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Quoted here:

“This isn’t about a lie or a conspiracy or a deceit or a deception,” Mr. Blair said. “It’s a decision. And the decision I had to take was, given Saddam’s history, given his use of chemical weapons, given the over one million people whose deaths he had caused, given 10 years of breaking U.N. resolutions, could we take the risk of this man reconstituting his weapons program or is that a risk it is responsible to take?”

(See also.)

Important news from the Middle East:

Using a satellite dish on loan from a nearby broadcast station, cooks in an Arab town near Jerusalem whipped up more than four metric tons of hummus, the chickpea paste that is a staple – and a near-religious obsession – for many in the Middle East.
 
The cooks doubled the previous record for the world’s biggest serving of hummus, set in October by cooks in Lebanon. That record broke an earlier Israeli record and briefly put Lebanon ahead.
 
Hundreds of jubilant Israelis, a mix of Arabs and Jews, gathered around the giant dish in the town of Abu Ghosh near Jerusalem on Friday, many of them dancing as a singer performed an Arabic love song to the beige chickpea paste.

But note that these developments are not without geopolitical implications:

Lebanese tourism minister Fadi Abboud told The Associated Press that his country plans to beat the new record in the spring with an even bigger plate of hummus prepared on the border with Israel. “This way they can learn how to do hummus,” he said.
 
“We have no objection that other people do hummus but they should know that it is Lebanese. They (Israelis) should find a name other than hummus because this is a Lebanese name,” Abboud said.

Check out the photo at the linked article, too.

Early and often
Is no longer adequate.
Will Dems move rightward?

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Barack Obama!
Double down, you clever guy.
We need more Scott Browns.

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Scourge of Amiraults,
Martha was unappealing.
(The best they could do?)

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(Feel free to add your own contribution in the comments.)

I post below the contents of a message that the Illinois State Rifle Association is sending to people on its email distribution list.

ALERT – Supreme Court Case on Chicago Handgun Ban
 
 
Yesterday the City of Chicago filed their brief in response in the US Supreme Court case brought by the Illinois State Rifle Association. The case, McDonald v Chicago, seeks to overturn Chicago’s handgun ban and punitive registration process.
 
This is the most important case in U.S. history concerning the Second Amendment and it is the ISRA’s case. Can state and local governments take away your Second Amendment Rights? Or is the Right to Keep and Bear Arms so fundamental that it is protected by being incorporated against the states through the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution? Without going into a bunch of legal language, Chicago’s brief is their attempt make sure that the handgun ban lives on.
 
These are the next steps in this case:
 
1. Our reply to what Chicago just submitted is due January 29.
 
2. Oral Arguments in the case have been scheduled for March 2.
 
3. The court is expected to deliver a decision near the end of June.
 
The outcome of this case is expected to affect the status of the Second Amendment across the nation. If we win, it does not mean that the fight is over, it means that next phase of the fight has begun.
 
The City of Chicago is using tax dollars pay for the defense in this case, in order to keep preventing its residents being able to have effective self-defense at home. Of course, no tax payer monies are being used to defend your Second Amendment rights! The legal effort behind the McDonald case is paid for privately.
 
The ISRA needs your support and your contributions to keep this case, and the inevitable follow-up cases, moving forward.
 
Now is the time. If you are an ISRA member, we need your continued support. Please make a donation on-line here, or over the phone at 815-635-3198. If you would like to mail or fax a donation, we have a printable form here [pdf].
 
Now is the time. If you’re not an ISRA member, join NOW and ride with us into history. You’ll be able to say “I was an ISRA member when WE overthrew the Chicago handgun ban and forever changed the gun control debate!” You can join on-line, or over the phone at 815-635-3198. You can download a printable application form here [pdf].
 
Post this alert to all internet blogs and bulletin boards to which you belong. Also, pass this alert on to your gun owning friends and fellow sporting club members. Ask them to forward this alert to their friend far and wide. Although the suit targets the local ordinance in Chicago, the implications of incorporation of the 2nd Amendment are national in scope.

(Note that I edited some of the links in the message to make them easier to use, but the content is unchanged.)

One hour of computer programming after ten hours of sleep is more productive than ten hours of computer programming after one hour of sleep.

Chicagoboyz visits Jimbo’s:

From James Rummel:

(Previous entries: Here and here.)

From a brilliant column by Caroline Glick:

Then there is the message he sent the Afghans. Just as Barak and Olmert discouraged the Lebanese from cooperating with IDF operations against Hizbullah when they declared that the IDF would not remain in Lebanon, so by announcing a timeline for withdrawal at the same time he announced his force build-up, Obama told the Afghan people that they have no reason to collaborate with US and NATO forces on the ground.
 
For Obama personally, this is a win-win situation. If McChrystal is able to make headway, Obama will take the credit. If not, Obama will blame McChrystal, and the Afghans, and NATO, and the Republicans, and George W. Bush for his failure. Then he will withdraw all US forces from the country, and watch as a disinterested observer as the Taliban retake control of Afghanistan – all to the rousing applause of his anti-war political base.
 
