Most Economists are just Cargo Cultists with PhDs.

Analysis like this is the main reason that I consider Economists to be even less useful than astrologers. Economists spend so much time staring at numbers and trying to find curves that describe them that they forget (or ignore) the fact that their data aren't the result of some mathematical equation waiting to be discovered, but are the sum of millions (or billions) of people each making dozens of decisions per day. This is the economy.

The problem begins when economists start loving their numbers too much and confuse correlation with causation. We wind up with PhD-level cargo cult analysis. In this case, the reason for increasing unemployment is simple: the government is scaring the crap out of business. The rule of law is even more subservient to the whims of politicians than it has been in the past (GM / Chrysler bankruptcy proceedings, anyone?). We're facing very significant tax increases in the near future, and the politicians are being even more disingenuous than usual when describing how it will pan out. With the "card check" legislation in the pipeline we're faced with uncertainty as to whether we'll be able to easily adjust our workforce to economic and other business conditions. Those of us who are strongly affected by the value of the dollar are deeply concerned about the government borrowing money with its printing press.

Any downturn creates opportunities for well-run companies to expand, but right now the uncertainty is exceptionally high. There are some opportunities that are irresistible under these circumstances (I just expanded one company this year), but for the most part we're looking at mountains of potential problems offset by a bunch of politicians and economists saying "don't worry - trust us - we know what we're doing." Umm... yeah. Right. You guys have just been batting 1.000 lately.

Businesses don't like uncertainty. More uncertainty = more conservative management. We're going to wait and see how things shake out before risking what capital we have left. There's no surprise here; we're just (mostly) rational people making (mostly) rational decisions.

The left's useful idiots and other fellow travellers

Dan Riehl has his take on Mark Levin's attack on Newt Gingrich and Colin Powell. As is typical, Mr. Reihl is a nice guy and takes a middle road:

Newt has much to contribute to the GOP, I'm sure. But he's been far too inconsistent over the years to generate the kind of broad support that would make him a successful national politician on the Right.

Newt is a respected part of what was for the Right. And as an intellect, he can offer much more. But some future face of the GOP that can win he simply is not and will never be, again.

I like to be a nice guy myself (blog title notwithstanding), but I think this take is a bit generous. Plenty of good men and women have gone to Washington and become corrupted by its influence. Instead of doing the right things and pushing the country in the right direction, they become more concerned with "getting along by going along." They give a little here and a little there with the hope of eventually getting something in return, but it doesn't happen. And you'd think that eventually this would bore its way through their thick skulls, but the empty platitudes dropped on them by their scheming opponents blind them to the truth - they've become the useful idiots of the left.

Back in 1994, Gingrich was at the vanguard of the conservative movement with the Contract With America. His star has long since faded (along with the Contract's promises), and what he really wants these days is a return to relevancy. A little corner of the spotlight. The Republicans and conservatives will let him give him the occasional convention speech, but he's moved off the 'A'-list with the rest of the guys who were almost, but not quite, great back in the day. But the left - the left will give him attention, flatter him with praises of his importance in being a crucial bridge between the Right and the Left, and allow him to play The Statesman (all the while snickering under their breath). Gingrich bought this hook, line and sinker, and then gave them a big wet kiss when they landed him on the boat. Let's not give him credit for being anything more than he's become - a worn-out, dried-up old attention whore.

As for Powell, I've never really seen him as anything other than a political opportunist. Republicans embraced him with thinly-concealed fantasies that he was The Great Black Hope that would make them look less pasty-white everyone who's not, well, pasty-white. Powell went along with it because it kept him relevant. Now that the Republican party is in shambles he sees no need to kowtow to them, but he's trying to limit the amount of bridge burning he does as he jumps to the ascendant movement. Powell's post-military career he been all about his own agenda and not that of a particular party. I'm not sure about every nuance of his beliefs, but they seem to be much more Progressive than anything that could be described as conservative or libertarian. While this makes me respect him far more than I could a turncoat like Gingrich, it doesn't necessarily make him "friendly."

In any case, don't mourn the "loss" of these guys - it's time to look to the future.

The Abortion Debate

The one thing that really bothers me about the abortion debate is that as debates go, this one sucks. Both sides really stink it up when it comes to reasoning through this complex issue. Pro-lifers generally hide behind their Bibles which is great when preaching to the choir, but utterly worthless outside of their little clique. Or they'll say "life is sacred," and then get hammered into the ground with the death penalty. But I'll take it easy on the pro-lifers, because I'm on their side. Besides that, it's more fun to beat up on the pro-choicers. Let's take some of their ideas and just... run with them.

