Among the first of which is (update: that I can spell “untenable” on the first try) that which operates on the idea that the interests of the upper echelons of any organization and those of the lower coincide.  If one thinks about it for a minute the assertion doesn’t hold up much at all, but we still pay it implicit lip service.

Michigan’s legislature just passed a right-to-work law.  That would be (ahem!) Michigan’s legislature, as in the legislature of Michigan, which has been in the pockets of Big Labor since the Wagner Act was passed.  That would be roughly the equivalent of the Curia deciding to open a snake-handling chapel just off Sistine Chapel.  “Blasphemy” only begins to describe the sense of outrage among the . . . eighteen or so union workers in Michigan who still have a job.  But BY GOD they’re gettin’ union scale for it, aren’t they?  I mean, it’s a pity and all about the hordes of Michigan workers . . . or rather would-be workers . . . who can’t get a job at all because everyone who would employ them is either already organized or depends on organized vendors or customers, and so cannot get away with paying a wage that would pay the light bill but still falls something short of union scale.

But I digress.  Maybe because it’s a public-sector union it may be subject to disclosure rules that don’t apply to private-sector unions, but the data on the Michigan Education Association’s spending patterns is the first of this kind that I’ve seen cited.  Here’s the (pun intended) money quotation:  “According to union documents, ‘representational activities’ (money spent on bargaining contracts for members) made up only 11 percent of total spending for the union. Meanwhile, spending on ‘general overhead’ (union administration and employee benefits) comprised of 61 percent of the total spending.”  I would love to see what the numbers look like for the UAW (the leadership of which a couple of years ago decided to keep their private golf club/resort), or the SEIU, or the IBEW, or the Teamsters, or even the other public-sector labor unions.  How much of what they take in is actually spent on getting a better deal for the guy on the shop floor?  In Michigan, for teachers at least, we now know that answer:  Around eleven cents of every dollar siphoned from the teacher’s pocket on payday.

 This is not a phenomenon that is exclusive to labor unions.  Political entities are likewise subject to it.  We have a problem in the United States.  Congress is simply not serious about addressing either the short-term problems or the longer-range problems that are towering over us and our children.  They’re simply not serious about it.  Just the other day I had a conversation with a sitting member of Congress who:  (i) Informed me how razor-sharp he was and how he knew more about the healthcare issue than anyone else in Congress (I noticed he didn’t claim to have read the 1,900 pages of Obamacare before he voted for it . . . which he did); (ii) Greeted every observation about how goofy are the measures being proposed with a statement along the lines of, “But you’ll never get anything else through Congress”; (iii) In response to pointing out how Obamacare is going to wreck both the private insurance industry, private employers in general, and the healthcare delivery system, could come up with nothing better than the statement that Medicare is broken.  So because of a single entitlement program, which everyone concedes is not sustainable in its present form (Q: What will end Medicare as we know it?  A:  Medicare as we know it.) we’ve got to blow up 20% of the entire economy?  Really?

What I’d like to focus on is his second group of fatuities, namely his rote repetition that you’ll never “get through Congress” anything other than demonstrably foolish measures.  For starts, I don’t dispute the truth of his statement, at least not with respect to Congress as it currently exists and operates.  The inability of any prudent, common-sense measure to make it through Congress is an indictment of all of its members.  They’re just not serious.  You can tell that they’re not serious because they never do anything difficult, where “difficult” is measured by consequences to them personally or politically.  What they are serious about is getting re-elected.  Again, you can tell that because well over 90% of those who run for re-election in fact win.  They’re not all winning based upon their stellar service.

Churchill was serious about re-arming Britain to face Nazi Germany.  He was dead serious about it and spent years in the wilderness, crying unto the heavens.  He was black-listed by the BBC.  He was consistently attacked and misrepresented by the titans of British print media.  He was laughed at, put down, subverted, ignored.  And he was right.  You can tell when a Congresscritter is serious about changing the direction this country is going when he begins behaving like Churchill.  Can one imagine what Churchill would have done with the Internet in 1936?  If he’d had a podcast, a blog, or Facebook?

Just as the Michigan Education Association devotes barely more than a tithe of its income to improving the lot of its members, so also are our elected leaders more interested in attending to their own needs than ours.  What’s the Biblical line?  “By their fruits shall ye know them.”

This is Iran.  These are Iran’s stated objectives.  Mind you, these aren’t just fringe-lunatic elements, speaking out of school on matters beyond their competencies.  These are the statements of the individuals occupying the highest positions in that barbarous land and organizations established by that government specifically to act as its proxies beyond its borders.

Hezbollah:  “If all the Jews gathered in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide. . . . It is an open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth.”

Hamas:  “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:  Israel “must be wiped off the map.”  That’s his own website’s translation of the statement.  An alternative reading of his statement could be translated as merely the assertion that it must be “eliminated from the pages of history.”

