Month: September 2011

Quote For The Day

"Serious conservatives are not essentially imperialists—they are realists, they work with the material at hand, however flawed it may be. In a perfect world Burke and Metternich may not have wanted empire; but empire was an established fact in imperfect reality. An empire restrained by tradition was preferable to the conflagrations of liberal imperialism or nationalism. American conservatives today face a twofold challenge: to constrain our county’s imperial ambitions within the bounds of reality while preparing for a post-imperial future," – Daniel McCarthy's contribution to a symposium on conservatism and empire post-9/11.

What The GOP Has Done To David Brooks

He's venting at Obama today for finally absorbing the ineluctable fact that the current GOP will never, ever support increasing government revenues, and thereby cannot get to the Grand Bargain so many of us want. But look: Obama has put Medicare on the table before and got nothing for it. He has even cut Medicare and been pilloried by the GOP for it. He has been open to major tax reform: they are uninterested until they regain the White House. He compromised on the extension of the Bush tax cuts … only to be ambushed by the debt ceiling fiasco, which seriously hurt him.

I agree with David that Obamaism matters; but I don't think Obama has treated us all like saps for proposing a second stimulus now and less radical ($3 trillion) debt reduction later. Yes, it's not Bowles-Simpson. Yes, its tax proposals will not radically simplify the system (which is what we need) and are geared for political purposes … but at this point, what's he seriously supposed to do?

The only way forward to a Grand Bargain is by calling the GOP bluff on taxes and going to the country on it. Once the Tea Party seized the House, this was always the likeliest scenario. Obama tried extremely hard to avoid it – which is what precipitated the last year of humiliations – which have taken a toll on his ratings and, far more dangerously, wounded his authority as president. And so, he has been forced into political contrast. To blame Obama for this seems absurd to me – and is only in the column because David is leerier of saying what needs to be said: that the current Republican party is a radical, extremist, reckless force that is far more concerned with defeating this president than in reforming the country on bipartisan lines.

And the political logic of the shift, even if it is a Plan B, is compelling. If Perry is the candidate, the choice in 2012 will be between an incrementalist like Obama who is prepared to put entitlement cuts and tax hikes on the table, and a radical who has called social security a "monstrous lie", and wants all the fiscal sacrifice to come from the middle class and poor.

I wish it hadn't come to this. But Obama, to my mind, has successfully demonstrated he has been willing to compromise, and the GOP has successfully demonstrated they cannot. I think most Americans get that. I think they get that if there has been a sap in all this, it isn't David Brooks for hoping for bipartisan reform, but Obama for hoping for sanity from today's GOP.

How The FBI Teaches Islam, Ctd

Ackerman and Schachtman hit troubling pay-dirt:

Money quote:

The best strategy for undermining militants, Gawthrop suggested, is to go after Islam itself. To undermine the validity of key Islamic scriptures and key Muslim leaders.

“If you remember Star Wars, that ventilation shaft that goes down to into the depths of the Death Star, they shot a torpedo down there. That’s a critical vulnerability,” Gawthrop told his audience. Then he waved a laser pointer at his projected PowerPoint slide, calling attention to the words “Holy Texts” and “Clerics.”

“We should be looking at, should be aiming at, these,” Gawthrop said.

Why Don’t Terrorists Have Nukes?

Thomas Schelling hazards an explanation:

Assume the sale [of fissile material] succeeds. The terrorist organization needs the people who can convert the fissile material into an explosive. It needs several highly trained scientists in physics, chemistry, computer science, and metallurgy, and highly skilled machinists and others who can produce something technologically demanding. The fact that a bomb design can be found on the internet, doesn’t make it easy. Anyone can find out how to make a Chevrolet, or an MRI or a CAT scan; there’s no secret, but it’s not easy!

The Rise Of The Generalist

Karl Smith hearlds it:

I don’t know if I’ve heard anyone say this and I am not quite sure what I think about it myself, but one way to view the economy in the Information Age is that the returns to specialization are falling.

So, those who like such things can go all the way back to Adam Smiths pin factory and think about all the tasks involved in making pins and how each person could become more suited to that task and learn the ins and outs of it. However, in the information age I can in many cases write a program to repeatedly perform each of these tasks and record ever single step that it makes for later review by me. The individualized skill and knowledge is not so important because it can all be dumped into a database.

Tyler Cowen adds that "the Generalist boosts the reach of the Specialist, as the Generalist relies on many specialists to supply inputs for his or her outputs."

Can Disease Kill Liberty?

Ronald Bailey analyzes some research on illness and political freedom:

Thornhill and Fincher found that where disease prevalence has been historically high, cultures tend toward collectivist values such as ethnocentrism and conformity—because, they argue, these inward-looking cultural values inhibit the transmission of diseases. The pair examined prevalence data for 22 diseases, looking for correlations with various cultural values, including democratization, property rights, gender equality, and sexual liberalization. Where disease prevalence remains high, they found, autocracy reigns, property rights are weak, women have fewer rights, and sexual behavior is restricted.

What Tax Reform Can’t Do

According to Pete Davis, tax reform "won't create any jobs or boost the economy in the short run" and it "won't raise any revenue for deficit reduction in the short run." Why it's still worthwhile:

[I]t has lot's of long run benefits, after five years. It will make U.S. multinationals more competitive and more likely to increase employment here in the U.S. It will shift employment away from the tax avoidance industry of lawyers and accountants to skilled workers who actually produce goods and services. It will cut down on the roughly $2 trillion U.S. multinationals have stashed overseas to avoid high U.S. taxes. It will stop rewarding U.S. multinationals for carrying debt and building financial services subsidiaries and will make them less vulnerable to financial crises. It will increase dividend payouts. It will lower the cost of capital and increase investment. These benefits only arise after firms change the way they operate, and that will take time, like many years.

Honing Your Elevator Pitch

Noting that the term is "dangerously misleading," Luke Williams shares a few pointers: 

If you're going to get your audience emotionally involved, you need a major piece of tension that throws the status quo off. … Finding the turning point means looking back through your research findings to pull out the key market insight that informs the idea you're trying to sell. After that, your job is to communicate it to your audience — in a counterintuitive way that wreaks havoc with their expectations. It's all about creating a disturbance, a disruption, between what your audience assumes they'll get and what you actually give them.