"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
by Smitty
People ask me how it’s going, and I say “I can’t complain.” Case in point as to why:It’s explicitely spiritual, without being heavily evangelical.
<jest>At the end, though, Crowder does ‘go British’, and starts hating on the Cosmic Credit Card that has made America great. Why do you hate Progress, Steven?</jest>
by Smitty
Insty links The Hill discussing snuffing the Department of Transportation.
Appearing late last week on a radio show in his home state, Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) agreed with the host of the program that the DOT was a “middleman” in transportation projects that can be done without.
“Well, I think there are some great ideas that would basically turn the Department of Transportation back to the states, because why do we have this system that says, hey, we’re going to just have you collect money, and we’re going to scrape some off the top,” Gardner said when KFKA 1310 AM host Amy Oliver asked him about the proposal Friday.
Freaking great idea! This can be a gateway drug for scaling back other federal over-reach. It is a good thing to hear serious discussion of trimming the federal bureaucracy.
Furthermore, I should like to propose a rule, that no new federal bureaucracy can outlive the POTUS who creates it. A regular lifecycle of creation and destruction would blunt the effect of the Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
by Smitty
Maggieby’s Farm: “The breakdown of the family lies behind all other urban dysfunction.”
The Progressive is the political equivalent of the stereotypical unethical used car salesmen. You need reliable transportation, he knows your need reliable transportation, and he’s all about separating you from your money with something that superficially passes for reliable transportation, but ultimately fails.
It’s one thing, in a political context, to assume a posture of libertarian indifference to people and puppets in private. Bert and Ernie just don’t matter. I really don’t care.
Yet, as a new father, there is no way under the sun that the World’s Youngest Blogger is going to suffer regular exposure to ideas that are pure dreck. Sesame Street and the Muppets were great back in the day, but something less poisonous, say, Veggie Tales, is what the WYB will be consuming.
While not explicitely setting myself up in judgement over anyone’s choices (the Almighty, History, and Economics do that far more effectively) I will repeatedly make positive choices in favor of the obviously truthful, correct, workable path. If the diseased, Progressive mindset overtakes the WYB later on, it shan’t be for lack of better counsel on my part.
by Smitty
Daily Pundit links Taylor at Outside the Beltway on the British riots in what is yet another willful attempt at non-analysis:
As best I can tell, the riots did not have a political motivation (the spark/excuse was the police shooting a suspect) and the general tenor appears to be wanton criminality rather than political statement. Certainly the current economic situation (and the relevant politics) is feeding the behavior, but at this point I don’t think that one can make broad political claims.
Oh horsepucky, Taylor: if these riots lack a political basis, then so did the American Revolution. The differences are (a) that these rioters are much closer to Parliament, and (b) there is no leadership core to kick the useless Parliament to the curb.
These types of events are complicated and one suspects that understanding this particular event will take some time to accomplish. I certainly am not going to claim to have answers at this point and am skeptical about those who claim to understand the event, especially if they think it fits some simplistic ideological worldview.
Taylor, obfuscation is as great a sin as oversimplification. What’s at work here is the unwillingness of the Progressive, Ruling Class Overlords to take an honest look at the situation. Honesty implies some notion of truth, some objective standard against which measurement occurs. Thanks for self-identifying as one of the spineless sophists more part of the problem than the solution, Taylor. Intellectually curious people should avoid your classes like ObamaCare.
by Smitty
. . .that anybody who is surprised that a mortal man cannot magically fix the economy ought to have their head examined.
Yeah, he was supposed to be all that and scoop of ice cream, the most over-sold thin since XML.
Sure, it’s a bad thing that his ideas aren’t proving much.
But it’s an order of magnitude worse that a supposedly liberty-based country has gone so far in abdicating that liberty to some finite individual. It’s disgusting. Knock it off. Scale back this government, and let’s be about digging ourselves out, people.
by Smitty
Via Memeorandum, this column in the Gray, Room-Temperature Lady is just a thing of beauty, if you find beauty staring down a port-a-john. Crescendo reached here:
Then came the financial crisis. I like to joke that there’s nothing like a good financial crisis to turn you into a liberal. But it’s not really a joke. The more I learned the back story that led to the crisis, the more horrified I became. The lack of regulation and oversight of Wall Street and the big subprime companies like Countrywide, driven by the ideology of deregulation, was thoughtless and irresponsible. The refusal of bank regulators to stop subprime abuses bordered on the criminally negligent. The unwillingness of the Obama Justice Department, even now, to hold anyone to account for their role in the crisis has been disheartening.