The first centers around the question of "When does a fertilized egg become a human being?" Many learned people have come up with arcane and elaborate formulas for this, which can be debated until the heat death of the universe. I prefer much more simple and elegant solutions that can be proposed and discussed in the space of no more than two martinis. So a couple of years ago, I came up with a Modest Proposal-esque solution to this dilemma. It's really dead simple (rimshot, please): Let any mother abort any baby at any time, with one condition: under penalty of death, she has to eat the fetus. Raw, straight up, and no Tabasco sauce. If it's not a human being - just some foreign tissue growing inside of her then there's nothing really wrong or gross or even cannibalistic about it, right? Heck, it just came out a nearly sterile environment and any toxins in it are just stuff she's got in her already. Just think of it as a really exotic dish. Biologically speaking, it's not nearly as gross as eating sushi, and I love to eat sushi. In fact, since some sushi is actually served alive, we really don't even have to kill it first. If you catch it early enough you can just suck it right down like an oyster. Maybe we can throw in just a little Tobasco. Remember: it's not a baby or anything like that. And ... um... how's that argument working for you right about now?

Another line of reasoning suggests that OK, OK, maybe it is human and all, but since a fetus isn't viable outside of the womb it's not really all the way human or something like that. This assertion fraught with problems to begin with (as anyone born prematurely can attest), but let's just take it at face value because we can have fun with it. The obvious question that comes to mind is "why stop at birth?" Babies can't survive on their own, nor can small children... or even many adults. If they can't support themselves then they're not viable, and we should be able to abort them instead of letting them drain our financial and biological resources (hey, they're costing me money and that's standing between me and more sushi). You could even go so far as to say that people who don't make enough money to pay taxes aren't viable in the sociological sense (ditto). Heck, we could solve social security insolvency, welfare problems, and eliminate the possibility of any Democrat being elected to anything ever again right there! It's tempting.

And finally, we get to: "My trigger finger is part of my body and the government can't tell me what to do with my body!!!"

(For the moonbats reading this, yes, this is satire, and no, I'm not going on nor advocating a shooting spree. But if you can eat the fetuses... well, you win.)

Arlen Specter - Whoopdy Do

Watching people get excited about Senator Arlen Specter (Ambiguous-Pennsylvania) switching from a Republican to a Democrat is like watching a bunch of five-year-old analyze a chess match by counting the number of pieces each player has.

As a practical matter, the Democrats go from enjoying a 62-seat majority to enjoying a 62-seat majority. Just because Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), and Susan Collins (R-Maine) have Rs after their names doesn't mean squat. It's how they vote that counts. And those votes were lost to the Democrats a long time ago.

As I've said before (well, not here), the Republican's best strategy would have been to kick Specter, Snowe, and Collins out of the party after the "2009 Stimulus" bill was passed with their votes. Not as an angry, infantile response, but as a dramatic gesture indicating a strong strategic shift in policy and as protection against the inevitable backlash that will occur once the repercussions from the massive increase in debt start to roll in. Apparently they're still convinced that the hill to stand and fight on is gay marriage (a wrong stand on so many levels). Americans really need a new party - one with libertarian ideas, but not so many Libertarians.

Amazon hates rainbows. Or something like that.

There's been quite a bit of speculation as to why or how Amazon started suddenly filtering out sexually-themed material, particularly gay- and lesbian-themed books and items.

I generally subscribe to Occam's Razor and would bet it was a stupid policy move that backfired. Hackers? Not terribly likely - the sheer scope of modifying a huge, complex system in a precisely targeted manner would require almost complete and undetected pwn4ge over a long period of time. Glitch? Again, targeting such a precise (and politically controversial) target? Please.

But if I had to pull out my tinfoil hat, I would suppose that if they wanted to mollify a certain group of customers who can't stand to see certain types of product on their site they could do something like this, retract the move, and then (rightly) claim they can't do such filtering because of the backlash.

Circling the drain

School budgets have been all over the news in the past few months. I must confess to being entirely unsympathetic - over the past few decades there has been a negative correlation between increased funding and academic achievement. Correlation, of course, is not causation. While it's true that money and the quality of education are inexorably linked, it's not in the way that most believe it is. You see, I've been to the promised land - a public school that not only worked, but excelled. But why was it better there?

