Likely outcome

Yassin Musharbash describes the likely outcome for the most recent Israeli offensive in the current Der Spiegel.

Is Israel Repeating Mistakes from the Past?

"Israel's anger is understandable. On Dec. 19, Hamas elected not to renew a fragile six-month-long cease-fire with Israel and began once again lobbing explosives at random across the border into Israel. Those rockets have killed four people this week. But the question remains: Is a vast military offensive of the kind we have seen this week the best way for Israel to proceed?

It is certainly risky. Most experts on asymmetrical warfare warn that it is virtually impossible to eliminate a group like Hamas -- with its military and social components -- merely with superior firepower. Furthermore, the offensive strains Israel's relations with its neighbors Jordan and Egypt -- bonds that have never been very tight. It also weakens the positions of those Palestinians who were in favor of a negotiated peace with Israel.

The last five days of Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip, which have seen over 350 Palestinians killed and many more wounded, have highlighted the problems inherent in such an asymmetrical operation. Planes have targeted mosques because Israel thinks they are being used to cache weapons; apartment blocks where high-ranking Hamas members live have been destroyed, almost guaranteeing civilian casualties. The university was destroyed because it espoused the Hamas ideology. Each one of these targets presents a dilemma -- and the images they create are unhelpful to Israel. Indeed, the only targets that make sense are the smuggler tunnels under the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip.

It is also unclear that the offensive brings Israel a single step closer to its ultimate goal of eliminating Hamas entirely. Indeed, the more intense the Israeli bombing campaign has become, the more Palestinian rockets have flown across the border into Israel. Hamas may be briefly weakened as its commanders are knocked off and its weapons depots destroyed. But, in the long run, it is difficult to see Hamas not benefiting the same way Hezbollah benefited from the 2006 war. Their aura as resistance fighters can only be strengthened.

Some have argued that the bombing campaign makes it clear to the Palestinians exactly what their support of Hamas can result in. Whether the demonstration of power will make Palestinians more interested in a peace deal with Israel, though, is doubtful.

It is always the case that, when the situation in the Middle East escalates, the world holds Israel to a different standard than its enemies. Israel, surrounded by enemies though it may be, is a democratic society based on the rule of law. Whereas nobody expects much from Hamas, one can hope that Israel would have more regard for civilian casualties. And one can hope that it would learn the lessons of the past.

Israel is currently considering a 48-hour cease-fire plan proposed by France. Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said however that the country's leaders 'view it as important to keep up the pressure on Hamas,' according to the New York Times. Preparations are still being made for a possible ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.

Should it come to that, no one should be surprised if, in a few months, another investigative committee -- as happened after the 2006 Lebanon war -- comes to the conclusion that the conflict was a mistake.

This time, to be sure, the entire Israeli government was brought in to the decision-making process. But, in 2006, one of the primary criticisms was that Israel had not sufficiently defined its war aims before marching into southern Lebanon. 'War to the bitter end,' certainly doesn't sound any more precise."

Life is not fair for anyone. Least of all, the civilians in this conflict. The choices each player faces all have potentially deadly consequence. But the most recent option taken by Israelis has failed time and again, and as recently as 2006 in Lebanon. And, in each case, has likely made more workable solutions more difficult and needless tragedy even greater.

If Israel must learn this lesson the hard way, with significant Palestinian civilian casualties, there is little I can do about it. But, at some point, Israel must learn this lesson if she and moderate Palestinians are going end this madness.

I am tired of watching civilians die in a war not of their own making.

It is time to learn the right lessons.

Senseless tragedy

The assault on Gaza offers the best hope for peace

I would very much like this very nicely argued piece by Con Coughlin to be true. It would make life for everyone, including the Palestinians, so much easier, safer, and more decent.

I just don't think it is.

Here is the essence of the strongest argument I have read for the Israeli incursion:

"The challenge facing Israel in Gaza is not dissimilar to that which faced the US-led coalition two years ago in Iraq, when al-Qaeda supporters were threatening to undermine American efforts to transform the country into a functioning, Western-style democracy.

As with Hamas in Gaza, the al-Qaeda leadership in Iraq was seen by many as an interloper that had imposed its radical Islamic agenda on the reluctant Sunni Muslim population. The military surge devised by General David Petraeus succeeded in destroying al-Qaeda's operational effectiveness in Iraq, thereby allowing the Iraqi government to start taking responsibility for governing the country.

Israel needs to adopt a similar strategy in Gaza, not least because a large proportion of the civilian Palestinian population would dearly love to see an end to Hamas's unwelcome interference in their affairs.

Hamas's defenders like to point out that the movement owes its current dominance of the Palestinian political scene to its success in the 2005 Palestinian elections, when it won a clear majority. But many of the Palestinians who voted for Hamas did so more as a protest vote against the endemic corruption of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority than their desire to have an Islamic state imposed upon them. Once Hamas had won the election, it set about dismantling the Palestinians' fledgling democratic institutions, replacing them with an Iranian-style, autocratic administration that brooked no opposition.

Hamas's widespread unpopularity is not confined to the Palestinian territories. The movement's links to other radical Islamist groups in neighbouring states such as Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon means that it attracts scant support from moderate, pro-Western states which regard it as a threat to their own survival. The Egyptian government, in particular, makes no secret of its disdain for Hamas.

In a year in which the new American President is expected to focus much of his energy on trying to resolve the outstanding conflicts in the Middle East, from the Israeli-Palestinian dispute to Iran and Afghanistan, there is no place for an organisation such as Hamas, whose entire raison d'être appears to be simply to obstruct any effort to make the region a better place in which to live.

Israel has attracted much international criticism for the way it has set about trying to tackle the challenge posed by Hamas, but the world will be a better and safer place if Israel's own military surge in Gaza achieves the same level of success as the Americans did in Iraq."

Here's the problem.

Israel vis a vis Palestine is not America vis a vis Iraq. The hatred of Israel and its military is what gives political oxygen for Hamas' existence and efforts, to begin with, not just as an additional prop to their power. America was most certainly hated by Iraqis and Saddam Hussein did try to portray himself as their hero challenging American and Western hegemony in the world.

But the very plain fact is that Iraqis did not hate Americans in the same way that Palestinians have come to hate Israel and its military efforts. Israel, in the minds of most Palestinians, plays the same role as Saddam Hussein in the lives of Iraqis - an oppressor who has enforced his repression against their will and claims to self-determination - not the United States.

It would be lovely if Israel could claim to be a hero to the Palestinian people. But the Palestinian people very clearly, to anyone not trying to defend this most recent Israeli action, do not see Israel as any kind of hero. To the contrary, they view them, quite accurately, as a force that has killed and repressed many of their family and neighbors - for reasons that most decent people understand, even if they do not agree with the significant degree of tragedy and misery that have been imposed on the Palestinian people - and who control much of their lives without their voice or choosing. Palestinian terrorists are quite clearly the worse of the bad guys, in this scenario, and the Israelis are much more committed both to preserving life and to a genuine peace than most Palestinians, to be sure.