Lack of regulation? Isn’t over-regulation the reason that capital is fleeing to England? Or is the anti-business tax climate of the U.S. just another form of patriotism?
Lord, grant this man some grasp of Economics.
“refusal of bank regulators to stop subprime abuses” is gorgeous. The Community Reinvestment Act is a standing 10th Amendment violation, and has been further used as graft machine. Fannie and Freddie created the moral hazard that drove the financial crisis.
Lord, grant this man some grasp of human nature and limited government.
“The unwillingness of the Obama Justice Department, even now, to hold anyone to account. . .” The Obama Department of Justice is a standing oxymoron. If Holder and his clown car load had any notion of Justice, they’d resign en masse.
Lord, grant the suffering people justice with a side of mercy.
You can read the whole thing, and judge whether a slightly liturgical response was better than the napalm shower that initially came to mind.
by Smitty
A fine break from whatever you were doing:
Psychologists will tell you that people, when faced with a threatening situation, react instinctively: either “fight or flight”. What they overlook is the not inconsiderable number of human beings who are occasionally overwhelmed with a desire to shrink to the size of a dime and roll into the first convenient crack in the floor, but have no alternative but to stick things out.
by Smitty
Via Insty, MIT’s Technology Review points to a McAfee article about governments getting hacked.
The attacks stretch back almost five years, and ranged in duration from one month to 28 months. They affected 32 types of organizations, including government agencies and defense, construction, information technology, and accounting firms.
McAfee believes the attacks were orchestrated by a nation-state, but it has not named that country.
I won’t hazard a guess, but if I had to, I’d throw out some place whose name rhymes with ‘vagina’.
This post will argue that the threat of hacking is the second greatest thing, after elections, for trimming the irrationally exhuberant growth of government. You see, when it comes to implementing the Iron Law of Bureaucracy what you see is increasingly deep hierarchies. The org charts go on for days. Organizations are all about controlling information flow, setting up patronage relationships where certain boxes on the org chart are choke points. People in the boxes control information to store up power and breed their own bureaucracies, in the fashion of a jungle.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.–Oscar Wilde
Well crafted information systems are Agent Orange to the bureaucratic jungle. Transparent, flat, unambiguous, reliable information delivered by software renders all that peopleware in the org chart completely moot. When the data are readily available, more work is accomplished, and it’s all over but the retirement party for the bureaucratic deadwood.
Which is precisely why the bureaucracy is fighting so hard to entrench. Arguably the most detestable example is Nancy Pelosi on ObamaCare:
“But we have to pass the [health care ] bill so that you can find out what is in it.”
No, you Botox-addled bimbo, that is precisely the opposite of the desired result.
And hacking is precisely, if illegally, what is going to drive the Pelosis out. The capacity to blow smoke up the public backside is diminished when email and websites spread the perfidy far and wide. Hacking off government fingers will prove a harsh, but effective, way of keeping them out of the economic pie. The government is going to be forced to focus on legitimate, core functions, and perform them more more transparently, as more and more data leak out. Government hasn’t been forced to conduct public business in a forthright manner, but increasing attention from taxpayers is going to drive precisely that. When people are asking questions, the simplest, most honest approach becomes the most defensible.
One real avenue for improvement along these lines will be the tax code. If the threat of exposure for private information is significant enough, maybe we’ll get around to the idea that income tax really sucks, and set about funding government through less intrusive means. Making the formulae for calculating tax burdens more transparent and public would seem an obvious improvement. The notion that we’re paying for service through taxation, but not privileged to see the business rules, is baffling. If I buy an application from Microsoft, and their proffered license hides the source code from me, well, fine: there are other vendors. Government, not so much. We need to amend this attitude that the Government regularly says ‘no’ to taxpayers without a national security basis for saying no.
So, while I’m not encouraging illegal activity, I’m saying that hacking will not be without positive side-effects for liberty.