On the other hand, for the American people and for the free world as a whole, this is a lose-lose situation. The sound and light show strategy Obama announced will enable al-Qaida and the Taliban to grow stronger as they wait out the American withdrawal. Likewise, just as Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon emboldened the Palestinians to initiate their terror war in September 2000, so the US retreat from Afghanistan will embolden terror forces and their state sponsors the world over to attack US and Western targets.
 
IN ISRAEL, the refusal of successive governments to fight our jihadist enemies to victory served to demoralize the public by making it believe that the IDF is incapable of truly protecting the country. The path that Obama has now embarked upon in Afghanistan will likely have the same impact on many Americans. This posture of weakness and helplessness will be sharply contrasted with the emboldened stance of America’s enemies.
 
From the time the Netanyahu government took office in late March until its recent moves to cut a shockingly dangerous deal with Hamas and prohibit Jewish building in Judea and Samaria, there was a sense that Israel had turned a corner. The public rejected the Barak-Olmert legacy of defeat and elected Netanyahu to change the course of the country. Depressingly, today it is less apparent that Netanyahu has in fact abandoned their legacy of defeat.
 
What is absolutely certain, however, is that until both Israel and the US change course and defeat our enemies, we will not be safe. Moreover, we must recognize the infuriating fact that even if both countries decide to defeat their enemies, their embrace of victory will come too late for the soldiers killed in futile and pointless battles and for civilians murdered in terror attacks that could have been prevented.

This is worth reading in full.

I fear that both the USA and Israel will pay a terrible price for the despair-inducing plague of bad leadership that afflicts both countries.

“Obama’s lonely decision” may have been the right one — if that’s really what he decided, if he really did decide. That’s the problem. You don’t know with this guy. What he does is so often unrelated to what he says that it’s usually most productive to watch what he does and ignore what he says. Kagan makes the classic error of evaluating Obama based on words. I don’t think we’ll be able to evaluate Obama’s handling of Afghanistan until we see how he follows through on his speech. That will take some time. All we can say now is that he avoided the issue for months while our position in Afghanistan deteriorated, and then when backed against a political wall finally asserted a policy. Only time will tell if he means what he said. The optimistic interpretation — Kagan’s — is that political pressure not to screw up will keep him honest. I’m skeptical. Obama’s history is that of a man who believes he can talk his way out of anything and has succeeded so far. Why would he behave differently now? He might — people can change. But that’s not the way to bet.

One of the problems with being a liar is that nobody believes you when you tell the truth. I hope that Obama really does show backbone in Afghanistan and commits to victory, but he’ll have to act like it (not merely talk like it) before reasonable people will believe him.

Anyone who is unclear on this point should compare the hopefulness of many online conservatives and libertarians with the sobering election odds displayed on Intrade. Republicans may score big gains in the coming election cycles, but they may not. And even if they win big there is no guarantee that they will behave better in office than they did during the Bush years. Meanwhile the Left, having rampaged through the universities and media, is now very deliberately restructuring the federal bureaucracies and writing legislation whose destructive effects won’t be fully apparent for years. You can bet that the inept Loony Left appointees who have garnered public attention are only the tip of the iceberg. Thousands of others, less flamboyant but equally committed, are doing their best behind the scenes to entrench themselves in power and make it difficult for their ideological opponents to reverse the changes.

From a WSJ column:

To be fair, the Orszags and Mr. Stiglitz acknowledged that “the extremely rare events located in the tail of a distribution are often quite difficult to analyze accurately.” Even so, they noted that White House budget gnomes had tested Fan and Fred’s capital against “the financial and economic conditions of the Great Depression.” The result: “[G]iven 1990 levels of capital, both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had sufficient capital to survive.”
 
[...]
 
The crucial point is that assessing systemic risk is difficult to impossible—and the likelihood of coming to a reliable consensus about it is even lower. Both Orszags and Mr. Stiglitz were officials in the Clinton Administration and saw the debates about Fan and Fred that the Clinton Treasury began in the late 1990s, only to get clobbered by the companies’ lobbying machine. Yet the three amigos still saw fit to put their names to a paper dismissing any risk of failure.
 
Why should anyone think that regulators—or economists—will predict the next systemic debacle any better? We only know better about the past. When the next problem erupts, as in 2002, smart people will be on both sides of the argument. And when large, systemically important companies are threatened with curbs on their business, they will pay Nobel laureates to write studies that explain away the dangers, and hire lobbyists to block any reform. A future Treasury secretary may also dismiss critics of a future Fannie Mae, or Goldman Sachs, as “ideologues,” as Hank Paulson did in 2007-2008.
 
The very existence of a systemic risk regulator, or council of regulators, will assist the largest and riskiest firms by creating an illusion of stability in a world made less stable by the implicit guarantee that this regulator would convey. It would be an accident waiting to happen, and one made inevitable by the institution created to prevent it.

