Read the whole thing.

Robert Farley on Israel, Rome, and Bailouts (yes, there's a line connecting them all.)

Both the settlements problem and the bailout problem remind me of something I wrote a while ago in reference to the Roman Republic. Simply because something must happen does not mean that it will happen. The Roman Republic faced a series of internal crises that were evident to all and that desperately required political solution; moreover, the contours of such solution were evident to most of the relevant political players, and in the abstract were achievable....

The Republic could not save itself because its very structure prevented it from doing the things that were necessary to reform. Almost no one wanted this outcome, but no one could stop it from happening. It's not that people are stupid (although many are) or dishonest (although many are); its that the institutions make certain outcomes difficult to achieve.

As it turns out, I just started reading Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly, which makes a similar argument but focuses on the individuals within institutions: the people who were caught captive by the institutions that they nominally headed: the Renaissance Popes who barely tried to restrain their corruption, and thus courted the Reformation, the English partition from the 13 Colonies and the successors to those Colonies getting mired in Vietnam.

It's why I read history: as a reminder that humans actually never change that much. We get better at some things, worse at others, but in the end the classical realists of political thought are right. You can get all you need to know about politics by reading Thucydides.

How the hell didn't this make it in?

I've got to watch CGI Jabba the Hutt, but when it came time to re-vamp the Star Wars movies Lucas left this part out? What a friggin' tool.

Okay, I guess I'm the only one who thought that was funny

Conversation in class, re: proof-reading

A: This can't be right, it says the infant mortality of X is 130%.

B: Clearly, you're limited by a pretty hard ceiling of only every single one of your children dying.

Me: Well, you could always import kids from somewhere else and kill them, too.

(horrified stares, mouths agape)

Me: I, uh, shouldn't talk. With words.

Odd

Colour me curious. If Bob Rae had not semi-successfully elbowed Michael Ignatieff out of the way to appear as Dion's trusty deputy, would we really be hearing a lot about a Canadian politician's support for the Iraq War circa 2002-2003?

Or, on a different hypothesis, is Bob Rae trying to refresh people's memories for the inevitable leadership race should Dion lose?

Or, is this only being allowed because the alleged issue is Harper's plagiarism of said support for said war, not said support?

Conflicting memes

So John Gray writes in the Guardian:

Ever since the end of the Cold War, successive American administrations have lectured other countries on the necessity of sound finance. Indonesia, Thailand, Argentina and several African states endured severe cuts in spending and deep recessions as the price of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which enforced the American orthodoxy. China in particular was hectored relentlessly on the weakness of its banking system. But China's success has been based on its consistent contempt for Western advice and it is not Chinese banks that are currently going bust. How symbolic yesterday that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees.

And this is seen as a sign of China's triumph and America's decline.

Well, okay. But while China's national government can, with a non-trivial commitment of GDP and educated workers launch a series of successful manned missions 40 years after the US, American billionaires are funding their own successful orbital launches for funsies. (Not quite, but you get my drift.)

So is America hobbled, stumbling in to the oblivion that all empires face against a rising power? Or is China still so backwards that it takes substantial and sustained national efforts to exceed the successes of individual American entrepreneurs? Both? Neither?

I think it's a reasonable point that America looks kind of wobbly at the moment, but if our self-selected anecdotes were statistics they'd have a margin of error of plus or minus 100%.

Notice

So it turns out that they don't just give Masters degrees away. They actually make you work like a dog for them sometimes, and at the moment you can call me Cujo. Among my duties at the moment is writing for yet another blog (that makes 4, if you're counting here, Cogitamus, Gristmill, and my new one.)

So if posting here is of even lower quality and quantity than usual, well, priorities.

Eyes open?

Not too long ago, Jim Laxer was busy telling us all how scurrilous the NDP was for running strong against the NDP. The argument on behalf of the NDP, briefly, was that the Liberals basically hated our guts anyway and it wasn't the job of a lefty party to prostrate ourselves whenever the Conservatives were doing well.

Laxer might just be learning.

