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LGF is having way too much fun finding crazies in Barack Obama’s blog community. It looks like it was inspired by Daily Kos’s community of like-minded progressives, where everyone gets his own little sublease to part of the real estate. The problem is that Obama’s campaign has attracted all kinds of crazies. The people running and moderating the little bloglets are way out of their depth; they don’t catch some of the real poisonous things until Charles or one of his lizard minions finds it and publicizes it. Shortly after, the offending blog is removed and the archives are deleted.

Maybe it’s unfair to judge a candidate by his supporters. If it were just one or two, I might go along with that. In this case, though, there is a whole ward of drooling loonies who think Obama is their kind of guy, and Obama’s campaign furnishes them with a soapbox and a microphone.

Before this is through, nearly everyone on the planet will have expressed an opinion on the sub-prime mortgage crisis. It’s a little late, but I thought I should get mine in. Here are some points about the issue that I don’t think have been given much discussion.

Mortgage-backed derivatives are not new. Some 20 years ago, FNMA introduced the REMIC (Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduit). These were pools of mortgages that were split into various tranches or classes of maturity and quality, which were then sold separately, similar to the way today’s collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) are sold.

There were some important differences between this first generation and its descendants. I would like to point out some of the differences, since they may highlight the reasons behind the collapse.

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One reason the effect of the US subprime loan crisis has spread so far and so quickly is that financial institutions have many ways of participating in the debt market other than issuing or buying debt instruments. Most of the financial news I have read omits explanations of how it happens, other than generic references to “derivatives.” Here are some of the other ways to have a loss without touching a mortgage.

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“We have not released giant badgers in Basra, and nor have we been collecting eggs and releasing serpents into the Shatt al-Arab river,” Major David Gell told reporters.

Cue the Monty Python references.

The Dissident Frogman is back!

Reductio ad absurdum done right.

The Upside of Income Inequality

By Gary S. Becker and Kevin M. Murphy
From the May/June 2007 Issue of American.com

For many, the solution to an increase in inequality is to make the tax structure more progressive—raise taxes on high-income households and reduce taxes on low-income households. While this may sound sensible, it is not. Would these same indi­viduals advocate a tax on going to college and a subsidy for dropping out of high school in response to the increased importance of education? We think not. Yet shifting the tax structure has exactly this effect.

“But what this global war on terror bumper sticker — political slogan, that’s all it is, all it’s ever been — was intended to do was for George Bush to use it to justify everything he does: the ongoing war in Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, spying on Americans, torture.” — John Edwards, June 3, 2007

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1. Think of a set of three words that sound the same (homophones) but begin with different letters. Example: nice and gneiss sound alike and they begin with different letters, but there are only two of them. There is no third that I can think of that sounds like that. I can come up with four sets of three words, but I believe I have forgotten one.

2. How many English words begin with s but not sh, and are pronounced as sh? I can think of three, not counting derivatives of these three.

3. Give yourself 1 minute and write down all the words you can think of that are doubled syllables. Examples: bye-bye, Dada. Punctuation and capitalization do not matter, but spelling does (syllables must be spelled identically). See if you can come up with a primate, a flowering tree, an actress (her Magyar nickname for the name Susan, in English), and a treat.

On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh set off a truck bomb that destroyed the Murra Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The truck was parked at the loading dock, directly under the day care center. My daughter, three years old at the time, was in the day care center on the first floor of the Kennedy Federal Building in Boston. It is next to the loading dock. My wife was working on the 19th floor. When I returned to work the next day, someone in the elevator joked that it was too bad the bomb hadn’t taken out the IRS. The ride was short, and I was able to stay still.

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CONCORD NH (Reuters) – Governor John Lynch today announced that he will begin the process to change the official name of the state to Tax-Free New Hampshire. This will require an amendment to the state constitution, which must receive a three-fifths majority in both houses of the state legislature and approval by a majority of the voters in the next regular election. “It’s clear that we will not have the change in place for the 2008 elections. In fact, that will be our earliest opportunity to get it on the ballot. We’re looking ahead to 2012.” The heavily-covered New Hampshire presidential primary is expected to give the new name wide exposure.

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The Personal Jetpack!

Those picturesque New England stone walls were not put there for their looks. They weren’t even the first choice of material. Fences were originally wood, using the zigzag design that calls for a lot of wood for the length. Wood became scarce and too valuable for fencing after the forests were cleared, so stone walls became the default.

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In today’s National Review Online, Mario Loyola argues that conservative esteem for the rule of law should extend to a refined understanding of international law, backed up with consistent enforcement of its principles (in other words, either both Kosovo and Iraq, or neither). Too late. That issue was settled over 60 years ago.