This is the regime which Dear Leader promised to meet “without preconditions.”  This is the regime which has publicly bragged — without contradiction that I’ve heard of — that Dear Leader has (clandestinely, of course) “acknowledged Iran’s nuclear rights.”  This is the outfit which Human Rights Watch cannot bring itself to condemn.

Human Rights Watch is the outfit funded in large measure by Geo. Soros, whose patronage of Dear Leader is a secret only to those who actively avoid the information.  Soros survived the Holocaust.  He was passed off as a Gentile’s son.  He was a boy at the time, neither adult nor infant.  His exact actions during that time have been the subject of some adverse commentary.  In round numbers, his “cover” was engaged in some peripheral activities in suppression of the local Jewish population — he was in fact part of implementing the Holocaust.  There have been accusations that George was something more than a passive observer of all this.  He has taken the position that he was no more than that, if even that.  In truth I am inclined to believe him; certainly there are no living witnesses other than George himself any more.  But even if he is understating, to a degree, what did and did not happen, I’m not sure I can, from a comfortable distance of 70-plus years, several thousand miles, and in the absence of swarms of uniformed thugs whose entire mission is to slaughter me, my family, and those like us, judge him.  Think about it:  You’re a young boy.  All you know is that your family has been so terrified for your physical survival that they’ve committed you to this person.  You are old enough to have seen the round-ups, seen the dead bodies, seen at least some of the violence and killing.  You know that’s directed at you.  You know that will happen to you if your cover is blown.  What do you do?  I’ll give ol’ George a pass, barring some truly bombshell revelation.  God will judge him, one way or the other, and I don’t need to.

But then again, we see how he behaves now, when he’s secure, filthy rich, and the Nazis are consigned to history’s dungheap.  We see his pet organization, Human Rights Watch, sucking up to and covering for people, organizations, and countries who have expressed, in exactly so many words, an intention to kill every Jew they can lay hands on.  We see his backing of politicians whose unambiguous actions speak a profound loathing for Israel’s existence.  Does anyone truly, actually believe that Human Rights Watch would so consistently denigrate Israel, would so predictably attack every halting step, every half-measure it takes to defend itself, without George Soros blessing it?  Does anyone actually think that HRW would actually and boldly do its stated job in undercutting every tyrannous regime in the world . . . except those bent on Israel’s destruction, without this reflecting a directive from the man who controls the purse strings?

The final paragraphs of the WSJ article point out something helpful, and something that seems to be of a piece with other aspects of lefty hand-wringing.  They’re not so much interested in those actions which will prevent human tragedy as they are in positioning themselves to come in after the fact and demonstrate what compassionate people they are in litigating over the survivors.  The context of international human rights violations is not the only one in which we see the left uninterested in victims stopping the train on their own.  If they do that, then they’re not victims (by hypothesis).  Non-victims don’t need angels.  Non-victims don’t need (or even very frequently want) the intervention of the compassion industry.  Non-victims don’t have much need for lawyers, counsellors, bureaucrats, consciousness-raisers, awareness peddlers, and the like.

Thus, we see the left straining every tissue to prevent individuals from protecting themselves from violent assault by arming themselves.  We see constant support for those measures which diminish individuals’ and families’ ability to house, clothe, or feed themselves without a hand-out from the government.  We see unwavering support for those policies which will prevent immigrants and their children from assimilating into the surrounding society, and forging paths upward and away from the squalid quarters where they have landed.  We see die-in-the-last-ditch support for government policies which provide cash and in-kind rewards for self-destructive life patterns, choices, and behaviors.  And we see vehement opposition to foreign policy positions and measures which diminish the prospect of massively destructive war.

That degree of consistency across so many unrelated sets of policy preferences cannot be a coincidence.  There is something about the leftish understanding of oneself, the world, and one’s place and value within it which must inform those decisions.  Thos. Sowell, in his extremely helpful book A Conflict of Visions traces two over-arching understandings of humanity, which he labels the “constrained” and the “unconstrained” visions.  (A “vision” he defines as a pre-cognitive mental process which disposes each of us to perceive different observable facts in a particular way, and to assign meanings to them which fall into patterns which we may not even notice are there.)

Grossly stated, the “constrained” vision Sowell so labels because it understands that there is a limit to the moral improvement of which human nature is susceptible.  The “unconstrained” vision does not recognize such limitation.  Someone who accepts an unconstrained vision of what human nature is capable of, in the way of improvement, is much more likely to understand his own human worth in terms of how he contributes to that improvement.  If he does not see himself as pulling an oar to get the boat out of the rapids he is less of a human.  And what better avenue towards human moral improvement than boldly stepping into the breach to better the lives of victims (who are, by definition, helpless; no one speaks of the U.S. Army as having been “victims” of the Wehrmacht at Kasserine Pass, after all)?  But there’s a problem:  Without victims, whom is he to improve?  If the boat’s safely at anchor in harbor, who needs the stout back of an oarsman?  Thos. Sowell, as one might be forgiven for anticipating, has a book on exactly that dynamic and how it plays out in the political field:  The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy. 