But that fact does not negate the very plain fact that most Palestinians would find the idea of a heroic Israeli military force liberating them from the clutches of the group they have often favored to fight back that same Israeli force as laughable, and ambivalent with much bitterness, at best.

I would love for a military solution to finally route out these brutal murderers that make up Hamas. There just is not such a solution, I do not believe.

And, in the meantime, not only do many innocent Palestinians die needlessly in such an operation. It sets the clock backwards, not forwards, by my lights, for a more likely and effective path to peace, since it engenders more bitterness and more determination on the part of Palestinians to destroy the Israeli enemy.

If Israelis prove me wrong on this count, I an open to being wrong. But if they do not, many more innocent civilians, including children, just died this Christmas inexplicably and counterproductively.

Senseless tragedy, especially the death of children, that accomplishes no real purpose that moves us forward, is the most tragic of all.

We have had quite enough senseless tragedy in Palestine and Israel.

It is time for it to end.

Tuna anyone?

Proof that pussies of the world are the ones who have fucked things up.

JUSTIN LONG in Hunger Relief by Justin Long

Nice people are constantly fucking shit up. If you don't believe me, ask Hamas. Or Hezbollah. Or Kim Jong Il. Or Mamoud Ahmadinejad. Or any real man, for that matter.

I would give all the pussies the assbeating of their life if I wasn't such a fuckin' pussy myself. Most days, I want to kick my own ass.

Thank God there are some real men in the world who know how to give the beat down to pussies who don't have the balls or the sense make the world a better place.

The Taliban.

Oh, and the Israeli Defense Forces. Welcome to the club, gentlemen.

Finally, Martin Luther King and Mohatma Gandhi are going to get the beatdown they deserve.

And free sub sandwich deliveries and all the evil in the world will finally be defeated for good.

Tuna anyone?

Blame the pussies

Has Israel learned its lesson?

Jeff Jacoby has finally figured out that after 80 years of bloodshed, what Israel and the world must stop doing is working for peace and to once and for all defeat those bloody Palestinians and all the blather on the left about peace and a two-state solution.

Because for 80 years, by Jeff's logic, Israel has been a pussy. And they finally need to grow some balls and kill these motherfuckers once and for all.

Thanks, Jeff. I'm thinking a little testosterone is exactly what this conflict has been missing for 80 years.

With all those people dead over that long period of armed conflict, isn't it obvious that the problem has been that everyone, including Israel, has been too nice?

Only pussies and Europeans don't understand that killing these motherfuckers once and for all is exactly what is going to end all the bloodshed.

For the rest of us, it is really without question that the problem in the Middle East has been not nearly enough carnage.

Thank Allah Israel will finally be ending this whole mess soon.

And if it doesn't work, we'll do what we always do.

Blame the pussies who said so.

"Hamas is the cause of all wars"

One, of many, signs that children often know better than their elders.



We're going to need more honesty from people that the aggression and brutality are failed means of governing if we are going to turn the corner.

This little girl is a good start.

Viva la vida

These are the same people, remember, who elect leaders who want to rule the world.



I wonder why most people outside of America find that kind of a ridiculous notion?

True dat

Bumper sticker on the myspace of the girl I was hopelessly in love with all through high school.



Appropriate.

Noone likes a whiner

RealClearPolitics: Victor Davis Hanson whimpering about something or other

Nice title. And criticisms of the left I share. But, outside of that, the same kind of defensiveness about an threatening, aggressive and all-too-callous foreign policy that lost Republicans the election in the first place.

Poor losers are not half as annoying as poor Victors. America suffers from abundance on many fronts. Apparently, sniveling is one of them.

Senseless

Right on time for Christmas. Jesus would most certainly approve. It is the reason for the season, after all.

Hamas Rockets pound Israel

Israel demolishes Hamas compounds, over 200 dead

Thank God this is finally going to end all of this. I really don't know how we'd manage without scores more dead on Christmas. The world would be a God-foresaken tragedy if we didn't kill a lot more people in the name of keeping people alive.

Thank goodness this will finally end the insanity and we can all go back to hating one another in peace. Or more warfare. It's all academic, really. As long as our side, whomever that may be, finally triumphs and rids the world of those dreaded [terrorists, Israelis, Arabs, Jews, take your pick].

Finally, the good guys are making things right.

Happy Hanukah and a Blessed Islamic New Year.

And may all of us go down in a hail of gunfire.

Christmas

Why is the world so fucked up?

It actually boils down pretty simply.

Everyone wants forgiveness. Noone wants to forgive.

This is the day that we celebrate the man who challenged us to be better.

Power trumps reason and freedom (until it doesn't)

Vatican rehabilitating Galileo

Yeah. Power always makes reason its bitch.

And that is exactly why power can eat a dick.

I'd rather be a bitch for reason and liberty, any day, waiting for power to suck a dick than ever be a bitch for the sake of power for its sake and at the expense of reason and freedom and the people that reason and freedom and all of us should be serving.

In the end, it always those who confuse power with reason and liberty who are the real bitches of the world.

Because, in the end, it is peoples' confidence in themselves and their own capacity for reason that improves, that makes real progress, for their own and all of our lives.

Liberal societies are not stronger by chance. They are stronger because liberal values make us stronger.

Liberal values teach the wisest among us to be patient. Until reason and freedom humble power.

And make real progress possible.

New Year's Resolution

Stop being such a whinin' little bitch. And to meet a girl with something more original to say than, "Don't I have a nice ass?"

Who am I kiddin'. I would fuck the shit out of any girl who said, "Don't I have a nice ass?"

Professor Sutherland: Keepin' it classy in '09.

Keeping it real, for the ages

Maybe I should become an English professor.

The Scarlet Letter: "OK, I shouldn't have swallowed that preacher's dick. But do you really have to be such shitheads about it?"

Huckleberry Finn: "I love dropping the N-bomb almost as much as I love Jim."

To Kill a Mockingbird: "Crazy people make better friends for your pre-pubescent daughters."

In the era of fake cable news, classic literature has never been quite so real.

As the famed Hokie Pokie once said...

That's what it's all about, baby.

We Are the World - Japanese Version - watch more funny videos

This gets closer to a better version of what the world has to offer.

America: Inspiring bad Japanese impersonation and getting our collective automotive asses spanked since God and Toyota invented the reliable engine.

Merry Christmas, world.

Freedom or power?

Andrew Sullivan asks the question that should define what America and all people want for the world.

Freedom or power?

Liberal democracy means a society predicated on freedom. It is the nature of who we are, even as we pretend otherwise. That was what drove men and women like Baron de Montesquieu, Voltaire, John Locke, David Hume, Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, Mary Wolstonecraft, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Mohatma Ghandi, John Dewey, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Martin Luther King, Karl Popper and so many othes to work and argue on behalf of freedom and liberal, democratic, and republican principles, and America's founding fathers including James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Mason, Thomas Paine, and all the rest to establish a liberal democratic republic in America.

They tirelessly sacraficed for our freedom.

