this is ridiculous. it's not incitement. he's an asshole. and there's no way he should rep for anything on this holocaust council.

Posted at December 6, 2006 1:26 AM in response to Congress Needs to Kick Prager Off Holocaust Council

goddamnit, i have no idea what the hell you're saying. ever. i try to disentangle this stuff every now and then, but it's too damned dense, has too many backflips and u-turns of phrase, etc. can you at least post an abstract so that those of us incapable of wading through can understand?

Posted at November 22, 2006 8:44 PM in response to The Red Queen's Money

Ahhh....dreams of a Pax Americana.

You know, one of the things I applaud scientists for is realism. So it is that when the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research develops its climate change models, it includes pertinent factors like government responsiveness to needed changes. In the case of most of the third world, it will likely be the absence of such responsiveness that costs the lives of most of its affected peoples in the coming century.

Now here we have a 'pragmatic' model for a future national security policy, and it doesn't seem to make any effort at an assessment of the likelihood of any of these changes actually being implemented. Is this really how our national security policy elite go about things? Do they only talk in hushed tones behind closed doors about reality? I know I've answered my own question here. But still, I would hope someone would be able to break free of this institutionalized blindness. Til then, you could cull the wisdom of 4000000 security experts, and I would still be just as underwhelmed by the product.

I really love, for instance, the two-state solution talk for Israel-Palestine. But guess what: that's been the conventional wisdom for 40 years. I suppose that the response would be that the report recommends turning everyone into a liberal democracy, so conflicts between Israel and her neighbors will be averted. I don't have the time nor energy to give a cogent analysis of the likelihood for this happening, but it's vanishingly small. And nothing about liberal democracies actually guarantees that people won't fight over resources (like Israel's precious water) or ethnic hatred. We have no idea what would happen if there appeared a liberal democracy that wasn't under the US sphere of influence and/or security veil. I guess the solution there is to ensure that everyone is under the American sphere of influence. But then why bother having liberal democracies at all if American security and financial interests are just going to determine everything the world does? Seems a bit, er, anti-democratic. This could go in circles for hours.

I admit, I've only skimmmed the actual report, and I am glad someone other than I is doing the heavy lifting when it comes to distilling conventional wisdom into a digestible form. Yet nothing about this report approximates a creative (or realistic) approach to security problems, and it seems to wallow in an ideological narcissism that distracts from more creative approaches.

Posted at October 9, 2006 6:45 PM in response to Getting National Security Right

Before diving headlong into a catastrophe, the one thing about the health care landscape that needs to be acknowledged is that privately-owned hospitals in this country are nothing short of a criminal conspiracy. Anyone who believes that universal health care will bring down costs rather than allow them to skyrocket is ignorant of the nature of the system. (This includes Paul Krugman.) The pre-requisite for any such reform would have to be strict controls on hospitals, and achieving that is the true uphill battle. A VA-style system is only achieveable if hospitals are closely regulated, and I don't know if people have noticed but hospital corporations hold a bit of power in this country (see Frist, Bill and HCA). Throwing a bunch of money at patients, doctors and hospitals would have a disastrous budgetary effect unless the entire hospital system is either nationalized or regulated so heavily that it's difficult to distinguish between the two.

Meanwhile, since national healthcare would almost certainly reduce the majority of physicians to the upper edges of the middle class, one has to acknowledge the very real moral issue that would then be introduced: do we then allow doctors to unionize effectively for their own economic well-being, perhaps at the expense of the public? This is an ongoing problem in Germany, where doctors were on strike intermittently throughout the summer. Yet, if we want national healthcare to relieve the burden of the middle class, a move that would almost certainly put doctors firmly into that class, we would also be somewhat obligated to allow doctors to unionize for their rights and wages, lest we allow doctors to become effectively enslaved for the utilitarian good of society. Utilitarian arguments aside, you're not going to get very many qualified doctors to want to enter a profession that amounts to state subservience, particularly since doctors as it is pride themselves on independence (for better and more often for worse).

Anyway, this whole question is a hell of a lot more complicated than the CW and the doctor-haters make it out to be. And for a progressive community that prides itself on critical thinking, it should strike everyone as at least a mite suspect that everyone seems to agree, with an echo-chamber peculiarity, that universal coverage would be attended by minimal problems.