It’s been a number of years since I read either book, and so I can’t recall exactly how harsh Sowell was on the “Deep Thinkers” (that’s his phrase, by the way, and if I recall correctly it comes from that latter book), but the point is valid at its core:  Leftism, to the extent it is not a cynical power grab, rests at bottom on making the exercisers of power feel good about themselves, much, much more than it concerns itself with permanently removing the conditions which oppress others.  They’d rather hold a protest march in support of the local battered women’s shelter than they would see those women break out the .40-cal. pistol borrowed from a friend and drill a hole in the man who’s beaten the snot out of them for the past five years.  They don’t adopt that preference from perfidy; it’s just that under the former they validate their own existence, while the latter scenario contains a kernel which negates their humanity:  I am not a victim; I do not need you; you cannot improve my moral plane of existence.

And so Israel, which is entirely willing to defend itself, mortally offends the sorts of people who staff and support Human Rights Watch.  Without suffering victims of war and “aggression” there’s nothing for them to do.  They can go home and worry about raking the leaves, like the rest of us rabble.

Really near you, and near your children and grandchildren.  Britain’s NHS provides “cash payments,” according to this article in the Daily Mail, to hospitals if they meet “targets” for shunting their patients off the take-care-of-them track and onto the let-them-die track.

The problem, of course, is that doctors don’t really know how near death someone really is.  Not even a new-born baby.  So that when the nice doctor in the white coat assures you that It’s All For the Best and you need to Put Your Baby Out of Its (and Your) Misery, about half the time your baby will die within ten days.  And about half the time your baby will linger, enduring “severe dehydration,” for more than ten days.

Once upon a time I could have read this article and just been outraged by it.  I mean, you take a mother (and father, although that’s not even always the case these days) who’ve just gone through up to nine months of pregnancy, the physical pain of childbirth, and the massive hormonal changes that occur in the mother’s body in consequence of all of that, and you introduce an authority figure — a gentle-voiced doctor in a nice white coat — who presents himself in the mantle of the Man of Science, the trained care-giver, and who is, it also happens, being paid cash to convince them that her baby needs to die.  Gee whiz, what could go wrong with that situation?  So a number of years ago I could have read that and merely seethed.

But now that I’ve got three wonderful boys of my own, I can’t read an article like this without sensations of physical illness.  With the advent of in utero genetic testing, what other monstrosities lie just below the horizon?  “You know, Mrs. Murgatroyd, your son is going to be at least to some extent autistic.  He’s going to go through life with no friends, constantly overwhelmed by the daily sensations of ordinary life.  If he’s really, really fortunate he’ll be able to find himself some group home.  He’s never going to have a normal life.  This is really for the best.  You’re doing him a favor.” 

George Will has a son with Down’s Syndrome.  I can’t remember exactly what his fist name is; I think it’s something like John.  A number of years ago Will wrote a column, which I failed to save, asking the question, “Why do people hate John?”  He was talking about the push to have certain forms of testing done even for normal, non-problem pregnancies.  It just so happens that those tests will also reveal whether the child is positive for Down’s.  As Will correctly pointed out, the whole point of encouraging medically unnecessary testing, the only material outcome of which would be Knowledge, is to encourage people to abort children like his son.  And ol’ Geo. Will, bless his heart, has a problem with that.  He talked a bit about his son, and how he lives in his own apartment, likes to go to baseball games, and generally is a loving, enjoyable, and enjoying human.  Around the little town where I live there are several people who are fairly obviously laboring under various mental handicaps, but who hold down jobs.  They’re productive, honest, hard-working members of society.

And in Britain, at least, the hospital gets a cash payment — blood money if ever there were such — to kill people like George Will’s son, and that guy bagging my groceries or bussing the tables, before they . . . you know, Get in Our Way.

Fortunately, something like can’t happen here.

If you think that, keep on comforting yourself with the thought.  I’m sure countless thousands of Germans assured themselves that the horrors of the Soviet Union could never happen in their hyper-educated, deeply-cultured country.  Keep on thinking that, if it pacifies you.

Or so says NBC News.  “American taxpayers have had it easy for decades.”  If by “taxpayers” you mean “able-bodied adult Americans” that answer might be just a teensy-weensy little bit correct.  If you’re talking about that subset of able-bodied adult Americans who actually pay taxes, well, not so much.

According to that notorious den of political hacks, the Congressional Budget Office, between 1979 and 2007, the percentage of total federal tax liabilities, by household income quintile, with additional break-outs for the top 10%, top 5% and them mean, nasty, awful top 1%ers, looks a bit like this:

The bottom quintile went from 2.1% to 0.8%, a 61.9% drop.