It is time that we chose.

Keynesianism

Welcome to European-style socialism, my friends.






















This, apparently, is what 'progress' looks like in the 21st century.

Can't wait to see what happens when they finally take over the joint.

No offense

No offense to Ariana Huffington, but having her write on behalf of the demise of free markets is like having Fred Phelps rally for the forces of ignorance and bigotry.

Laissez-Faire Capitalism Should Be as Dead as Soviet Communism.

It just emboldens people who are on the right side of this issue.

I have a trivia quiz for Arianna Huffington:

Which name will liberal democratic people be reading hundreds of years from now to better understand markets and the economy?

Arianna Huffington? Or Adam Smith?

I'll give you a clue. It's not the washed up Republican who hasn't thought beyond her little toe about how markets function.

I don't have time to go into the longer, extended, and better argument for free markets, right now. I have a book that will be dedicated, in large part, to this project.

But here's one of the more obvious arguments:

Which economies are stronger, create more wealth, employ more people, offer more diversity of products, services, and experience, ensure greater freedom of thought, expression, and conscience, meet more peoples' needs, financially and otherwise support more and better quality efforts to tackle common problems not immediately tied to profit, are more genuinely democratic, and otherwise do better by their people?

Liberal or illiberal? Free or repressive? America or Iran? Great Britain or Cuba? Chile or Venezuela?

The arguments about free markets and mixed economies are more involved, obviously. But Adam Smith believed, as do I, that the arguments for free markets were powerful for exactly the likes of Arianna Huffington who make the argument for taxation, regulation, and giveaways only to swing that door wide open for as much power as they please.

That was Lord Acton's concern about power. And he was right. And it doesn't matter who gets a hold of it. And power being used on behalf of the wealthy to enlarge their own purses, as is happening with these bailouts, was exactly the concern of Milton Friedman.

Arianna thinks she's outthunk Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Lord Acton, Milton Friedman, Amartya Sen, Ronald Coase and a million other people committed to freedom and free markets.

I have a message for Arianna Huffington and her quaint little notion that people who are committed to free markets are fundamentalists.

Fuck you, you fuckin' mindless slutty demagogue. You don't know what the fuck you think, nevertheless what I or any of these men and women think.

You are exactly why free markets and political and economic freedom are so precious to people like me.

Because the very little thought that you have put into anything other than your career, you think that you have earned the right to regulate at will the activities of any and all of these people who outclass you in every way possible.

And all the while you fuck who you please, whore your internet smut rag as you please, drink as much booze and smoke as much weed as you please, and make as much money as you please.

The arrogance and hypocrisy of such a position reeks. Not that you've cared to consider that it might matter. As one of my best friends, Brian White, used to say amidst choruses of the Beattle's Eleanor Rigby on a van ride to a speech tournament during my days at Wichita State: Fuckin' liberals. They stink up the joint with their hypocrisy and condescension and don't even have the sense to ask your name when they fuck you. I should know. I spent most of my life as one. I was too young to know the difference, I suppose.

I don't take up for any ideology or damned fool shortsighted notion of the world, anymore.

I'm a liberal of the original sort. When liberalism meant something. Classical liberalism. Liberal as in liberty. It meant societies predicated on the freedom of individual consciences to work on behalf of all sorts of concerns, noble and not-so-noble.

What I respect is people who have stronger arguments and understandings of what they are doing to offer. And who at least try to live a life of something approximating principle.

And you aren't it, Arianna.

And that is why you should be kept as far away from power as possible, you fuckin' dumbshit cheerleader.

Lord Acton might have a thing or two to teach you about that.

Merry Christmas, y'all

I lifted this directly from one of my best friends, Carson Brackney, at BigRedNotebook.com.

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Dirty, rotten, blind theft. All in the name of Christmas.

God, I love this country.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

But of course

But of course.

AP study finds $1.6B went to bailed-out bank execs

Lord Acton and Adam Smith both had one or two things to say about this particular version of corporate socialism.

In fact, it was this exact tendency of the rich and powerful to look out for themselves at the expense of everyone else that led each of them to the conclusion that the most honest and decent societies were the consequence of greater freedom, not greater power.

That is what it originally meant to be a liberal: to believe in liberty as the better alternative to power as the basis for society and the fundamental premise of governance.

But of course liberals would abandon such liberalism. What could make more sense?

Nice guys finish last

You know why nice guys finish last? Because this world just might be a decent place if it weren't for all the fuckin' love and kindness.

Jesus Christ was a sucker. One less do-gooder in the world.

This Christmas, we should all be giving out bumper stickers that say out loud how how we really feel inside.

Nice guys: Crucifixion's a bitch.

What a mess this world would be if we didn't have such dicks in charge.

Thank goodness we don't have that problem.

Rules is rules

Florida Woman Says Former Church Plans To Make Her Sins Public

Actually, this church has it wrong. Biblically speaking, in the Hebrew tradition, they stoned women.

In Iran, death is the punishment for fornication.




Zina laws in Muslim countries impose sentences of public whippings, years in prison, and stonings for fornication and adultery.

Rules is rules. Isn't that what Jesus said? Something like that.

Glad they finally whipped that problem.

Progress

Force as a governing philosophy.

Free trade bill sparks violent brawl in S. Korean parliament



'Zimbabwe is mine' says Mugabe

Iraqi judge: Shoe-tossing reporter was beaten

All that plus a new New Deal.

Iran: A government bailout for an ailing stock market.

Progress. Happy days are here again.

Liberty and the limits of the rule of law

Ronald Cass, Dean of the Boston University School of Law and chairman for the Center for the Rule of Law, gives honesty a big shot in the arm in today's Wall Street Journal.

Madoff Exploited the Jews: Networks of trust are vulnerable. No law can change that.

Law and power have limits for what they can deter, prevent, or advance. We are vulnerable to violations of trust as a function of living.

Every generation before ours has entrusted resolving such issues through law. But the limit of law is that it can only help to make marginal right after a violation has occurred. And, far too often, it can fail to right a wrong, and, as often, make two wrongs and no right.

The idea that it would be 21st century "liberals" who would look to law to resolve all violations of trust is one of the more ironic facts of the history of liberal democracy and liberal values.

How ironic for progressives that it will be conservatives who will make the most powerful arguments for the advancement of liberty in this particular stage of our democratic development, and "liberals" who argue for the reverse of liberty.

There was a day when to be liberal meant to love liberty.

Ronald Cass makes the case for why that should be today as much as when that term came to mean something near to our hearts.

Where this contest is won

Pete Du Pont is on fire, today, in his dead-center column on "progressive" economic policies and the likely consequences for the economy.

Don't Pull Back: 'Progressive' policies would cause economic regression

From that column:

"These two governmental takeovers have raised important questions concerning the future course of our country: How much government money and how much government regulation of the private sector should be a part of our market economy? Should America become a Europeanized sort of a nanny state in which the government manages our industries, their boards of directors, their products and their finances?

