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Those new-nation mavens at the "Let a Thousand Nations Bloom" blog are celebrating the week leading up the 4th of July the right way--with a week-long series on secession. Here is where the celebration begins.
I wrote about our times' leading theoretician and activist for new nations, Patri Friedman (one of the principles of the blog) and his "Seasteading" idea in the July issue of Reason magazine.
For a story most people I know profess not to care about, the death of Michael Jackson is still delivering in terms of structure, character, spectacle and narrative complexity. This week alone has brought Michael's enigmatic will [pdf], father Joe Jackson's impromptu record label promotion, the revelation that the King of Pop's apparently motherless and fatherless children came to Earth directly from Planet Sedna, and the curious twist that celebrity attorney Londell McMillan (who previously served as Michael's lawyer) is representing both of Michael's parents, although mother Katherine is named as Michael's executor and Joe is excluded from the will.
I kind of feel that Big Joe is the most compelling Jackson. It may be that I just have more sympathy for abusive fathers than I used to, or that, even if you don't believe this tale of Quincy Jones' full-contact producing technique, Michael's discography suggests that he tended to flail without a strong male presence in his life.
But who will speak for Joe Jackson? Who is the globalization-age Shakespeare able to comprehend a figure so rudely stamp'd that dogs bark at him as he halts by them? 
Peter Bagge, that's who! Complete Reason's hat trick of Bagge celebration by watching Murray Wilson: Rock 'n' Roll Dad, the animated epic about the Beach Boys' rageaholic paterfamilias that Bagge and Dana Gould cooked up back when Thomas Edison was first experimenting with web video. Along with Fred Lennon and the title character, Joe Jackson gets a chance to stand up and speak for underappreciated producer/fathers everywhere: their fury, their foiled dreams, and their tireless search for the next big thing that will be "driven by Blu-ray technology." Watch the Joe Jackson parts on Youtube or at the original Icebox.com site (still up after all these years).
Former congresswoman and current crazywoman Cynthia McKinney is spending a little time in an Israeli hoosegow this week.
Only a matter of time, you say? Well, she isn't there because of the time her father blamed her electoral defeat on the "J-E-W-S." Nor, as far as we can tell, is it due to her habit of roughing up cops—although there's no official word about her demeanor when her Greek-flagged Gaza-blockade runner was boarded by the aforementioned J-E-W-S in uniform.
McKinney found herself in dangerous waters as part of her new affiliation with the Green Party (she was their presidential nominee in 2008, in case you missed that) she set sail for Gaza in a ship called the Spirit of Humanity, carrying "21 activists, medical supplies, cement, olive trees and children's toys." She says they were in international waters when she and her shipmates were netted by the Israelis, and refuse to sign a statement admitting guilt—a condition Israel has placed on her release.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor has said Israel was planning to free the crew and passengers.
"Nobody wants to keep them here," he said earlier this week.
I bet.
Via Patrick of Popehat, who notes "While McKinney’s outspokenness and frank opinions have made her a lightning rod for controversy, including charges of anti-semitism, there can be no doubt that, this time, the J-E-W-S are at the root of Cynthia McKinney’s troubles. They really do run everything."
Another entry in the "same as the old boss" file, from The Washington Post:
The Obama administration will proceed with a Bush-era plan to use National Security Agency assistance in screening government computer traffic on private-sector networks, with AT&T as the likely test site, according to three current and former government officials.
President Obama said in May that government efforts to protect computer systems from attack would not involve "monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic" and Department of Homeland Security officials say that the new program will only scrutinize data going to or from government systems.
But the program has provoked debate within DHS, the current and former officials said, because of uncertainty over whether private data can be shielded from unauthorized scrutiny, how much of a role NSA should play and whether the agency's involvement in warrantless wiretapping under the Bush administration would draw controversy.
"We absolutely intend to use the technical resources, the substantial ones, that NSA has. But . . . they will be guided, led, and in a sense directed by the people we have at the Department of Homeland Security," the department's secretary, Janet Napolitano, told reporters in a discussion of cybersecurity efforts.
Under a classified pilot program approved during the Bush administration, NSA data and hardware would be used to protect the networks of some civilian government agencies. Part of an initiative known as Einstein 3, the pilot called for telecommunications companies to route the Internet traffic of civilian government agencies through a monitoring box that would search for and block malicious computer codes.
Full article. Back in February, I noted the early similiarties between Obama and Bush's foreign policy visions.