The fourth quintile went from 7.2% to 4.4%, a 38.9% drop.

The middle quintile went from 13.2% to 9.2%, a 30.3% drop.

The second quintile went from 21.0% to 16.5%, a 21.4% drop.

The top quintile went from 56.4% to 68.9%, a 22.2% increase.

Within that top quintile, the top 10% went from 40.7% to 55.0%, a 35% increase; the top 5% went from 29.6% to 44.3%, a 49.7% increase, and them awful 1%ers went from 15.4% to 28.1%, an 82.5% increase. 

Just by the numbers, according to total federal tax burden, the total tax burden is not only “progressive,” but it has become massively more so in the past three decades.  What, however, if you want to look at just the individual income tax?  Curiously enough, the CBO is ready to oblige:

Bottom quintile:  change from 0.0% to -3.0%, which produces meaningless number as a percent decrease.

Fourth quintile:  change from 4.1% to -0.3%, which produces a 107% decrease.

Middle quintile:  change from 10.7% to 4.6%, a 57% decrease.

Second quintile: change from 20.2% to 12.7% a 37.1% decrease.

Top quintile:  change from 64.9% to 86.0%, a 32.5% increase.

Within the top quintile, the top 10% went from 48.1% to 72.7%, a 51.1% increase; the top 5% went from 35.6% to 61.0%, a 71% increase, and the nasty ol’ 1%ers went from 18.3% to 39.5%, a 115.8% increase.  The same picture emerges if you look at share of corporate taxes, which the CBO also conveniently provides:

Bottom quintile:  change from 1.8% to 0.6%, a 66.67% decrease;

Fourth quintile: change from 4.1% to 1.4%, a 65.85% decrease;

Middle quintile: change from 6.7% to 3.3%, a 50.75% decrease;

Second quintile: change from 10.5% to 6.8%, a 35.24% decrease; and,

Top quintile: change from 76.5% to 86.8%, a 13.46% increase.

Within that top quintile, the top 10% went from 66.7% to 80.0%, a 19.94% increase; the top 5% went from 57.9% to 73.0%, a 26% increase; and, them ol’ 1%ers went from 37.8% to 57.0%, a 50.79% increase.  To put a slightly different lens on it, the top 5% of households by income paid in 2007 a share of the total corporate income tax lick almost equal to the entire share paid by the entire top quintile in 1979.

I’ll just come on out and say it:  There is no intellectually honest way to characterize the U.S. tax system as being either not “progressive” or not “progressive” enough.  When those whom you most wish to plunder are already paying more than everyone else put together, there isn’t much more room to go up on their tax burdens.

What is especially interesting about this tripe is that NBC actually produces the chart of spending and tax receipts as percentages of GDP since 1990.  It’s pretty easy to trace out the rising tax receipts of the internet bubble in the late 1990s, followed by its bursting.  Likewise it’s easy to see the slowly-decreasing spending curve, beginning after the sniffles which cost Geo. H. W. Bush his job.  The spending continued on a more-or-less steady downward incline until 2000-01, when it was equal to the 50-year average of tax receipts.  Great!  And then the internet bubble burst and we got attacked.  The tax receipts dropped precipitously, and spending bounced back up.  Here’s the interesting thing, however:  Despite Dear Leader’s harping about “two wars fought on a credit card,” spending never did get back to its 50-year average, and in fact by 2003-04 had more or less hit a plateau (it went up for a year or two, and then went back down).  Right about the same time tax receipts started to pick back up, and by roughly 2007-08 were back to their 50-year average. 

And then, as the cross-talk act would say, “The front fell off.”  Spending rocketed to its highest percentage of GDP since World War II — 24.1%.  That spending did . . . what for outright unemployment?  Did what for growth in GDP?  Did what for underemployment?  Did what to stem the tide of foreclosures?  It did precisely just about bugger all, in round numbers.  Meanwhile tax receipts plummeted to where they are now, at 15.4% of GDP.  We’re borrowing $0.40 of every dollar we spend, except we’re not really.  We’re just making it up, since over 90% of long term Treasury paper is being “bought” by . . . the Federal Reserve Bank.  Really?  The left pocket is shovelling the stuff into the right pocket and the guy inside the trousers is crowing about how solvent he is in consequence.

Now the proposal is to ratchet up the tax burden on those same folks who are already accounting for 72.7% of the total income tax liability in the country.  If you went ahead and socked the entire federal income tax liability to just the top 10%, that would require only a 37.6% increase in their overall tax burdens to accomplish.  That would mean, for example, going from a 35% marginal rate bracket to less than a 50% bracket (anyone’s effective tax rate is always less than his marginal rate, so to increase the total tax burden by 37.6% on someone in the 35% bracket would not require increasing the top marginal bracket to 48.1%, but rather some percentage less than that).