It shouldn't, but it is clear that the incoming Obama administration believes strongly in governmental control of a great many parts of our economy. During the campaign, Barack Obama called for a 10% to 12% annual increase in government spending, which will likely come on top of our current congressional spending surge, which according to USA Today 'is increasing the federal share of the nation's economic activity close to $1 out of every $4, the highest level since World War II,' and will give us "a budget deficit headed towards a record $1 trillion.'

Mr. Obama is urging several other pieces of government control legislation that would quickly Europeanize America's future.

After automobile manufacturing control, the next effort will be to mandate government regulation and operation of health care: a federal statute regulating the price, content and supervision of health care, and a government council to significantly regulate the content and cost of health care policies (see my November column).

Next, the regulation and downsizing of international trade. Trade creates jobs--some five million Americans work for overseas companies. The export of American products support some six million domestic jobs, the export of services another five million, and U.S. trade as a share of gross domestic product reached 29% in 2007. Mr. Obama opposes trade, from his previously stated opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement, to his dislike of other regional trade agreements, so we will see our economy shrink if these policies are followed.

As for the environment, the Boxer-Lieberman global warming bill that failed to pass the Senate last June will be back, and with the Democrat Senate's new 58-seat majority instead of the current 51, it is much more likely to pass. This bill would shut down coal-fired plants and contains more than 300 production regulations and mandates, from a federal commission to impose environmental controls on businesses, to a protectionist agency that could impose tariffs on imported goods.

In short, bigger and more intrusive government is rolling down the tracks toward us. Taxes will be higher, government spending will be larger, and matters from automobile manufacturing to health care and trade will be Europeanized. The government will be in charge.

As Mr. Smick concluded: 'Today the United States is a politically polarized nation plagued increasingly with thoughts of class warfare and unable to exert economic leadership in the world. . . . Nervous markets sense that American policy makers are pulling back.'

But America mustn't pull back, it must move forward, with low taxes, expanded global economic trade, and less, not more, government interference in the marketplace. It does not look like we are moving in those directions, but we should be."

There is where this contest will be won and lost, ladies and gentleman. And, I have full confidence, will be won by those who honestly value the free market. In the empirics.

You can make as many weak arguments and construct as much weak propaganda for a position as you please.

But only the strongest understandings and arguments win out in the marketplace of ideas. And the strongest understandings are yielded from the empirical evidence. And, given the trends of almost the entire 20th century, but especially the last 50 years or so, I have very little doubt that general thrust of Pete's argument is correct, here, and that Keynesianism and socialism, in the form of government-sponsored intervention in the economy, will see its last twilight as a serious economic or political theory.

The kids and I had a fantastic discussion, today, actually, getting underneath why the most desperate poverty, in the form of starvation and debilitating and life-threatening disease, can only be addressed through the market, with temporary government interventions being necessary only in the cases of extreme deprivation - hence, the quite sensible public disapproval of the current financial bailouts of affluent industries in the United States; all in the name of socialism, mind you - but a commitment to for-profit and non-profit markets of committed citizens engaged in genuinely democratic efforts to tackle the world's most serious problems is the direction we should be headed, with their ideas and efforts being rewarded or allowed to fail on their own merits.

Pete is quite right that this is exactly the direction that the world should be taking, right now. And I am quite confident that this is exactly the direction the world will be taking. As soon as enough people see the folly of our ways.

And seeing the folly of our ways is what free and democratic peoples do best.

What Prop 8 could never stop

You got to love globalization.



America. Inspiring swishy Maria Carey impersonations since 1776.

Stuff and what matters

A reminder of what matters.

Why Stuff is Not Salvation

Merry Christmas, everyone.

The more things change...

$700 Billion Bailout Celebrated with Lavish $800 Billion Executive Party

How the world really works. A la, the Onion.

Gambatte kudasai

Or good luck. As Milton Friedman might say.

Barack Obama-san

Brilliant article. My favorite bit:

"November 1999: 18 trillion yen. In a "last push," Mr. Obuchi's government spent 7.4 trillion yen to prop up businesses, 6.8 trillion yen for social infrastructure projects like telecommunications and environmental projects, and two trillion yen for housing loans, among other things. Debt-to-GDP reached 128.3%.

Japan's economy grow anemically over that decade, but as the nearby chart shows, its national debt exploded. Only in this decade, with a monetary reflation and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's decision to privatize state assets and force banks to acknowledge their bad debts, did the economy recover. Yet recent governments have rolled back Mr. Koizumi's reforms and returned to their spending habits. But Japan does have better roads."

You gotta read the whole thing.

At bottom, social science is like car mechanics. Either you get the car to go or you don't. And no matter how much you bullshit your friends that you know your way under that hood, when the car won't run, people stop listening.

Or as the Wall Street Journal would put it:

"Now we're told that a similar spending program -- a new New Deal -- will revive the U.S. economy. How do you say 'good luck' in Japanese?"

News item: Keynesians discover that they were right all along

Amusing.

Why Keynes is the Man of the Year

"It is this flight into cash that makes interest-rate policy such an uncertain agent of recovery. If the managers of banks and companies hold pessimistic views about the future, they will raise the price they charge for “giving up liquidity,” even though the central bank might be flooding the economy with cash. That is why Keynes did not think that cutting the central bank’s interest rate would necessarily — and certainly not quickly — lower the interest rates charged on different types of loans. This was his main argument for the use of government stimulus to fight a depression. There was only one sure way to get an increase in spending in the face of an extreme private-sector reluctance to spend, and that was for the government to spend the money itself. Spend on pyramids, spend on hospitals, but spend it must.

This, in a nutshell, was Keynes’s economics. His purpose, as he saw it, was not to destroy capitalism but to save it from itself. He thought that the work of rescue had to start with economic theory itself. Now that Greenspan’s intellectual edifice has collapsed, the moment has come to build a new structure on the foundations that Keynes laid."

Robert Skildesky has obviously not heard of Adam Smith. Or John Stuart Mill. Or Milton Friedman.

It is so ironic that after more than half a century of Keynesian fiscal and regulatory policies doing a find job of undermining their own intellectual premises with or without independent criticism, thank you very much (Robert has apparently forgotten about the stagflation of the 1970's and the price, wage, and other controls that made it possible), leftists are reveling in the "story" that it was just an elaborate conspiracy by conservatives against the unflinching virtue of progressives in the 20th century.

Sweet story, huh? Good guy liberals save the world from mean, evil, greedy conservatives. Ironic that these guys don't believe in good guys and bad guys, isn't it? Ironic that they believe in progress, at all, given that conservatives are still in our midst unawares, apparently, of the righteousness of the left's march of progress?

Never really occurred to them that perhaps they were wrong.

It will.

Because people get tired of the consequences of bullshit long before they get tired of the bullshit, itself. And there are plenty of consequences that neo-Keynsianism will serve up. Progressives will try to talk themselves out of them.

But that's the beauty of a free and open marketplace of ideas. You can run from the consequences of your poorer ideas. But you can't hide.

And, in economic matters as much as in other matters, the truth will set us free.