Here is how the Economist defines regulatory capture:

Gamekeeper turns poacher or, at least, helps poacher. The theory of regulatory capture was set out by Richard Posner, an economist and lawyer at the University of Chicago, who argued that “REGULATION is not about the public interest at all, but is a process, by which interest groups seek to promote their private interest … Over time, regulatory agencies come to be dominated by the industries regulated.” Most economists are less extreme, arguing that regulation often does good but is always at RISK of being captured by the regulated firms.

Familiar examples of regulatory capture in the US would include those agencies charged with setting rates, fees, and prices. The ICC, originally meant to keep railroads from overcharging farmers with no other means of shipping their commodities, eventually became a means by which trucking companies and interstate bus lines set prices, limited competition, and allocated routes. The FAA, until deregulation in 1978, assured airlines of an orderly and profitable division of routes, without the prospect of interlopers disrupting the arrangement. Similarly, the United Nations, formed in the very act of destroying a murderous tyranny, came to become a system for regulating tyranny and allocating the areas in which tyrants might operate without interference.

The immediate predecessor of the United Nations was actually not the League of Nations, but the Atlantic Charter between the United States and Great Britain. This was purely an Anglo-American document in terms of its principles as well as its origin. The two signatory nations disavowed any territorial claims, embraced consensual sovereignty and self-determination for all people, and stated their support for international economic cooperation, freedom of the seas, and eventual worldwide demilitarization. Even though the US had not yet entered the war, the treaty embraced the destruction of the Nazi regime as a common foreign policy objective. It also contemplated, but did not establish, “a wider and permanent system of general security.” The original agreement between the two countries was signed August 14, 1941. On January 1, 1942, the representatives of 26 governments, including some governments in exile, signed the “Declaration by United Nations, Subscribing to the Principles of the Atlantic Charter.” The United Nations then became the formal name of the anti-Nazi allies.

The signatories included the USSR. Stalin’s government had no intention of following most of the principles set forth in the treaty; its signing was a transparent fraud. The Atlantic Charter and the United Nations were designed to restrain the practices of aggression, brutality, dictatorship, and government-sanctioned murder, yet the United Nations brought in one of the most brutal and murderous dictatorships as a founding member. Stalin’s USSR set a precedent which is followed to this day.

The contradiction was present from the beginning in the UN Charter:

Preamble
The Purposes of the United Nations are:

1. To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace;

2. To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;

3. To achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; and

4. To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.

These ends were not and could not be harmonized. They were in fact placed in opposition:

Article 2
Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter VII.

Article 55
With a view to the creation of conditions of stability and well-being which are necessary for peaceful and friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, the United Nations shall promote … universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.

Note the contrasting strength of the language in these two provisions (”nothing …shall authorize” and “shall promote”). If human rights are truly universal, the interposition of national boundaries must be irrelevant, since they exist everywhere. As a practical matter, Violations of human rights were defined as outside of the scope of the UN, as long as they took place within a country’s borders. It is as though there had been no reason to fight Hitler except for his invasion of Poland.

We cannot defeat tyranny by leaving tyrants safe and secure, as long as they stay close to home. The rights to life, liberty, and property are not just local customs. Either human rights are universal, or they are nothing.

We went into Iraq with the goal of creating a democracy where a tyrant had ruled. After a few hundred years of democratic republics, constitutional monarchy, free markets, individual rights, and a tendency toward egalitarianism, we may have come to miss some of the obvious factors that make for a successful nation. It seems so natural to us that we may have imagined it to be the normal, default setting for any society; any instance of tyranny must be due to some interference with the natural progress of freedom, and the removal of that interference would allow that progress to resume.

We may have elevated democracy above its natural priority. The purple fingers in January 2005 led only to months of wrangling, and the new constitution was not in place until October of that year. Actual formation of a permanent government was delayed until May 2006. There were few noticeable differences of principle involved; it looked more like squabbling over the division of loot and control over the state’s enforcement assets. Some of the various Iraqi militias became political parties without disarming, and the security forces often reported along party lines and mixed partisan violence with their supposed law-enforcement duties. Even those security forces ostensibly loyal to the central government are often too badly corrupted to function. Military supplies and arms are trucked in, and all that is needed is a few small bribes at the border. A democratically-elected but totally dysfunctional government is not much different from anarchy.

Solutions are difficult, but they at least require a good statement of the problem. Democracy, as defined by free and fair elections, has been established, yet the situation is clearly not improving. There is a cultural problem in the Middle East that democracy cannot cure.
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Captain Jamil Hussein of the Iraqi police force actually does exist. He has supplied this photo, which was taken by noted Middle East news photographer Adnan Hajj

Additional resources:
Biography of Capt. Hussein

Discuss this post at the Chicago Boyz Forum.