Behold my works, ye mighty, and despair

Bailout fails. Republicans balk, as well as 90-odd Dems.

The Dow is down about 500 points. Question: the next stop is a) interwar deutschmark territory, or b) Lord of the Flies?

Finally, a thoughtful President

Man I like this picture. Barack Obama, preparing for his debate last Friday:



I do wonder what he was thinking.

What Ta-Nehisi said, II

But then today it hit me: In the context of this campaign, and with all due respect to a former president, why do I give a fuck about Bill Clinton?

I think some Democrats thought that Bill Clinton could be our Reagan if they tried hard enough: the totemic politician to whom we all would pay homage and devote the next 20 years trying to forward his dreams. Problem is, Bill ain't that grand. His record of accomplishments is substantial, but the party has moved somewhere different. In many ways, the proper analogy is to Dubya's father: competent in some ways, terribly flawed in others, but in any case irrelevant to the direction his party has decided to move.

Debate Reaction

Apparently, the insta-polls all give it to Obama. Therefore, Obama wins! Huzzah!

What Ta-Nehisi said

Here:

The Palin pick was the most crassest, most bigoted decision that I've seen in national electoral politics, in my--admittedly short--lifetime. There can be no doubt that they picked Palin strictly as a stick to drum up the victimhood narrative--small town, hunters, big families and most importantly, women. Had Barack Obama picked Hillary Clinton, there simply is no way they would have picked Sarah Palin. To the McCain camp, Palin isn't important as a politician, or even as a person....

In election season, there is a price for being turned into a symbol. When actual journalists, with a rep to protect, show up, they are going to do their job. Which brings me to the sexism of John McCain. He knew full well what Sarah Palin was going to face if he nominated her. He knew that reporters would go through her past, that they'd quizz her on the present, that she would need to be ready, and he shunted concern aside, and tossed her to the wolves. Think on that for a mement. For one last run at the White House, he risked a future star of the party he claims to call home. How do you do that? I don't meant to rob Palin of agency, certainly she is also a victim of her own calculations and ambitions. But where I am from the elders protect you, and pull you back when you've gone too far, when your head has gotten too big.

Pretty smart, Alaksa

Alaskans think Joe Biden is better prepared to be President (should the unthinkable happen), by 6 points. Delaware, unsurprisingly, agrees.

Busy busy busy

And while I haven't had a lot of time to blog about the US or Canadian elections, can I just say that John McCain may, if he continues down this path and works really hard at it, may just hand Barack Obama Utah's electoral votes.

Survey USA did a snap poll and found only 10% of Americans thought a delay in the debates was a good idea. Meaning Barack Obama, by doing nothing, just got put in the 90% crowd.

And then, in a truly grievous mistake, he pissed off The Dave.



Is it possible for a GOP candidate to get less than 40% of the popular vote? We're gonna find out....

Like it even needs to be said

You really should watch last night's Daily Show. Stewart and XXX covered the bailout proceedings beautifully, but also got the mood for Bush's most magnificent fuckup yet perfectly. Paraphrasing from memory: "It was like finding a vein on a failure junkie, Jon, but they did it."

Also, "We knew he would never be the best President, but now, if he tries hard enough, he just might be..."

"The worst?"

"The last."

All of this has happened before

Why, a white southern man finds himself in the totally not-racist position of arguing that poor people should be sterilized.

Worried that welfare costs are rising as the number of taxpayers declines, state Rep. John LaBruzzo, R-Metairie, said Tuesday he is studying a plan to pay poor women $1,000 to have their Fallopian tubes tied.

"We're on a train headed to the future and there's a bridge out," LaBruzzo said of what he suspects are dangerous demographic trends. "And nobody wants to talk about it."

LaBruzzo said he worries that people receiving government aid such as food stamps and publicly subsidized housing are reproducing at a faster rate than more affluent, better-educated people who presumably pay more tax revenue to the government. He said he is gathering statistics now.

I think my favourite part is this:

He said his program would be voluntary. It could involve tubal ligation, encouraging other forms of birth control or, to avoid charges of gender discrimination, vasectomies for men.