Bank on it.

All of us blind

It is bizarre to me that the very kinds of treatment of people that leads Westerners, honestly and accurately, to recognize the barbarity and tragedy of life in places like Iran, is what too many in the West and outside the grip of such repression celebrate as the solution to all of our problems. The final solution, you might say.

Iranian Woman Blinded by Spurned Man Invokes Islamic Retribution

"TEHRAN -- Ameneh Bahrami once enjoyed photography and mountain vistas. Her work for a medical equipment company gave her financial independence. Several men had asked for her hand in marriage, but the hazel-eyed electrical technician had refused them all. 'I wanted to get married, but only to the man I really loved,' she said.

Four years ago, a spurned suitor poured a bucket of sulfuric acid over her head, leaving her blind and disfigured.

Late last month, an Iranian court ordered that five drops of the same chemical be placed in each of her attacker's eyes, acceding to Bahrami's demand that he be punished according to a principle in Islamic jurisprudence that allows a victim to seek retribution for a crime. The sentence has not yet been carried out."

And here are reactions at MediaTakeOut, back in November, when the sentence was first announced.

"I HATE CRAP LIKE THIS.

WTF? LOOK AT THAT POOR WOMAN'S FACE! THESE IGNORANT, SELFISH, SELF-RIGHTEOUS, JEALOUS MOFOS NEED THE BOOK THROWN AT THEM!

THAT HAD TO BE THE SCARIEST, MOST PAINFUL THING TO HAPPEN TO SOMEONE! JUST GIVE ME A BAT, SOME ROPE AND 15 MINUTES ALONE IN A ROOM WITH THIS FOOL!"

"Oh I am liking THAT EYE FOR AN EYE [EXPLETIVE]!!!! Clear up these jails...do to them what they did to their victims and TRUST me CRIME WILL GO DOWN!!!

We dont need to have these nigggas lounging around wit meals, tv and a work out center, smoking cigs and making clicks and sh!t!!!

DAMN why cant we get GANSTA wit these so called violent offenders!!!"

And my personal favorite:

"Damn, and he claimed he did that out of love? Some people's minds are so warped. Anything goes these days, it's just sad.

No sense of right and wrong, no moral compass, no gut feelings, no guilty conscience, nothing...........I'm so thankful I was born in The Bahamas, which is founded on Christian principles."

We're so enlightened, aren't we?

What happened to this woman was an incomparable tragedy, obviously. But the truth is that we can't decide what we are and what we want to be when something like this happens. We're sure that we are better until we see something ugly like this and then we decide that maybe all that barbarism isn't such a bad thing.

Apparently the Christian commenter forgot that the central and most courageous challenge that Christ posed to the world was that giving into the temptation of an eye for an eye maintained and reinforced all that ugliness in his world, as much as ours. And that the only way out was to give up that temptation.

Repressive societies, like Iran, regularly give into that temptation and regularly have the most serious problems with issues like brutal violence, especially violence against women.

Jesus posited that the two correlate and that if we wanted to end it, we needed to take forgiveness seriously.

Apparently, my man from Nazareth was wrong and the Iranian mullahs are right.

Good thing we got that cleared up.

True love for trolls

For all of those convinced that the secret to life is having the high hand in negotiations, a reminder of where such out-of-touch douchebaggery leads.

Best of craigslist: SWF who isn't asking too much

From that list:

"-must be willing to pay for dinner at least once a week at a Zagat-rated restaurant after proper research and scouting of restaurant

-must own more than 3 items from The North Face jacket line but no more than 5

-owning a car is a plus, but it can't be a hatchback (some standards)

-I ski one weekend a year, so you ski. No shredders.

-must love Gary Larson, and hate Dilbert

-passionate about animal rights, but willing to take in the circus when it comes to town

-must read at least 3 books a month, no comics unless Gary Larson

-must have read complete works of Jane Austen

-must know how to turn a Word document into a PDF

-must be on T-Mobile for Fave 5 access

-must love pinball and not play ping pong

-3 out of your 5 favorite movies should be John Hughes films

-must agree to watch 'The Hills' on MTV on Sundays but hate that bitch Heidi, she is everything wrong with womankind

-must know CPR and have current certification, ++ for SCUBA certification

-must be home from 2-6pm on Saturdays to receive packages; bonus points if you're an Ebay power seller too!

-NO FELONS!!!

-must have all limbs, no quads (not biased, just poor past experience)"

And the kicker:

"I am willing to make a few sacrifices, but not many. If you see yourself in even a FEW of my specifications, you are invited to apply. Think of it more like a guidebook to my heart."

I suppose if you have the heart of a vapid, shallow, self-centered she-cow.

Note to women:

No man is really attracted to such women. Not even hot women. Not after they have used you and your girlfriends for their advanced anatomy study.

Why people waste their lives gratifying their egos in such useless ways I will never know.

Oh, I remember now. Because thet are insufferable fucktards.

Welcome to true love, I suppose. With yourself, wanker. Congrats to the happy couple.

Bank on it

As to be expected, the Economist nails it exactly.

The left's resignation note

"The proudest trophy of the left is the European social model, a web of labour and welfare laws offering a 'high degree of social protection'. The model emerged during the post-war boom, when living standards soared across western Europe. In his book 'Postwar', Tony Judt, a New York-based British academic, lists many causes: governments turned away from protectionism, people started having lots of babies, energy was cheap and Europe had much catching up to do (in 1957 only 2% of Italian homes had a refrigerator, but by 1974 94% did).

Crucially, the European social model also enjoyed an amazingly low degree of external competition. In 1960 a West German car worker had little to fear from Eastern Europe or Asia. Skodas and Nissans were pretty horrid; Chinese workers were lost to the madness of Mao. When China, India and the ex-Soviet block joined the capitalist world three decades later, the global labour pool grew from 1.5 billion to 3 billion: an explosion called the 'great doubling' by Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist.

Never again will west European workers live in a world with so little competition. Honest European politicians know this—and so, deep down, do most voters. That is why trade unions are still shedding members. It is why the mainstream left cannot credibly promise to reverse globalisation, preferring instead to blame the crisis on ill-regulated markets. But attacking market follies is hardly a distinctive position (listen to Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s supposedly centre-right president). Europe’s centre-left is struggling because its 20th century rationale is dying. If it cannot find a less muddled message that explicitly embraces globalisation, this economic crash could deliver it a fatal blow."

20th century leftists either needs to embrace 19th century liberalism or get used to losing elections, down the line.

You know what I love about the marketplace of ideas? It sticks around and sorts through this nonsense even if you don't like it. Fucking brilliant.

The marketplace believes in you even if you don't believe in the marketplace.

And liberalization, now and forever, is the wave of humanity's future.

Bank on it.

Our most fundamental error and our most important virtue

If I had to sum up the most serious problem with people, today and since the dawn of humanity, it is that most people do not understand people very well, at all, and never really have. And we have treated one another poorly in the extreme as a consequence of our ignorance.