The Washington Examiner's Byron York reported yesterday that Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) has plans for the cash coming in as banks repay TARP money:
Last Friday, Frank introduced the "TARP for Main Street Act of 2009," a bill that would take profits from the program and immediately redirect them toward housing proposals favored by Frank and some fellow Democrats.In other words, Frank wants to take any profit the government would have made off of TARP and immediately spend it on low income housing and mortgage subsidies. Never mind that TARP legislation says that any money the government receives from institutions paying off their bailouts "shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury for reduction of the public debt."
Via The New Yorker comes final confirmation that Osama bin Laden has actually visited the United States in the past. It was a mellow trip undertaken in 1979, hitting all of the Great White Satan's hot spots—including, of course, Indianapolis.
The tale comes mostly from his first wife, Najwa, who recounts one particular encounter with vintage American culture shock:
There was one incident that reminded me that some Americans are unaware of other cultures. When the time came for us to leave America, Osama and I, along with our two boys, waited for our departure at the airport in Indiana. I was sitting quietly in my chair, relaxing, grateful that our boys were quiet….
I saw an American man gawking at me. I knew without asking that his unwelcome attention had been snagged by my black Saudi costume…
I took a side glance at Osama and saw that he was intently studying the curious man. I knew that my husband would never allow the man to approach me…
The New Yorker's Steve Coll admirably resists the urge to conclude that this awkward moment (which, I imagine, is common for Muslim men carting burqa- or hijab-clad wives around in fly-over states) is, like, so important to understanding bin Laden's mind:
Not a particularly consequential experience, perhaps, but surely one that has a life in Osama’s memory and imagination—and another indication, among many available in his life, that he should be understood not only as a self-isolating radical imbued with millenarian religious narratives, but also as a modern and globalized figure whose experiences and outlook belong very much to our age.
To the unknown, uncouth fellow who looked askance at Mrs. bin Laden that one time 30 years ago in Indianapolis: Thanks.
(One more bit of crazy bin Laden family trivia: Osama's niece Wafah Dufour did a spread in GQ and is both Ivy-League educated and smokin' hot.)
Last week was the first anniversary of the Heller case, in which the Supreme Court for the first time declared that the Second Amendment indeed protects an individual right to own guns in the home for self-defense. It was a great victory for individual rights, but by no means a final one.
The lawyer who successfully argued that case, Alan Gura, has remained a dedicated opponent of all sorts of gun regulations that still stand post-Heller. Senior Editor Brian Doherty talked to Gura by phone earlier this week about the various legal challenges he’s fighting against state and local gun laws.
GenomeWeb News is reporting the results of a very preliminary study in which researchers test smokers for a genetic variant that slightly increases their risk of lung cancer:
Researchers from the National Human Genome Research Institute and elsewhere used online and telephone surveys to gauge smokers' perceptions and understanding of online genetic test results indicating whether individuals carried a copy of the glutathione S-transferase gene GSTM1. Previous research suggests those missing the enzyme have a slightly elevated lung cancer risk...
The researchers evaluated 44 smokers between the ages of 23 and 55 years old. Participants received a mouth swab kit by mail and were notified when the results were available online...
Half of the smokers tested were missing GSTM1. All of these individuals reported that they understood that this was a higher risk condition...
All participants sought some form of help quitting and 91 percent of individuals in both groups requested nicotine replacement therapy. After six months, five individuals in the higher risk group and one in the lower risk group reported that they had quit smoking. Still, the study authors were cautious about linking smoking cessation to the test itself, noting that "the study was not sufficiently powered for, nor was it a study aim to, assess smoking cessation as an outcome."
Of course, some bioethicists think that such direct-to-consumer genetic testing needs to be strictly regulated.
Go here for whole GenomeWeb News report.
For all the tears that get shed over the beginning of the middle of the end for Mr. Luce's mag and newsweeklies in general, one obvious explanation generally gets glossed over: They are mostly written by conventional-wisdom mongerers who can barely finish shipping an issue of "Why Dinosaurs Believed in God" and "The Mother Mary Holy Water Diet" before rushing out something like this time-waster by esteemed historian David M. Kennedy.
Sample verbiage:
It's old news that F.D.R.'s New Deal did not end the Depression....F.D.R. appreciated the irony that it was the Depression that made it possible for him to realize those larger objectives. It would be too much to say that he deliberately prolonged the crisis to preserve the possibilities for reform. But he candidly acknowledged the relationship between peril and progress in his second Inaugural Address, on Jan. 20, 1937....
President Obama knows this. Asked by PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer in February if he did not feel burdened by the several crises now besetting the country, Obama noted that the moment "is full of peril but full of possibility" and that such times are "when the political system starts to move effectively."
