunes the receiver inside, which feels like starting an old car. He climbs back down and begins to listen.

Drake and colleagues were conducting a seminal experiment: the first modern search for extraterrestrial life. For four months, the researchers used the Tatel Telescope in Green Bank to listen for any intelligent signals from the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani that might be hidden on the same wavelength as radiation emitted naturally by hydrogen. Drake named the effort Project Ozma after the princess in the 0z books by Frank Baum, who wrote that he used a radio to learn of events there.

April 2010 will mark the 50th anniversary of the start of Project Ozma, and those involved in the search for extraterrestrial life, or SETI, will be raising a glass. Not only did the experiment inspire countless people to continue the search, it brought alien-hunting into the mainstream and arguably seeded the science of astrobiology.

Other famous searchers for things that were never found:

   Albert Einstein and Unified Field Theory.

   Don Quixote and defeatable windmills

   Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth

   Isaac Newton and a way to turn lead into gold

   AI researchers and actual machine intelligence

   Modern physics and cold fusion

You get the idea.  Some things just SOUND plausible, even likely.  The argument that “the universe is just so big that there has to be intelligent life out there” is like that.  It just instinctively sounds right.

That doesn’t make it right.

And even if they are there, the aliens are almost certainly far, far ahead of us, so far that we wouldn’t recognize one of their artifacts or communications methods if we saw it.  Or, they are so far behind us that they’re still working on inventing the bow and arrow, or controlling fire.  The odds of intelligent aliens in a detectable state of technological development anywhere near us are so small as to be laughable.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’ll all for funding more SETI, though I’m not acquiescent about more active approaches.  ET may not be nice.

But I don’t expect much to be found.

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