Don’t forget that socking the entire federal tax liability to the top 10% still only gets you to 15.4% of GDP, and you’ve got that yawning chasm between 15.4% and 24.1%.  That difference, kiddoes, is 56.5%.  That’s right, to close each year’s deficit (we haven’t even touched the $16.4 trillion in accumulated debt) we’d have to increase our tax yield by over a full half.  In the middle of a “recovery” so weak that it’s not even really clear that there is a recovery.  Even just to get tax receipts back to the 50-year average spending level entails a 40%+ increase in actual tax yield. 

Uummmmmmm . . . . aaaahhhhhhhhh . . . where the hell is that money going to come from?  Goobers like this feller at NBC seem to think that poor people create jobs, that some guy who is scraping by on unemployment and what he can raise doing odd jobs around town is going to start a business, hire eight or ten people, and suddenly become a wealth generator.  He isn’t.  He can’t.  Even if he knows how, even if he wants to work so badly he can taste it, if no one is hiring, and if he’s burned through every dime he’s ever managed to put by in order to keep his children in their house, he’s got nothing to move forward with.  The only kind of a job the government can “create” for him is a government job, which usually entails people doing things others don’t want them to do.  It doesn’t, in other words, create wealth, but only transfers it.

If you want true economic wealth generated, it’s going to have to come from those whom you so dislike.  They are the ones who have capital available to them to figure out something that other people want and are able and willing to pay for, and then go out and do it.  If you strip from them their available surplus, you’re not left with “social justice,” or a more “equitable distribution of wealth,” or any of the other holy grails of the left.  You’ll have a nation full of people whose only skills are in government make-work, and the permanent effects of which will evaporate six minutes after they leave the building.  And you’ll have a ruined capitalist class.  You’ll be left with East Germany.

Finally, from a purely moralistic perspective, is it seriously contended that the 90% of us deserve a free ride on the top 10%?  If it is, I want to hear the arguments in support of that proposition.

There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq!!  We was lied to!  People died, after all, I mean, you know?  The NYT has told us so, for cryin’ out loud.  What is it with you people who keep suspecting that a fellow who had actually used chemical weapons not only against an enemy with whom at war, but also his own subjects, might still have a few lying around the pantry, and that when we didn’t find the stuff when we invaded in 2003, we needed to study on where they might be.

Ignore all those trucks trundling back and forth between Iraq and Syria in the run-up to the 2003 attack on Iraq.  Nothing to see here, folks, move along.

And now, Dear Leader admonishes the Syrians not to use any chemical weapons on their own citizens.  No mention is made of where the Syrians might have got the weapons, the delivery systems, and their respective components in this Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article.  Syria got its first such weapons from Egypt in the 1970s, and thereafter continued to build up its stockpile, with everything from a blind eye from to the actual connivance of some few of the western countries now so earnestly lecturing them on using what’s in their arsenal.  During the run-up to the 2003 invasion, satellite imagery showed convoys of trucks headed from Iraq to Syria.  Captured documents show the active participation of Putin’s spetsnaz in moving chemical weapons and components, rockets and their components, and other weapons systems from Iraq to Syria.  Apparently during the war and its aftermath it was common for U.S. soldiers to stumble upon something suspicious, but, having no trained weapons inspectors with them, by the time they came back a day or two later with folks who would know, what they’d found was gone.

Let’s also take a moment and ask why it is that Turkey is so keen to have a Patriot missile defense shield, just now.  Patriots, if the gentle reader will recall, proved themselves very capable at taking out Scud missiles in flight.  What’s that, you say?  Did those naughty North Koreans build Assad an underground factory for assembly of Scud missiles?  Why yes, yes they did.

Now, not everyone agrees that Saddam, a man who pretty much never did what he told you he was going to do (unless it suited him), and who subverted every attempt short of war to rein him in (I’m thinking specifically of his corrupting the entire U.N. oil-for-food program, in which he bribed luminaries such as Kofi Annan and his family to ignore a constant influx of oil-funded contraband), on this one occasion actually did what he said and destroyed his entire stockpile of chemical weapons after the butt-kicking he took in 1991.  The International Herald-Tribune doesn’t seem to think much of the possibility of Iraq’s weapons’ having made their way to Syria, quoting some anecdotes of potential eye-witnesses to the truck convoys on the one hand, and on the other a senior official to scout the possibility.  Who is not cited in the article is the Director of National Intelligence who, relying at least in part on the referenced satellite imagery, stated his opinion that such a transfer did occur.  In any event, at least the author is honest enough to admit that if we ever get a peek inside Assad’s world we may just have to revise some of our received wisdom on whether Geo. W. Bush’s stated basis for war in 2003 was or was not a “lie.”  Reckon there are bets being hedged among the Deep Thinkers?  Reckon they’ll actually report it if found?  Yeah, I don’t either.