Posted at September 5, 2006 7:14 PM in response to It's Health Care, Smart People!

your cunning logic, usually spot on, could use a dollop of actual evidence. two things. one, yes those ARMs and IO loans are that widespread. in florida alone, bankunited has over 5.6 billion (75% of residential loans) dollars in outstanding loans of the ARM variety. they're actually a special type of ARM by which you can defer your interest payments up to 115% of the principal before the bank comes knocking for real.

so, that's point one. point two is that much of the housing boom in the later part of its development was fueled by speculators, i.e. people who have no interest in living in the houses that they've bought/built, or even renting them, but who wanted to flip them and make some money. it's highly doubtful that they're going to be able to get all the supply sold off, and renting them is already a loss since they won't likely be able to cover the payments in light of spiking interest rates, and since so many of the outstanding loans were used on equity that was meant to be rapidly liquidated, a lot of people are going to be stuck holding the bag. i don't know who these people are, but some morons from my hometown who i know to suffer from bad cases of meatheadedness were heavily into the real estate market in the past few years because it seemed like just any chump could walk away a rich man.

so, lots of outstanding ARM loans with deferable interest payments (ideal to give the flippers some time to turn the property around) combined with a lot of unsold properties=defaults, foreclosures, mounting debt, etc.

your final point was right, that prices are going to have to drop, particularly in florida, but it's not certain yet by how much because one of the unknown factors is just how much of the buying was done purely by fly-by-night speculators.

anyway, if you'd like, ask kevin drum (or me) for the grant investor's report he sent me. it's got a lot of these data points, specifically as regardss florida.

Posted at August 28, 2006 6:24 PM in response to Housing Bust?

wow, that cohen column was about as slapdash as these things come. it's probably worth noting, however, that there isn't a single european government who doesn't understand what's at stake. cohen seems to think they just want to walk away from all this and not worry their pretty heads about it. far from it, they want to avoid war, and one of the ways to do so is to not start one. given the limited military strength of the middle east's various roleplayers, what cohen here calls appeasement isn't such a terrible idea. you know, not going to war because the threat to our own territory and peoples is far more limited than what germany was plainly capable of. the threat to israel's territorial integrity remains marginal so long as the threat of overwhelming force from elsewhere remains, something that was most certainly not in place opposite the Nazis. an all-out frontline war in the middle east would be fought entirely on the territory of our opponents, save for the missiles lobbed at us. i should hope cohen is aware that the US, not to mention other interested parties, has military encircling the region already and that the populations and armies he seems to worried about are, in fact, very far from being able to march on us or our allies for the combined reason that they don't have the military strength and, aside from proximity to israel, they're geographically hemmed in.

whatevs. these people are alarmist retards.

Posted at August 22, 2006 7:50 AM in response to Analogies

three things i'm curious about. one, how many terrorist attacks have coincided with any major islamic calendar event? i bet it's a ton, since the sheer number in the past couple of years has meant there's been more than two a day.

why do these people think they would attack us on one of their holidays? what would be the ultimate logic of that? i mean, i would suppose there are a slew of operational reasons why locking themselves into the third moon of ramadan would be impractical, and beyond that, wouldn't it be a great deal more effective to do this on an arbitrarily chosen date? you know, preserve the element of surprise. or better yet, why not on one of OUR holidays? wouldn't shitting on our picnic be a great deal more satisfying than shitting on one of their own?

and third, where do these people get their hermetically-sealed diapers? i would think that by now their basements would be overpowering.

Posted at August 22, 2006 7:05 AM in response to While The World Waits

on mullets being uniquely american, that's not remotely true. while i understand the impulse to associate it with americans, here in germany the very same haircut, associated with the very same social group, is called the Vokuhila (pronounced FOH-KOO-HEE-LAH), which is an acronym for 'Vorne Kurz Hinten Lang', best translated 'short in front, long in back'. it's really popular in the former east, you'll see whole families walking around with Vokuhilas.

Posted at August 16, 2006 9:47 AM in response to Monkeys and Mullets

an acquaintance of mine studies this very subject and has recently finished his dissertation at the sociology department at harvard. although causal relationships are almost impossible to discern (so says he), there is a simple correlation that seems to indicate the likelihood of divorce, namely, secularism. one of the strongest correlative factors that help predict whether a marriage will end in divorce is if the couple lives together before marriage. that's a strong indication that they have a secular perspective on marriage, in contrast to the religious perspective, which, due to the pressures inherent in it, keeps couples together far longer. it's sad that marriages in secular communities tend to end earlier, but it's also the case that the prior, more religiously-tinted system was wholly discriminatory towards women. take your pick, it seems: longer marriages or a liberal role for women in them.

Posted at July 26, 2006 5:40 AM in response to Marriage's Heartbreak Hill

well, i don't know what exactly counts as destruction, but anchorage was pretty devastated by the 1964, as was much of the rest of the population base of the state.

Posted at July 22, 2006 12:56 PM in response to Pro-Joe Hysteria Strikes the Financial Times