Most people believe that they can threaten and overpower others much more than they really can and rationalize the bullying, abuse of power, and repeated tragedy that this often becomes much more than they are willing to acknowledge, and their limitations in their understanding or in the use of that power.

This is what Lord Acton meant when he said that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Most people do not respect the limitations of power, enough, nor, more importantly, their own limitations as human beings, to wield power wisely.

And that is the most powerful argument for liberty, which is the foundation for liberal democracy, even as we perpetually rationalize our illiberal impulses.

Most people do not understand power or people well. And most people are too stubborn to admit this is the case. And all over the world, people die, are imprisoned, are oppressed, and our otherwise abused by power and those who seek to wield it over others, all in the name of this most fundamental error of understanding of people and power.

No matter how much we take for granted liberal thinkers like Lord Acton, John Stuart Mill, Baron de Montesquieu, John Locke, Adam Smith, Mary Wolstonecraft, Frederick Douglas, and the like to promote liberty as the central principle of honest human existence, they have made so much of the liberty and good things that it brings us possible to our lives.

And what liberal and illiberal people of the world, today, need more than any other one thing in our lives, right now, is to appreciate and understand how important that value is in our lives and the limitations of power and our understanding of it and one another.

The kids and I have remarked, many times, that it is terribly tragic and ironic, that, outside of bacteria, viruses, and other sources of disease, the most serious predator for human beings is and may always have been other human beings. And all as a function of this mistake in what is otherwise our most serious strength: our capacity for reason and intelligent thought.

Our most important virtue in the face of this repeated and most serious mistake of reasoning of human existence is our most serious strength as a species versus other comparable animal and other living species: our capacity to learn.

And the virtue that facilitates this learning, best, in the face of the often overwhelming arrogance and abuse of power and the compounded tragedy it creates in the lives of our fellow man and woman is the one most celebrated by the man whose birth people around the world will be celebrating in 12 days, Jesus Christ of Nazareth: forgiveness and love for fellow man, woman, and child.

Jesus did not promote forgiveness and love because he was weak or soft. He promoted forgiveness and love because it was the only way through a world much more brutal and capricious than our own. And because the one group of people most in need of forgiveness are those who refuse to do so, failing to recognize that it is their own sins and mistakes of judgment that are most in need of forgiveness.

There is a reason pride is the deadliest sin.

And we are living the consequences of that sin, today, as we have been since the beginning of humankind.

This season, we should consider forgiving ourselves and one another for that most deadly sin, and loving one another enough to see past our own pride and our mistakes of judgment, and committing ourselves to true progress:

Peace on earth and goodwill towards men.

On second thought

On second thought, I can't do something I will hate for the rest of my life.

I've got to do something with my life that offers me substantially more freedom.

Teaching just isn't going to do it, at this point. Not the way it is governed today.

I've got to do something where I can be happy.

And that cannot be education, given the illiberal direction we have taken.

I don't know. We'll see.

How politics really works

Most of the time, though noone will admit it, this is how politics really works.



When random opinion trumps more substantial and honest reason, this is what you get.

I'm pretty sure we can do better.

Hitler

I think I now understand how Hitler was able to do what he did in Germany.

Because people are, too often, stupid, scared, mean and lazy. And they will believe just about anything they are told.

Until they don't.

Two words

Two words for me, as it concerns my job, right now, and as it concerns all the bullshit and shitheadeness in the world masquerading as something more honest and decent:

Man up.

Life is bullshit, often. The trick is being able to tell the difference between bullshit and something more honest.

In the meantime, I gotta deal with the bullshit. And fuck every last asshole who brings it my way. Your comeuppance is on it's way. Bet on that. Hitler and Stalin thought they were going to rule the world and noone was going to challenge them, either.

And as my students are thoroughly aware, today, with some study: every motherfucker who says he will rule unchallenged goes down. Every single last one of them. Without exception.

Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman included.

Bank on it.

Be prepared to man up.

Hubris

Big Government is Back

Hubris, the Greeks whisper. Hubris.

Who kept us safe?

Someone needed to say it.

Peggy Noonan So Happy George W. Bush Prevented 9/11

As Wonkette puts it (always with eloquence and class):

"Every day is Good Friday in the Wall Street Journal, because Friday is Peggy’s Day, and this week her wonderful Declaration is right there in the headline, “At Least Bush Kept Us Safe.” Wait, what? Let’s just ask the old Internets here and double-check, because it is so hard to remember, say, when TERRORISTS BLEW UP MOTHERFUCKING MANHATTAN, WITH JETS, WHICH RUINED EVERYTHING FOREVER.

Umm, yep, Google says September 11, 2001. Who was president then, anyway? Right, right, Al Gore. That fat faggot, he killed 3,000 innocent Americans who weren’t even in the military, and then he started a war with the wrong place, and luckily he was indicted for War Crimes and then executed on teevee — along with Lieberman, which was extra-awesome — and the Supreme Court appointed George Bush Junior to be president because he actually won Florida, it was finally determined, and Bush kept us safe!...

George Bush Junior will be remembered for many things, for a very long time. But the witless clown who jacked off at his pretend ranch in Crawford while freaked-out FBI agents were frantically begging for White House help in stopping an organized plot unveiling itself within the United States for foreign hijackers to crash passenger jets into high-profile American buildings will certainly the fuck not be remembered by anyone as the guy who 'kept us safe.'

About time someone said it.

Don't mean to burst conservative pretensions but, for all the bluster about testing Presidents terrorists think are weak, nothing even in the ballpark of 9/11 happened on the watches of any previous American President, unless you count the War of 1812. And even then, only 2260 Americans died in action.

If terrorists attack when Presidents are weak, the current President has a lot of explaining to do.

The echo-chamber gets thick in every circle. But this particular theme has been uniquely disingenuous.

Thank God Al Queda didn't attack again. But I'm not 100% sure that George W. had anything to do with it, at all. I'm open to argument. But I'm not open to blatant bullshit. And this one has the stink of the latter.

The Administration deserves thanks for its efforts. But it doesn't deserve credit where credit is not due. And keeping us safe from 9/11 is not something the Bush Administration can claim, because 9/11 happened while he was President, if anyone took notice.

Back to the drawing board, folks. Surely there are better reasons to celebrate this President than ones that aren't true.

For the ladies in my life

For Jenny. Hope life is good, hon.



And for the future Mrs. So-Hot-I-Sizzle-In-A-Sweet-And-Almost-Intellectual-Kind-Of-Way Sutherland.



And, in case the women are into something a little more hardcore. I'm like Ice Cube with vocabulary.



There's more where that came from, ladies. Even stuff I didn't steal from the Land of the Long White Cloud (Yeah, I'm sure they were sippin' tea the night they came up with that one).

Holla.

Do we really need any more evidence?

While I appreciate and agree with Paul Krugman's conclusion that the U.S. auto industry bailout is a short-term effort to avoid facing the more fundamental weaknesses in the American car industry, and, more importantly, to help those responsible for these companies to face that weakness...