The International Herald-Tribune is owned by The New York Times.  You’ll remember them as the ones of whom it was correctly observed, as they betrayed one national security secret after another while our country was actively engaged in a war, that “they’re not anti-war; they’re just on the other side.”  If you Google the topic, more than a few of the skeptical reports, e.g. this one, link back to articles in the NYT and/or its subsidiaries.  The first linked article above is to the London Daily Mail, which is (ahem!) neither owned by the NYT nor an unpaid adjunct to the DNC. 

Then of course there is a Kris Alexander, who it seems actually was on the ground in Iraq post-war, as a weapons expert, and found nothing.  He’s got a few articles over at Wired, in which he pretty vigorously dismisses the suggestion that Iraqi chemical (or other sorts of) WMD made it to Syria in 2003.  I certainly am not going to dispute his statements about what he did or did not find.  His dismissal of the possibility as being nothing more than the fevered imaginations of conspiracy lunatics ought, I think, to engage a bit more fully with the evaluation of what was observed and has not been explained yet.  The satellite images showed what they showed.  What does Alexander believe to have been in those trucks?  Were those the last desperate deliveries of export goods previously contracted for, which Saddam in a mechanical fashion continued to deliver, just like the last Soviet train bearing raw materials crossed the border in the late hours of June 21, 1941?

Other than his personal observations, which as mentioned I’m perfectly willing to take undiscounted, much of Alexander’s analysis in the linked article comes back around to the idea that Saddam’s shunting his most potent weapons off to Syria on the eve of an invasion just makes no sense.  It’s a plausible argument.  I beg to offer a dissenting opinion.  For starts, dictators, especially those who’ve been in power for a good while, do not think like you or I.  They tend to think that no matter what happens, they’ll survive, somehow, by a miracle (Hitler in his bunker in Berlin, literally able to hear the concussion of Soviet artillery shells through the walls, was convinced that FDR’s death on April 12 was the miracle deliverance he’d been waiting for, just like Frederick the Great was saved in the 1700s by a similarly fortuitous death).  Saddam had, by the way, a concrete data point to support him in his evaluation of his post-invasion chances.  The U.S. had already invaded once, destroyed most of his combat army and air force, and still had pulled its punch in leaving him in power.  And that was after he’d actually invaded a neighbor.  In 2001-3 all he’d done was welcome the stray Al Qaeda operative.  And if he intended to give up on coming back, why did he go into hiding for months afterward?  Why did he not just disappear into the shadow world of Arab politics?

With all possible respect for those like Brer Alexander and the others who rely on the essentially psychological argument that it makes no sense for Saddam to have done what is mooted, I think the better interpretation of why he acted as he did is that he fully intended to return to power, once the U.S. had held its victory parades and gone home.  Just like 1991.  His chemical weapons weren’t built to use against America; even a lunatic understands what happens when you pull that kind of trigger against someone who so vastly overpowers you.  You guarantee your personal destruction.  Trying to think myself into the shoes of a madman is pretty presumptuous, of course, but Saddam can be forgiven for thinking that the U.S. would do again what it had done in the past:  Crow on its conquered dunghill and then, weary of the effort, trundle on home.  At which point Saddam, with Assad’s assistance and that of his most loyal followers, who had (let’s not forget) largely melted back into the populace by that point, would re-emerge, and re-armed with his WMD place himself back in power.  He might have to contend with a few opponents here and there, but he’d be the only one armed and backed by a friendly power, and he’d certainly be the only one with non-conventional weapons.  Which he was quite willing to use on his people.  So removing his WMD from the scene in the interim would have served two very realistic goals for him: (i) It would have removed a temptation for the U.S. to hang around, which would be fatal to his hopes; and, (ii) It would preserve his ability to re-impose himself on the country after the U.S. left.

In the end here we are, with a paper tiger at our head, desperately hoping that the Assad regime won’t decide that if it’s going down, it will do so with an empty magazine.  That’s a safe bet.

But they sure can tell when something devalues what they’re in the process of getting and paying for.  Of students polled at Brown University, one of the most famously left-wing campuses in the country, 58% disapproved of the use of racial preferences in admissions, and only 34% approved.

You see, when you dole out a credential on any basis other than demonstrated ability to earn that credential, you cheapen it, not only for the people who got it on that discounted basis, but also for every other holder.  Dare we hope that these students have figured that out?  Unfortunately, as the article points out, we can’t assume that the students’ opinions reflects any lack of mandatory group-think: None was willing to go on record with a disapproving opinion.

The linked article is brief, so we can’t know whether the polling was done with any statistical degree of rigor, nor are we told anything about the sampling population.  It would be interesting to know.  This may be just some “man on the street” sort of interview.  But however it was done, having that percentage even admit in private to heterodox views on the subject has to be seen as some sort of encouraging.