Roosevelt could not have said it better. F.D.R. championed a long-deferred reform agenda that put security at its core. Obama wants to advance another set of reforms that have long been stalled.
Whole rendezvous with declining circulation here.
Given that it's such old news that the New Deal was an economic flopperoo and that President Obama is pushing a New Dealish-like economic stimulus package, you'd think that maybe Time would be interested in engaging the whys and wherefores of such things. Or in anything like a critical analysis of FDR and BHO. It needn't be negative or libertarian, but something other than idle idol worship might actually pull some eyeballs.
Check out Radley Balko and Jeff Winkler's great social-panic stories from the past four decades of Time here. But don't try satanism at home, kids!
In any case, what can Obama learn from FDR? Plenty. Especially what not to do during an economic downturn. Just watch below.
"Less devastating" is President Obama's description of new Labor Department unemployment figures that massively exceeded expectations. Some 467,000 jobs vanished in June, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That figure was well above the 350,000-363,000 job losses guesstimated by economists, but it was quite close to the 473,000 figure calculated by Macroeconomic Advisers, LLC in its ADP National Employment Report [pdf].
Calculated Risk notes, once again, that the unemployment figures have blown through the "more adverse" scenario envisioned in the first of the so-called bank stress tests. The financial markets are in the process of giving up a non-trivial portion of their second-quarter gains — a slightly unusual pattern for the pre-Fourth of July period. (CNBC calls it the "single worst day before the long Fourth weekend in more than a century," for all you economic sabermetricians out there.) Will any news be coming after the holiday to indicate economic activity is increasing, or decreasing at a decreasing rate, in these here United States?
Obama economic advisors Christina Romer and David Axelrod both downplay but do not dismiss the possibility of a second stimulus package. Meanwhile, paying for the first stimulus package is getting easier, as 10-year Treasury yields drop to 3.49 percent. The Department of the Treasury will be borrowing new piles of money next week, and China is reiterating its call to replace the dollar as a reserve currency. Disgruntled goldbugs (ain't they all disgruntled?) may enjoy this headline: "China, Dollar Vie for Gold Standard."
P.J. O'Rourke is a 21st-century H.L. Mencken-a libertarian satirist and quote-machine who's deeply suspicious of most any office-holder ("Politics is the attempt to achieve power and prestige without merit").
Since the 1970s, O'Rourke has written for all kinds of publications, including Playboy, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Automobile, and The National Lampoon. He is the H.L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute, a regular correspondent to for The Atlantic Monthly, and the best-selling author of 12 books, the latest of which is Driving Like Crazy: 30 Years of Vehicular Hell-Bending.
In June, Reason.tv's Ted Balaker sat down with O'Rourke at the Peterson Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. Topics include: bailouts, who ruined the U.S. auto industry, politicians' love affair with trains, how easy women made O'Rourke a youthful socialist and how getting a paycheck turned him into a libertarian.
Go here for embed code, audio podcast, iPod, and HD versions.
Go to Reason's YouTube channel!
Approximately 15 minutes. This interview produced by Ted Balaker. Director of photography is Alex Manning, editor is Nate Chaffetz, and associate producer is Paul Detrick.
In a post about Wal-Mart signing on to an employer mandate for health insurance, Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein says he was initially skeptical, but then read the joint letter between Wal-Mart, the Service Employees Union International, and the Center for American Progress, and pronounces himself convinced.
He notes, though, that Wal-Mart isn't doing this for altruistic reasons, and in doing so Klein comes perilously close to grasping the concept of rent seeking and regulatory capture. But then he whiffs.
This isn't, of course, a story of altruism. By being of use to the administration, Wal-Mart ensures that its concerns will be heard and heeded. By publicly associating itself with health reform, the company repairs some of the damage SEIU and others have done to its reputation in recent years. And, in a more macro sense, by throwing its weight behind strict cost controls, Wal-Mart makes it likelier that it gets the largest of all possible benefits: an eventual slowing in the double-time march of health-care costs.
Klein then again almost stumbles onto the point. But again he misses.
But health reform isn't supposed to be about altruism. And that's arguably the most important message of this letter. Reforming health reform [sic] isn't just some liberal president's agenda item. It's good business.
Supporting new regulations is usually good business if your company is big enough to absorb compliance costs that could slow down or cripple your competitors. Even better if can you sign on early and win over a few influential opinion makers, interest groups, and politicians so you'll have some pull over how the regulations are written.
Michael Moynihan on Wal-Mart's money connection to the Center for American Progress here. Peter Suderman wrote on Wal-Mart's support for the mandate here.