This little piece is by someone who not only takes John Kerry’s side, but thinks he really may have had a point in the first place. Maybe it wasn’t a blooper.

Troops With No Choice; An Opinion Piece From Air America on John Kerry’s Comments about Education and Serving in the Military; By JACKIE GUERRA [excerpt]

Serving our country in the military is a great service, one which we all admire and revere, but it’s more than that. It’s also a job.

And it’s a job that many Americans sign up for not only out of a sense of patriotic duty, but also because it often seems the best of few options.

At high schools like these across the country, inner-city and rural students, often from communities of color but almost always poor, do not have many options in George Bush’s America.

The Boston Globe, Kerry’s best buddies, didn’t even go as far as that; they characterized his efforts as dumb. This is the newspaper that helped Kerry finesse his promise to release his full military service records by letting one of their reporters look at them. The report on them was very carefully hedged; it made no mention, for example, of why his honorable discharge was granted by a review panel during the Carter administration, or whether his original discharge, which should have taken place years earlier, may not have been an honorable one, or whether he needed replacement medals in 1985 because he had been stripped of them.

Kerry is sort of a hothouse flower. He grew and bloomed in the controlled environment of Massachusetts. Kerry may thrive in a micro-climate designed to maintain his ideal growing conditions, but not in the harsh world outside; this was despite the efforts of the friendly national media to shelter him. The real mistake was when the Democrats decided to nominate him.

The Nobel Prizes are announced in October each year. The scientific awards, starting with Medicine, begin tomorrow. Economics will be awarded a week from Monday, and the Peace prize on lucky Friday, October 13. None of the Chicago Boyz contributors have been nominated this year, so I feel free to make some predictions. France will probably not win its second Economics prize, since that discipline is so lightly regarded and little practiced there. Many of the prizes for actually discovering something will go to Americans, and the prizes for doing things that make Europeans feel good will go to anti-Americans (Rigoberta Menchu, Peace, 1992; Yasser Arafat, Peace, 1994; Harold Pinter, Literature, 2005). In his Nobel lecture, Pinter had the following helpful remarks to make, among others: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” Perhaps his prize should have been in Medicine, for having discovered such widespread but unsuspected mental illness; perhaps he will spend some of his prize money on a subscription to the Guardian. That way he can check from time to time to see whether anyone has yet noticed that large, Engish-speaking evil empire.

But on to the good stuff. The real action will be in Cambridge MA, where the Improbable Research institute will begin awarding the Ig Nobel Prizes next week. Good seats are still available. In the interest of Bad Science, here are some random links to show that the mission of Improbable Research has not been accomplished. Long may they mock!

• The persistent belief that the Apollo moon landings were faked is proof that skepticism can be as foolish as credulity.
• The Flat Earth Society may have fallen on hard times, but the remaining few struggle nobly against the moon hoax and the pernicious Copernican doctrine.
• Others believe that the moon landings were real, but have a different explanation for how they were accomplished. The adjustment is necessary to account for the belief that there is no gravity in space. (See the other scientific myths at the site and vote for your favorite. Some of them turn out to be true.)
• UFOs, alas, are not related to anything outside our planet, according to recently-released archives of the British Ministry of Defence. This will no doubt convince no one.
• Try not to miss this site devoted to Bad Science. The guilty parties handing out erroneous information often turn out not to be hairy patchouli-intoxicated crystalmongers, but science teachers and textbook writers.
• The James Randi Educational Foundation goes after frauds of the occult with a glee that is almost painful to see. He is following in a distinguished tradition.

Have fun!

The informal monthly meeting of knuckle-dragging Neanderthal New England bloggers was held in Cambridge MA today. The unusual venue was chosen to take advantage of former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami’s visit to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. We did not attempt to get tickets for the lecture, which was to feature the fruits of Ayatollah Khatami’s lucubrations on Tolerance. Perhaps when Madonna comes to lecture on personal modesty, or Donald Trump on humility, or Bernie Ebbers on business ethics, we will try harder.

The protest against Khatami’s visit was remarkable. It was a revolt of the reasonable, and the participants seemed to be trying hard to avoid inconveniencing anyone. They did not block the entrance; instead, they assembled farther down the street where the sidewalk widened into a little brick-laid park, right next to the semi-organic farm stand. There was a cordon of Cambridge policemen (no women) in their special black uniforms, but they were quite unnecessary. The speaker used a bullhorn, but the volume was set so low that it was impossible to hear her 20 feet away.

Pictures and a little commentary on the extended link. Flickr is having issues, so check back for more pictures later.
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