A short screed here, on the word “merit.”  That word is way too value-laden for my liking.  I have absolutely no way of weighing any other human’s “merit,” either in the abstract or concretely.  I can pretty well tell when someone is unmeritorious, but beyond gross-scale differentiation (e.g., I’m reasonably sure that a senior Taliban official responsible for oppression of females in Afghanistan does not deserve to live, let alone to be enrolled at Yale University in preference to any single other of school’s thousands of applicants), but my ability runs out at that point.  All that I can adequately measure is demonstrated (i) ability, or (ii) achievement in some relevant related human activity.  To the extent that I claim I’m taking anything else into account I’m more or less making it up as I go along.  I mean, how do you make any sort of meaningful distinction between the applicant whose mother was an unmarried crack whore living in a beat-up single wide in, say, Harlan County, Kentucky on the one hand and on the other the Vietnamese boat person’s kid who arrived on these shores with a bundle that could be carried in one hand, not knowing the language, but with an intact family and a phenomenal work ethic?  You can’t; you just can’t.  To say that one is more “meritorious” than the other pretends to a degree of knowledge that humans have never possessed and never will.

Except it is.  You have to be a Deep Thinker to be amazed by that fact, though.  You see, Deep Thinkers don’t mix with the rest of us.  They’re so much better than we are, you see.  They live in the correct ZIP Codes, after all; they vote for the correct people, donate to the right causes, and all get their panties in a wad together over the obligatory things, like someone cutting down a tree halfway around the world.  We ignernt incestuous beetle-browed clingers?  They really don’t have any idea about us, except what they read in the NYT, the WaPo, the LAT, New Yorker, TNR, and see on MSNBC.  And don’t let’s forget how thoroughly those infotainment outlets try to understand anyone other than their readership.

So of course the Deep Thinkers know — they just know! — that if you let us have something that will push a .45 cal. bullet downrange at 1,000 f.p.s. or better, we’re all going to put on our face camouflage and go hunt us some Hispanics, or something like that.

Thus when, as the Associated Press reports, gun sales in Virginia increase by 73% and gun-related crime goes down by 24% during the same period, that only “seems to contradict the premise that more guns lead to more crime in Virginia,” according to the feller who did the study, a professor Baker of Virginia Commonwealth University, and they just get all plum comflusterated a-tryin’ to cipher it out.  Well, prof., it’s been 27 or so years since I took statistics for liberal arts folks (i.e. people who can’t do math), but I’ll share something with you: The existence of two measurable diametrically opposing trends, when one of the trends is three times the magnitude of the other, does not “seem to contradict” the proposition that the two variables are positively correlated.  It in fact falsifies that statement.  Had gun sales gone up by 22% and gun-related crime increased by 5%, you might say there was evidence that they are not or only weakly positively correlated.  You might be forgiven for saying further research was needed to see if, as a hireling of the anti-personal-liberty lobby d.b.a. the “Virginia Center for Public Safety” (I’ll remind the gentle reader that tyrants since the days of Robespierre have done business under the banner of “public safety”) allows, “But is the crime going down because more people are buying guns, or is the crime going down because the crime is going down?”  But you cannot intelligently make those statements when the numbers move opposite to each other and by those magnitudes.

[Yes, dear, there are in fact crimes other than gun-related crimes, but are we really interested in whether a three-quarters increase in gun purchases moves the needle on tax fraud, meth labs, or importing rosewood which you can’t prove was harvested in a “sustainable” manner?]

I’ll also observe that not only are the numbers moving opposite to each other, but they’re doing so precisely during a period, 2006-2011, when all the other factors which we rednecks are assured actually cause crime, such as poverty, economic dislocation, long-term unemployment, increasing political polarization, folks losing their homes, etc., have been going through the roof.  In short, everything, literally everything which according to their predictive models would produce measurable increase in gun-related crime has not only failed to produce any increase at all, but has failed to stop the decrease.  Thus, not only has a near-doubling of Input 1 not produced any increase at all in Outcome X but rather a 24% decrease in observable Outcome X, but the simultaneous near doubling of Inputs 2 (e.g., going from 5% unemployment to 8.2% unemployment is a 64% increase) through n have likewise failed to produce any increase. 

Mind you, for the past half-century or so we’ve had our pocketbooks repeatedly visited by those like the “public safety” feller, on the basis — among many others, admittedly — that certain things “cause crime,” and that we need to shell out billions upon billions of dollars to “fight” this, that, or the other self-destructive behavior because if we don’t, it will “cause crime to increase,” and so forth.  Now this “public safety” feller wants us to understand that crime just goes up and down because it . . . well, because it just goes up and down, magically on its own, and independently of any other varying, measurable behavior in society at large.  What he’s really telling me is some one or more of the following statements:  (i) I am an idiot; (ii) I have been lying to you all these years while I gulled you into forking out your money; (iii) I cannot understand basic notions of statistics; (iv) I have never heard the name Karl Popper; or, (v) I, too, am afraid of losing my job.