Eight years after a petition to decriminalize gay sex was originally filed by sexual health advocates, India's Delhi High Court has acquiesced. Their ruling applies only to the city of New Delhi and it may be appealed to the Indian Supreme Court, but sexual liberty (and public health) advocates on the subcontinent hope that the decision will stick and influence other parts of the country to follow suit. In a nation where intimate homosexual relations can net you a 10-year prison sentence, this is no small victory.Some religious leaders quickly criticized the ruling. "This Western culture cannot be permitted in our country," said Maulana Khalid Rashid Farangi Mahali, a leading Muslim cleric in the northern city of Lucknow....I'm not exactly sure what sort of permissive "Western culture" Mr. Maulana Khaldi Rashid Farangi Mahali is imagining, but gay sex only became legal in my home state of Virginia in 2003, and "carnally know[ing] any male or female person by the anus or by or with the mouth" remains a felony (by dint of a probably unconstitutional law) in the Old Dominion."This legal remnant of British colonialism has been used to deprive people of their basic rights for too long," Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Rights Program at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. "This long-awaited decision testifies to the reach of democracy and rights in India.
Overlawyered.com proprietor and Reason Contributing Editor Walter Olson had a great New York Post op-ed earlier this week on the Supreme Court's decision in Ricci v. DeStefano:
MORAL of the day: If you're going to give white job applicants the shaft, don't be blatant about it. Moral No. 2: Don't annoy Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy....
Most of all, Kennedy went out of his way to document his evident disgust with the way New Haven leaders, from Mayor John DiStefano on down, handled the firefighter controversy.The after-the-fact and pretextual rationalizations they devised, Kennedy wrote, were "blatantly contradicted by the record." And that was just the start of the unwelcome scrutiny of New Haven's town fathers....
It's not often that Supreme Court opinions go into such detail to criticize the way a city is run. Some high-profile figures in Connecticut's Elm City must be quite embarrassed right now--if they're capable of embarrassment.
President Obama says government will make health care cheaper and better. But as John Stossel writes, there's no free lunch, even in Canada. "People line up for care, some of them die. That's what happens," says Canadian doctor David Gratzer. As Stossel reports, Dr. Gratzer liked Canada's government health care—until he started treating patients.
Did the Senate Health, Labor, Education, and Pensions (HELP) Committee figure out a way to provide most Americans with health insurance coverage for a lot less money than anyone thought possible? That's what a quick read of some news items seems to suggest. But it's not exactly true.
The AP is reporting that the HELP committee has brought the CBO score of their revised health-care bill down to $600 billion, and that the new bill will cover 97% of America's legal population. The first version of the bill was scored at $1 trillion, and was projected to only cover about 16 million people.
But as The New Republic's Jon Cohn notes, the new numbers are somewhat misleading. The expanded coverage numbers aren't possible unless you also factor in an expansion of Medicaid that isn't included in the $600 billion price tag — an expansion that will probably raise the total cost to between $1 and $1.3 trillion. So it's incorrect to say that the bill would cover most Americans for only $600 billion.
Cohn says the outlays will be deficit neutral, but as the Spectator's Phil Klein points out, there's considerable disagreement over how to raise the revenue to pay for all of this. And of course, there's always the Senate Finance Committee, which is in the midst of revising its health-care reform bill, to think about too.
The obvious upshot of all this is that it'll put a solid wind in the sails of a reform movement that's been roughing fairly stormy waters for the last two weeks. But some of the reform movement's newfound energy will no doubt come from excitement about numbers that don't tell the whole story.
Elsewhere at Reason, John Stossel argues that there's no such thing as free health care.
As Brian Doherty noted yesterday, Reason's own beloved Peter Bagge has a fantastic collection of a near-decade's worth of political cartooning coming out from Fantagraphics. The content is king but the actual production is nothing short of stunning, filled with the bright, bright colors than Paul Simon used to sing about back when Kodak was still making film.
Or (writes Peter hisself!): "If you want a copy RIGHT NOW, you can order it by phone directly from Fantagraphics Books. If you dial (800-657-1100) between now and the end of July they won't charge you postage, so it'll cost you about the same that Amazon charges. DEAL!"
And check out the reviews so far (the last one included to be fair and balanced):
How to describe Peter Bagge? Cartoonist? Cynic? Little ball of human rage? All of the above. Also satirist, raconteur, concerned citizen, and critic. And finally, Libertarian. But one from the realist branch of that political tree.