I have some answers that are informed by my personal anecdotes. I went to public schools both in Texas and California. Back in the day, Texas had many "Independent" school districts that were funded by local property taxes. These property taxes were staggeringly high in the middle-class community we lived in - about 3% per year just for schools. The school districts were overseen by a locally elected board of parents and managed by the best administrators the boards could find. There was pretty much no secrecy. Waste was impossible to hide. Texas being a "right to work" state, anyone who didn't perform was shown the door. Teachers cared about education, because if they didn't produce results they'd be fired. Students cared because high standards were demanded and enforced. The overall attitude was that we were the best and if you didn't do your part teaching or learning then you were letting down the team, and you did not want to go there. The results were amazing. Three of the four high schools were ranked (academically) in the top ten in the country. National Merit Scholars had to be crammed into two pages on the yearbook. 98% of students who attended my high school would graduate from college (not just attend). Academic Decathlon teams didn't worry about placing at the district level; they worried about getting more than 50% of the golds at state. If a student missed more than 5 days of class in a semester (regardless of the reason), they would have to repeat it. If you didn't have cancer, your were in class. Students and teachers didn't just show up to learn and teach, they showed up to dominate. Keep in mind that this was not a particularly affluent area; it was middle-class (with maybe 5% upper-middle class). In my mind the key difference was the culture of excellence demanded by the board, who had the power to enforce this culture in the administration, teachers, and ultimately the students.

I absolutely hated that place as a student. As an adult, I can't believe how absolutely lucky I was to have been there for two-thirds of my high school career. You see, I moved to sunny Southern California for my senior year. Allegedly I was in one of the best high schools in the region. It couldn't have been a bigger waste of one year of my life. Yes, there were a few decent teachers (perhaps 15%) who cared and put in solid efforts teaching their students. Only one of them could have even held a job at my old school back in Texas. To the overwhelming majority, you were a warm body in a seat for so many minutes per day. If you happened to learn anything (assuming actual knowledge was even being offered) then that was nice (albeit unexpected). The culture was about meeting the minimum standards necessary to get by. I quickly discovered that the only thing they really cared about was your presence during 2nd period, because their attendance percentage during that time was what controlled the amount of money they would get from the state. Aside from 2nd period, I spent about 50% of my senior year at the beach and still managed to graduate. To this day I don't worry about having missed anything. This is the culture you get when standards are set by government bureaucrats at the local level, state, and federal levels. Nobody is actually, personally accountable for anything other than meeting some practically meaningless guidelines written in Government-Issue weasel-words. The local school district doesn't care about educating kids (they would deny this) - they actually care about meeting state standards so they can get their money. The teachers have a union so powerful that they have the closest thing possible to tenure the day they are hired - a few that are exceptionally motivated will put in extra effort, but the overwhelming majority do not. The state people care about getting as much money as possible to expand their fiefdoms and budgetary control. Ditto for the feds. Any learning that takes place above some absurd lowest-common-denominator is a happy (and incidental) side effect.

Just like business, schools benefit immensely from local control and the only way the locals have real control is if they control the purse strings. It's the Golden Rule - "whoever has the gold makes the rules." The larger an organization is, the more accountability is blurred. It's extraordinarily difficult to maintain high standards as they grow larger, and the rare people with the ability to organize and lead huge groups aren't terribly attracted to civil service paychecks. There aren't nearly enough of them to go around in the business world which is one of the reasons executive salaries have been "bid up" to such absurd levels. Our local-yokel parents in Texas had the sense to bring in (and pay for) six-figure management skills, and got the commensurate results. Sadly, that all went by the wayside in the early 1990s. Texas courts ruled, in a fit of egalitarian insanity, that it was unfair that some school districts wound up with more money than others. Never mind that certain communities decided to make huge sacrifices to have exceptional education - this simply wasn't fair to the communities that wouldn't or couldn't do so. They were given the choice to share their local tax dollars with other school districts (leaving them no better off than if they were state-funded) or subject themselves to funding (and control) from the state. During this court battle our schools could not collect local tax dollars or receive state funding, but they actually had sufficient cash reserves to keep the district (and the lawyers) going for two years before they ultimately submitted. I'm not sure how long state-funded schools would last if pulled from the teat but I'd imagine the time would be measured in minutes, not years.

Before it was neutered, this incident allowed my old school to provide me with one final lesson in life. Liberalism isn't driven by those looking for the greater good. It's driven by tiny people who are so obsessed with jealousy towards those who do better than them - even if those people make huge sacrifices to do so - they'll do anything possible to destroy that success and bring others down to their level. It's people who are too selfish and lazy to do well making sure that nobody else can either so as to protect their meaningless and ill-gotten self-esteem.

P.S.: I can see some people whining and crying about how I might have learned something from the few decent teachers available during my senior year. Nope, not the case - due to the deficient standards in the local schools, what was being taught my senior year was generally at the level of we were being taught as Freshmen and Sophomores in Texas. Even considering the options we had to take classes at the community college across the street the opportunities simply were not there. These problems were exacerbated by lazy administrators who were unwilling to adjust for the relative levels in areas where taking other classes may have made a difference.

Greatest Speaker Evah!

Is it just me, or does Obama without a teleprompter sounds like .. uh uh ummm uh uh ...the world's most boring porn soundtrack?