 Dan Mitchell over at International Liberty has the correct two-sentence summation of the Deep Thinkers’ outlook:  “Gee, there are more innocent people with guns and people are surprised that criminals are now more reluctant to commit crimes? I guess you have to be a reporter or an academic to be surprised by this common-sense observation.”

Last night the EU parliament approved a new series of regulation of the rating agencies, such as Standard & Poor, Fitch, and Moody’s.  They are now to be liable for, among other things, “grossly negligent” ratings.  Issuers who own 10% or more of one of the agencies are forbidden to use that agency to issue a rating on their securities; ownership of 5% of a rating agency must be publicly disclosed.  Every three years issuers of certain complex products must change at least one of the agencies rating their securities; the one they change out must then wait four years before being permitted to rate another security of that issuer.  The agencies are also to be required to issue a uniform, mathematically-expressed rating in addition to their alphabetical ratings.  By 2020 no investor is to be required automatically to regard an issued rating (presumably this is to insulate fiduciaries from being prohibited from making investments unless they have a particular rating).

Now, a good-faith argument can be made for all of the above measures.  The whole ratings game can, just as with any other repeat-player dynamic, easily mutate into a mutual accommodation society.  There seems to have been more than a tad of that going on in the run-up to the 2008 collapse.  Of course, the single biggest part of the bubble — the U.S. housing bubble — was not only being deliberately inflated by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but its pet Congressmen were publicly and vehemently denying any problems at all with their donor’s portfolio or finances.  The statements of, e.g. Maxine Waters, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd were far more egregious than anything put out by S&P or any of the others.  But we aren’t talking about that.

 The question that’s niggling away in the back of my mind on this particular set of regulations is:  Why only now?  All of the problems with rating agencies have been known for years; their role in the 2008 collapse has been known for years; the measures adopted by the EU are not terribly complicated measures.  Why has it taken just over four whole years to enact a fairly modest slate of reforms to the industry?

OK; I admit I wasn’t being entirely forthcoming in that preceding paragraph.  The Eurocrats tipped their hand.  Their sudden concern for all the poor downtrodden investors out there has got bugger all to do with what Moody’s has to say about issues of Ford Motor Corporation, and everything to do with what it has to say about whether it’s a good idea to keep buying European sovereign debt.  I deliberately didn’t mention above all of the new regulations.  F’rinstance, the agencies are now prohibited from issuing ratings with respect to EU-area sovereign debt except three times a year, and only when the European exchanges are closed.  The proposal was initially floated to forbid them outright from expressing an opinion at all about whether Greece, which within the past couple of days has just got another few dozen billion Euros, at zero percent interest, and obtained extensions on its existing debts, and is proposing write-downs of its fellow-states’ holdings, might not be the best place to park your money.

According to the linked article, those super-dooper diligent Eurocrats are have been just worrying themselves sick (cue Pete Puma:  “I’m the little feller’s mother and I’ve been so wooooorrrried about him!“) that the ratings agencies have been over-valuing private issues of securities.  Bullshit, as the same article makes clear:  They’re worried that by cluing in the pigeons investors in EU sovereign debt that buying paper from such paragons of financial probity as Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and/or France is shooting one’s money up a wild hog’s ass, those worthies might have to pay market price for their promises to pay the money back, and that the market price for their worthless paper might actually fluctuate according to their own behavior. 

When you ponder those additional nuggets, the underlying purpose behind absolving investors from paying attention to whether S&P says a particular bond is junk or gilt becomes a bit clearer.  Who are the big purchasers of sovereign debt?  Pension funds and financial institutions.  They are, in other words, investors who are bound by fiduciary obligations, or whose own soundness is at issue on a daily basis.  If, for example, Dresdner Bank is required by German banking regulation not to hold more than X% of paper in its portfolio that is rated Aab or worse, then it cannot legally continue to purchase worthless Greek paper.  If the pension fund for, say, a bunch of Dutch shipyard workers is held to a fiduciary’s standard of prudence in investing its members’ retirement assets, then wouldn’t it be nice for the EU simply to declare that putting the whole wad in Portuguese sovereign debt is just hunky-dorey?

Just to make the actual agenda even more abundantly clear, even to someone as dense as a NYT pundit:  One of the German SPD members has demanded nothing less than — you really do have to admire the brass on this guy — a specifically EU-run ratings agency to express opinions as to the soundness of the EU’s and its member states’ obligations.  Really.  He really said that.

You know, if only the emperor in the story had thought to pass a decree declaring it illegal to express an opinion on another person’s clothing except on three stipulated occasions per year, he’d have done so much better.

Updated (28 Nov 12): To add link to relevant video of Pete Puma.