Do we really need any more evidence that this guy is just as likely to be a dumbshit like the rest of us, than this conclusion:

Krugman: U.S. Auto Industry Will Probably Disappear

Yes, he really said this. Read the article. I couldn't believe it either.

Paul is not a bad guy. He's a smart guy. He is also politically unhinged, as of late (say over the last 5 years; I bet you can deduce when it started).

And his ideological blinders show in this foolish, foolish notion that somehow America is going to stop producing cars.

You mean like how they stopped producing computers when the Japanese got a jump on that industry? Or how Americans stopped producing electronics as Taiwan got good at that?

Paul, the U.S. auto industry will not be as dominant in the next generation. You and I agree on that point. Too many stronger competitors, especially from Japan (I am biased, since I own a Toyota). But the U.S. auto industry will still be around. GM and Ford are not going anywhere (Chrysler might be another story, but I still think it is likely that someone will pick up that Chrysler brand name and run with it, even if their cars are kind of shit. Did I just say that out loud? I'm actually joking. I don't know dick about cars, is the truth. But I do have some understanding of business. And I have a feeling that someone will want to keep making money off of Chrysler's name, even if they lose market share).

People are not going to stop buying Fords and Chevies just because Toyotas are often better. They will just buy fewer of them.

And, in the meantime, that generalization does not at all hold for individual car models and car purchases, all of which are made on an incalcuable multitude of many different individual reasons and calculations.

Paul Krugman's not a bad guy. He's a smart guy. He's also full of shit. Often. And this little zinger, which derives from the field of analysis that won Krugman the Nobel Prize, international trade patterns and economic geography, remember, should illustrate that fact really well.

Don't worry, Paul. I mean that, bud. We all fuck up. I still like you. You're still a smart guy. You got plenty of good things to say, that's for sure. You just needed a little humbling.

It looks like you might be finding some. That's what it looks like to get honest, Paul.

If that's the case, proud on ya.

Choices (or I've Got Soul, But I'm Not a Soldier)

Back in July, I posted about a really outstanding soldier, Lieutenent Matthew Gallagher, known as Lieutenant G to his men, who was featured in a Washington Post article I caught awhile back, and who was being harrassed by a superior because he was asserting his right to leave the armed forces instead of going professional military. Matthew featured this Killers' song, All These Things That I've Done, on his website, Kaboom: A Soldier's War Journal.



And I have to say that after dealing with the bullshit and bureaucracy and limitations on my ability to do a better job in my own work, I completely understand this soldier's dilemma, today.

What he was going through, I think, and definitely what I am experiencing, now, is that I cannot imagine living a life where everything I do is controlled and compromised by the machinations of people who don't care as much as I do about the doing the job well and the freedom I need to do it.

And, at some level, if they can't respect my right to make my own choices - because they don't care as much about what they're doing, is the truth, not enough to question their own egos - then I need to go do something where I don't have to deal with such assholes until they can face up to their bullshit.

I'm not going to spend my life being controlled by people who care less about what they're doing. And less about me than they do about their own egos.

Fuck 'em, I say. Do it without me. I'll be just fine without anyone who disrespects me and my choices like that.

For all you babyboomers out there (especially leftists):

You remember how you felt about the draft during Vietnam?

That's how I feel about having my choices coerced by you, too. And if you can't respect that, I'll have to let you do the work on your own.

And that is the choice - as I decide if I'm staying with teaching, for a living - that I am facing, today.

Our romance with power

This is what is wrong with romanticizing power. No matter how much damage and destruction people do to the lives of others in its name, noone ever wants to take responsibility.

The Real Bill Ayers by Bill Ayers

Here's hilzoy's spot-on response to Bill Ayers stank solipsism:

"Starting his narrative in 1970 allows Ayers to omit the time when Weatherman was not trying not to harm people: for instance, the Days of Rage:

'The Days of Rage," as the 1969 protest was called, brought several hundred members of the Weatherman—many of them attired for battle with helmets and weapons—to Lincoln Park. The tear-gassed marches, window smashing, and clashes with police lasted four days, during which 290 militants were arrested and 63 people were injured. Damage to windows, cars, and other property soared to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Around this time, Ayers summed up the Weatherman philosophy as "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents—that's where it's really at.'

Nor should we forget Bernardine Dohrn's comment on the Manson murders at the Flint War Council in 1969: 'Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies. Wild!' At the same meeting, Weathermen 'debated the ethics of killing white babies, so as not to bring more 'oppressors' into the world, and denounced American women bearing white babies as 'pig mothers.' (p. 159) And they sang songs about a lawyer, Richard Elrod, who had broken his neck during the Days of Rage: 'Stay Elrod stay/ Stay in your iron lung/ Play Elrod play/ Play with your toes a while.' (p. 159)

The 'accidental explosion' Ayers refers to occurred when three Weathermen blew themselves up while making nail bombs to detonate at a dance at Fort Dix. One was Ayers' girlfriend, 'who was later identified from a fragment of finger.'

After three of their own were blown up, Weatherman tried not to hurt people, though they did blow up property, and seem to have placed a lot of trust in their ability to tell, for instance, whether any janitors were still in the buildings they bombed. And after that explosion, according to Ayers, the Weather Underground got a new name. But when his co-Weathermen blew themselves up, they were planning to kill a whole lot of people. Weatherman was never nonviolent.

Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground did more than 'cross lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense.' They were, by any syandard I can think of, terrorists. As one historian says, 'The only reason they were not guilty of mass murder is mere incompetence (...) I don't know what sort of defense that is.'

They say they did it to end the war in Vietnam. But how, exactly, that was supposed to happen is a total mystery. It's the Underpants Gnome theory of political activism:

Phase 1: Set a bunch of bombs.
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: The war ends!

That level of tactical idiocy is one thing when you're collecting underpants. It's quite another when you're setting bombs.

Ayers may think that there's still a debate about the Weather Underground's effectiveness. And he might also think that he 'acted appropriately in the context of those times.' To me, though, he's just a shallow rich kid who took himself and his revolutionary rhetoric much too seriously, helped inspire people to do things that got them killed, and helped to discredit the anti-war movement and the left as a whole.

He has done enough harm already. Now he should do the decent thing and leave us in peace.'

Actually, there is one more important twist to Bill Ayer's retardation.

It was consistent with the same theory dominant in most mainstream political circles now and then: that with enough pressure, they could get their way.

Everyone who is everyone believes this line of nihilism. As long as they can justify it in the name of their cause. Bill Ayers and his pals just took it to all extremes they could conjure. Which makes them bigger shitheads than everyone else, that's for sure.

But it doesn't exactly get everyone else off the hook.

Lord Acton was not joking. Power tends to corrupt. Absolutely power corrupts absolutely. It doesn't matter who has it or who wants it.

That is why we value liberty. Because those who seek to exercise power never know a limit to its use. Unless we take liberty seriously.

Strangely, no matter how much power those who romanticize it gather and no matter how long our regressive obsession with it, we always come back to that principle.

When we say we live in a liberal democracy, today, or that we get a liberal education, or that we love liberal values, this is what we mean.