Right, because a) people are just sitting around waiting to be sterilized but nobody's asked them if they wanna, and b) gender discrimination is not the first thing that came to my mind when white southern Republicans talk about sterilizing blacks (oops, I mean the poor!)

Monster. But, because he's GOP, he's a pro-family monster.

Free Sarah!

When will the misogyny end?

That's gotta smart

There's not much to be grateful for when it comes to the Ernie Eves government but his ridiculous election campaign did give us the glorious phrase, "reptilian kitten-eater". It was a phrase that certain journalists repeated to me last year, after John Tory tried to back away from his toxic school funding plan. For those not schooled in the finer points of Ontario politics, the short form definition of a reptilian-kitten-eater moment is when a campaign ceases to have any coherent argument for itself short of the crass pursuit of power. Ernie Eves squandered the advantage of being an incumbent by acting like a petulant child. You could also say that the Palin pick is John McCain's reptilian-kitten-eater moment (I sure did.)

Stephane Dion just had his reptilian kitten-eater moment. It's really quite a shame to watch it happen.

And a pony

If we're going to consider imaginary amendments to the US Constitution that radically change the politics of the nation, I'd argue strongly for the abolition of the Senate instead of abolishing the electoral college. First off, without the Senate seats the electoral college is far less problematic, and the Senate is a pretty despicable institution in its own right. Every progressive policy dies in the Senate three times before it becomes law. Were it not for the Senate, the US could have had Civil Rights laws in the 20s and universal health care in the 40s.

Didn't we win the Cold War?

...and didn't the command-economy-types lose?

So as I write this the Dow is up 400 points on the news that the US Treasury is going to probably end up assuming ownership of all the bad paper behind this latest mess in global capitalism. The first thing I want to do is reiterate a comment I left at Chet's place -- the US Government is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to do absolutely nothing: nothing, that is, except reinforce the status quo. Oh sure, there's some nice words about making sure the middle class gets something out of this too, but the motive force is coming from the Wall Street Bailout. And of course, there's the dilemma of a) whether it will actuall help matters (pace McCain, the fundamentals of the US economy aren't particularly strong) and b) whether there's any other realistic option.

What it does mean, I think, is that the very first things Barack Obama should do when inaugurated is 1) propose legislation to the US Congress creating single-payer healthcare in America, and 2) initiate a massive program to get America off coal, oil and natural gas. Expensive, you say? Big goverment, you say? Bite me. If the US taxpayer can be put on the hook for billions to no purpose at all, while the arsonists reponsible for this mess escape without so much as a night in prison, then we can afford pretty much any amout of big-government project you can name. (And, btw, Iraq is still slated to cost $3 trillion plus...)

The justification here, it seems, is that Wall Street needs to be "recapitalized", which in plain English means the treasury is going to give banks hundreds of billions of dollars for chunks of big shitpile. Fuck me, if you want to give somebody billions of dollars for nothing I could probably set up a solvent, competent banking system too. The difference is I haven't just spend the last decade running businesses in to the ground, which apparently disqualifies me from running a Fortune 500 company, or a Republican Presidential campaign.

When I say this is money being thrown down a hole, somebody is sure to object that this is, in fact, a necessary rescue. The equivalent of calling in the fire department. No, it's not. This is the equivalent of spending years building shitty matchstick homes. Made of paper, plywood and frayed wiring. On the side of a volcano. And then calling the fire department to rescue the poor, innocent people who could never possibly have predicted they were heading towards disaster.

Here's my alternate bailout proposal: instead of the trillion dollars that it's now estimated the US is going to spend getting out of this mess, how about we let Wall Street burn and spend that money rebuilding the actual economy? On today of all days, don't tell me the US can't afford high-speed rail or solar power. The government can charter what ever GSEs it needs to get through the immediate crisis, and in the meantime if Wall Street collapses entirely they'll deserve every bit of it and the supply of donations to the Republican party will dry up appreciably. I call it win-win.