For the past eight years, Bagge has been producing regular strips and features for Reason, the scathingly brilliant libertarian journal that's the secret guilty favorite of Washington insiders Left and Right. Now the best of that work has been collected by Fantagraphics. Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me is as combative, iconoclastic, and embittered as its title suggests it would be. It is also smart, thought-provoking, and funny as hell. Disconcertingly, you'll agree with at least half of what Bagge says. Then, gratifyingly, you'll realize that everybody is stupid except for you, too.—Tim Heffernan, Esquire
Everybody Is Stupid, overt political concerns aside, is pleasingly consistent with Bagge's earlier work: As mass-population stupidity (tax-dollar boondoggles, sports-arena and shopping-mall mania and so forth) escalates, so do Bagge's abilities to hold it up to razor-edged ridicule.
Bagge cartoons himself as a confused Everyman, perpetually attempting to make sense of a society-gone-senseless. If Bagge is a curmudgeon, he tempers the attitude with a willingness to laugh at everything—even himself. If a documentarian, he is an interpretive and exaggerative one. If a social critic or polemicist, he brings to the table a rare combination of backhanded affection and rambunctious humor. No "ifs" as to the matter of his being one terrific cartoonist, with a keen constancy of purpose.—Michael H. Price, Fort Worth Business Press
First of all, sorry to bury the lead, I'm getting to the point. Second of all, Iggy Pop wouldn't suffer shit like this from smug, vodka-swilling liberal arts majors at a bar. Third of all, is it all right if I draw from this isolated incident with a moron, that all libertarians are idiots?
If Everyone is Stupid is any indication, that's totally fine. This bloated collection of Peter Bagge's work is just a series of similar encounters, through the lens of libertarianism. The book would have you believe that the world is comprised of bleeding-heart pinko Democrats who want to tax you to death and take away your assault rifles, and the GOP's flock of sexually-repressed bible-thumping rednecks.—Ashley Cardiff, CC2K
I may have written and edited a few critical things about Arnold Schwarzenegger over the years, but I find him among the smartest and most interesting politicians I've ever covered. Unlike most pols, he can be pretty damned funny, especially during those increasingly frequent (of late, anyway) occasions when he says something with which I agree. For instance:
Follow Arnold on Twitter! And the You-Tube! Listen to David Bowie pronounce "Warhol" the same way Schwarzie pronounces "cow tails!" And read Reason's archive on the cyborg here.
Since The New York Times' David Rohde has escaped Taliban captivity, information about his capture—and the voluntary six-month media blackout that accompanied it—is finally out. In order to protect Rohde, the Times explains that it corralled print media into a circle of story suppression, but had a tougher time keeping the vigilant user-editors of Wikipedia silent:
It's hard to say whether this makes new media (or new ways of managing media) look bad. Given a situation in which "lives were at stake"—that is, in which the nearly-anarchic quality of Wikipedia's management threatened to put Rohde in more danger by publicizing his situation—Wales compromised and used top-down censorship to suppress news of the kidnapping. It is remarkable, and a little bit reassuring, that Wales and his editors had such a difficult time censoring the site's more ornery, persistent users. Rohde's case, however, also exposes an interesting kink in Wikipedia's model of content control. Usually, it's possible for decentralized governance to keep content on a medium-sized leash, but decentralization requires public discussion about what is or isn't worth including. What should be done when the subject is so sensitive that preventing public discussion of it has to be the entire aim of content control? It looks like we have Wales' answer.The Wikipedia page history shows that [the day after he was kidnapped], someone without a user name edited the entry on Mr. Rohde for the first time to include the kidnapping. [Times investigative reporter Michael] Moss deleted the addition, and the same unidentified user promptly restored it, adding a note protesting the removal. The unnamed editor cited an Afghan news agency report. In the first few days, at least two small news agencies and a handful of blogs reported the kidnapping...
On Nov. 13, news of the kidnapping was posted and deleted four times within four hours, before an administrator blocked any more changes for three days. On Nov. 16, it was blocked again, for two weeks....
Most of the attempts to add the information, including the first and the last, came from three similar Internet protocol addresses that correspond to an Internet service provider in Florida, and Wikipedia administrators guessed that they were all the same user.
“We had no idea who it was,” said [Wikipedia founder Jimmy] Wales, who said there was no indication the person had ill intent. “There was no way to reach out quietly and say ‘Dude, stop and think about this.’”
Over at the MartinKronicle ("insight from a commodity trader), Michael Martin interviews Bill Dunn, the chairman of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website, and principal at Dunn Capital Management.
There's two parts and both are well worth watching if you're interested in freedom and fiscal sanity.
Go here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.
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