It has nothing to do with ideology. Left-wing, right-wing or otherwise. It has to do with freedom. And affirming a democratic government that respects it and takes it seriously.

And that is our challenge this generation and will be as long as those who are hostile to liberty kill, imprison, and repress those who love it.

Most people may not know Voltaire, Baron de Montesquieu, John Locke, Lord Acton, John Stuart Mill, Mary Wolstonecraft. They might recognize James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin and any and all of the early liberals that made our liberty central to our governance and our lives.

They did not fight and sacrafice for our liberty so we could pretend that it was all an elaborate hoax by naive idealists who did not understand the nasty and brutish world as it is. They made those sacrafices so we could cherish it.

We can romanticize power out of our free will. But we ought not do all of the things that we can.

It will up to us to decide if their sacrafices were made in vain.

Real courage

For all of those romanticizing the Chinese government and repression, generally, a reminder of what it looks like. And what it looks like when people have the courage to challenge it.



Repression is not progress. No matter the propaganda. Progress is reducing and ending repression as the means of democratic engagement, not its increase and impunity.

Courage is our capacity to honestly account for this mistaken direction for humanity.

Freedom is not a dirty word

Thank goodness somewhere freedom is not a dirty word.

Defending political freedom in Russia and Britain

Progress

It is amazing to me how much humanity fumbles forward rather than walking there in some kind of straight line. For each of us and all of us together. We often inch forward despite ourselves as much as because of ourselves. It's just the natural human propensity to screw up and the learning that happens as a result.

When people fail to make progress is when they just won't admit their mistakes. Each of us and all of us together. When we just can't even imagine that maybe the problem is us.

And that is how we make progress. When people figure out and when we figure out that it is us and not the other guy. Or when it is all of us and not the asshole who keeps protesting that we're the ones screwing up. Jesus was one such asshole. He happened to be right. And after they killed them, all of those people responsible must have been thinking, "Who's the asshole, now?"

Probably about right

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

The wisdom of markets and George Will

It is on the subject of markets that George Will is genius.

Markets, Not Economists, Will Help the Economy

"In recent years, in normal conditions, the economy has 'lost' tens of millions of jobs through capitalism's 'creative destruction' (Joseph Schumpeter's phrase). It also has created a few million more than that, which is why the destruction is creative. Investor's Business Daily reports:

'Since Eisenhower's first term, the economy has created an average of 1.5 million new jobs each year. Since Reagan's first term, the average has been about 2.5 million a year. And Reagan, who inherited an economy as bad if not worse than the current one, saw 6.3 million new jobs created four years after he entered the White House.'

Because the economy's job-creation is not quite as predictable as a solar eclipse, Obama, by promising 2.5 million jobs by 2011, is a bit more audacious than was Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee, who astonished King Arthur's court by commanding an eclipse that he knew was due. Still, because scores of millions of today's jobs will exist two years from now, who will be able to dispute a presidential claim that administration policies 'saved' some portion of them?

If you must forecast tomorrow's weather, you will be tolerably accurate more often than not if you say it will be sort of like today's. In normal times, the rule for forecasting next year's economy is similar. The problem is that economic forecasts matter most in abnormal times, such as these. The question is: How abnormal are these times?

A snapshot of a moving target is of limited use, but: Sales the day after Thanksgiving were 3 percent higher than last year. Over the weekend, 172 million people, shopping in stores and online, spent an average of $372.57, a 7.2 percent increase over a year ago, when 147 million shoppers spent $347.55 per person. Is this evidence that the recent deleveraging of indebted households has breathed fresh life into personal consumption, which normally is 70 percent of economic activity? Is it evidence of underestimated strength of an economy in which more than 93 percent of those who want to work are employed, and more than 93 percent of mortgages are being paid on time? Is it evidence that Washington's jaw-dropping interventions with hundreds of billions of dollars are having their intended psychotherapeutic effects? How much is it evidence of the decline of the price of a gallon of regular gasoline from $4.10 in July to $1.81 today? Over a year, every 1 cent decline is a $1.5 billion saving to consumers.

Whatever else historians will say about Washington's response to today's crisis, they are not apt to say the government did too little. It certainly has not suffered the fate of Buridan's ass, the animal in a philosophic puzzle who, placed equidistant from two piles of hay, starved to death from indecision. Some Washingtonians can remember when the federal government first had a budget of $100 billion (1962); this year's decisiveness might contribute to a deficit next year of $1 trillion.

In his wise book 'Capitalism, Democracy & Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery,' John Mueller, an Ohio State political scientist, notes that John Maynard Keynes' central theme, according to his biographer Robert Skidelsky, was that 'the state is wise and the market is stupid.' Mueller continues: 'Working from that sort of perspective, India's top economists for a generation supported policies of regulation and central control that failed abysmally -- leading one of them to lament recently, 'India's misfortune was to have brilliant economists.'

Many of them were educated in Britain, by Keynes' followers. In America today, everyone agrees that the president-elect's economic team is composed of brilliant economists."

Please read the entire piece. There is more brilliance where that came from.

I know it is hard to believe. But letting the markets do their magic is exactly what the doctor ordered, right now. What this period should demonstrate to people with their eyes open is that, truth be told, folks in government generally do not have the foggiest clue what to do about an economic downturn. And, except in clear emergencies - like, say, 25% unemployment and when they can actually do some good - they should, generally, let people who know what they are doing better resolve problems in the market.

One of the more important reasons we need to make a transition to a free for-profit and non-profit market economy is because of the propensity of those who are sure that only their advice will fix things for everyone - and then only when, good or bad, their ideas are enforced on a population - to never own up when their solutions fail. And to manipulate the political conversation until they get the action they want, even when it is ineffective or makes things worse.

What this period should demonstrate to Americans, I hope, is that their instincts that government handles economic matters poorly - as well as many other matters outside of their core responsibilities that no other institution can manage - are good ones.

There are good reasons to be skeptical of power and people with power to solve your problems for you.

The best one is that usually they cannot.

This one's for you, Donald

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Quitting

I'm a bit more serious about quitting, today, after a meeting, last night, and the millionth new requirement that gets in the way of my teaching. I'm just at my wits end, I guess is what I'm saying. And so I'm looking much more seriously at options if I were to quit, today, than I was before last night.

I wouldn't love making money more. But I would love investing for profit and for causes I care about. It'd be nice to be on the money end of stuff I really care about: democracy promotion, promotion of free markets, promotion of liberal education, promotion of liberal values, microloan and poverty alleviation, preventing and treating diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, clean water and sewage, and various other causes that keep more people alive, safe, and living decent lives.

I'd still write my book. I'm just not convinced that working at a university or a school job is really what I want to do with my life. I need independence to strive for excellence and not be burdened with the imposition of mediocrity by others.

Whatever I do, it needs to be independent, I need to be able to achieve excellence, and it needs to be something I love and I can adequately raise a family doing for the rest of my life.

I'm thinking about it. I'll share what I decide.

Anyway.