Clever people rationalizing away risk destroyed Long Term Capital Management and countless other leveraged financial businesses. (As the column suggests, the incentives facing bureaucrats and politicians make this problem even more acute for government-managed enterprises.) The idea is generally: we’ve looked at all the angles and done simulations and the odds of a ruinous meltdown are so small we’re not going to worry about it. The problem is that the models used to estimate risk are sensitive to errors in the assumptions. That’s what “extremely rare events located in the tail of a distribution are often quite difficult to analyze accurately” means. If the distribution is statistically abnormal the tails of the distribution might be fatter than you think, in which case those extremely rare events might not be so rare. For businesses that deal with statistically normal returns distributions, such as casinos and life-insurance companies, the risks are relatively easy to determine. Those are well understood businesses with almost no risk of failure as long as they are well capitalized and well managed. By comparison, the risks for a highly leveraged negative-gamma financial scheme are much more difficult to pin down. Fannie Mae was essentially a colossal short-put position on the mortgage industry. Was the risk of ruin 1 in 1,000,000 or one in a hundred? Who knows. A cursory look at the history of financial debacles suggests that such events happen much more frequently than many models have predicted. A reasonable person with extensive private-sector financial experience as a trader or fund manager would know better than to bet the ranch on the accuracy of a model whose worst-case outcomes involve unknown probability of unbounded loss. More likely he would want to be on the other side of that trade. Yet Congress jumped right in and kept doubling down when it should have been cutting its losses, and is now repeating the error with the FHA. Orszag and Stiglitz apparently didn’t understand this back in the day. Do they understand it now?

When people like these are in business and miscalculate they go out of business. If they’re lucky they then get to go to work for someone who has a better understanding of risk than they did. But when they’re in government and miscalculate they may pay no penalty or even be promoted, and the risks they rationalize may be ignored until institutions fail. I don’t mean to single out Orszag and Stiglitz, who probably meant well and were not responsible for Fannie Mae (Congress was). But the public sector is full of such people, and as the government expands they become more influential and their mistakes become more costly.

A reader reports receiving a warning from anti-virus software about a malicious program called “inst32.exe” after visiting this blog. Has anyone else had a similar experience? If we’re linking to a bad site I’d like to know so that I can remove the link. Thanks.

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I don’t remember the exact words but this was the essence of a headline in a Chilean leftist newspaper after an Allende referendum was defeated by the voters (as reported, IIRC, by Robert Moss in Chile’s Marxist Experiment).

The aroma of similar attitudes wafts from an AP report that has the headline, “Honduras vote to sideline president, enshrine coup”. Hey, nobody’s calling anybody reactionary here, but if you talk about a “coup” it’s usually an indication that you’re unsympathetic to the people who did it. Never mind that the president was kicked out by his own legislature and courts, following their country’s written constitution, after he flagrantly broke the law. Like global-warming hysterics, and lawyers for obviously guilty defendants, Zelaya’s supporters don’t have the facts on their side and so keep repeating unsupported assertions that are meant to shift the frame of debate in the direction of their narrative.

Meanwhile, the Brazilian government, sensing weakness, is trying to push Obama around. This is the same Brazilian government that just received the great democrat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a widely publicized state visit. But Honduras, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, a democracy and a steadfast US ally, is a threat to world peace.

The discussion at this otherwise-good Instapundit post is typical.

The discussion is misframed. The question isn’t whether a specific medical procedure is a good idea. The question is who gets to make the decisions.

This is a comment that I left on a recent Neo-Neocon post:

It’s the public-health fallacy, the confusion (perhaps willful, on the part of socialized-medicine proponents) between population outcomes and individual outcomes. Do you know how expensive that mammogram would be if every woman had one? The implication is that individuals should make decisions based on averages, the greatest good for the greatest number.
 
The better question is, who gets to decide. The more free the system, the more that individuals can weigh their own costs and benefits and make their own decisions. The more centralized the system, the more that one size must fit all — someone else makes your decisions for you according to his criteria rather than yours.
 
In a free system you can have fewer mammograms and save money or you can have more mammograms and reduce your risk. Choice. In a government system, someone like Kathleen Sebelius will make your decision for you, and probably not with your individual welfare as her main consideration.

Even in utilitarian terms — the greatest good for the greatest number — governmental monopolies only maximize economic welfare if the alternative system is unavoidably burdened with free-rider issues. This is why national defense is probably best handled as a governmental monopoly: on an individual basis people benefit as much if they don’t pay their share for the system as if they do. But medicine is not so burdened, because despite economic externalities under the current system (if I don’t pay for my treatment its cost will be shifted to paying customers) there is no reason why the market for insurance and medical services can’t work like any other market, since medical customers have strong individual incentive to get the best treatment and (in a well-designed pricing system) value for their money. The problems of the current medical system are mostly artifacts of third-party payment and over-regulation, and would diminish if we changed the system to put control over spending decisions back into the hands of patients. The current Democratic proposal is a move in the opposite direction.