New Citizenship Questions

Riffing on U.S. to unveil new citizenship questions — and, just maybe, James McCormick’s phenomenal review immediately below — here’s some ideas:

  1. What portion of US GDP is taken by government, at all levels, each year?
  2. (Acceptable answer: at least 30% or $3.3 trillion.)

  3. What portion of law enforcement resources in the US is devoted to nonviolent narcotics offenders, versus violent offenders of all types?
  4. (Acceptable answer: they are approximately equal, as a percentage of arrests.)

  5. What is the proposed penalty in Federal law for scientists engaging in somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT)?
  6. (Acceptable answer: ten years in prison and a $1 million fine [Human Cloning Prohibition Act].)

  7. Sen Ted Stevens (R-AK) described the internet as “a series of …”?
  8. (Acceptable answer: anything with the word “tubes.” Extra points for speculating how long the nation can survive with technologically illiterate leadership.)

  9. How much money has been spent on welfare since the inception of the Great Society programs?
  10. (Acceptable answer: at least $18 trillion in 2006 dollars. This figure includes all transfer payments carried out at the Federal level, but none by state and local governments.)

  11. Still sure you want to go through with this?
  12. Discuss this post at the Chicago Boyz Forum.

Naim — Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats …

Naim, Moises, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy, Doubleday, 2005, 340pp.

[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, has written an outstanding summary of the flip side of the post-Cold War economic boom. Think of it as the antithesis of Jim Bennett’s book … a “The Global Criminal Affluenza Challenge: How an Army of Fagins Leverages High-Yield Crime while Civil Society Implodes in the 21st Century.”

The author asks a provocative question. What if we looked at global crime from a purely economic perspective?

What industries would form the MisFortune 500? What criteria would criminals use for market development? How would criminal enterprises adapt to the new technological realities (which are also challenging legitimate business)? In other words, setting morals and laws and national sovereignty to one side, how is crime coping with globalization?

Read more

A collection of Jonathan Swift’s journalistic texts

Attentive readers of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle will remember Daniel Waterhouse reading a a number of astonishingly vile newspapers. Some of the most acrimonious articles were from Jonathan Swift, writing for Tory papers. Stephenson didn’t make that part up, the articles can be found here.

I didn’t have time to do more than a bit of browsing, but some of the historical characters from the Baroque Cycle are mentioned, like Marlborough, Bolingbroke, Harley and of course Queen Anne. There also are extensive footnotes explaining the concrete circumstances under which the articles appeared.

Discuss this post at the Chicago Boyz Forum.

Disgusted About the War

A beautiful post from Rachel:

American prestige is no small thing. Loss of American prestige as a result of Vietnam, the Iran hostage crisis, Somalia and the bombing of the US Embassy in Lebanon emboldened Osama bin Laden to bomb the World Trade Center. Loss of American prestige gives Kim Jong Il the idea that he can test his nukes with impunity. Loss of American prestige tells the mullahs in Iran that no one and nothing can stop them from acquiring nukes and arming Hezbollah and Hamas.

Read the whole thing.

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