Read it.

It has been interesting to watch the word cowboy become a term of abuse, politically, over the last decade. Critics often described Bush’s foreign policy approach, in particular, as reckless, unthinking or bombastic – a case of “cowboy diplomacy.” My guess is that the vast majority of people employing this term have never met an actual cowboy. Real North American cowboys are often very deliberate and measured when they speak, but they do tend to have limited patience for being pushed around – a combination of qualities as useful in foreign policy as in life.

The chief thing to remember about cowboys is, that you don’t want to fuck with ’em. And ‘Don’t Mess With Texas’ is trademarked by the state. I wouldn’t mind having Gary Cooper as Secretary of State, with Jimmy Stewart as President and John Wayne as Secretary of Defense. I think that lineup might just get the job done.

To be sure, President Obama is no “cowboy.” He instinctively scolds and shifts blame, splits every difference, appears peevish when criticized, views himself as a kind of international community organizer, and places tremendous faith in the power of endless talk – especially his own. Elite transatlantic liberal opinion continues to view this overall approach, self-referentially, as the height of sophistication, regardless of its practical failures.

Perhaps we might call this approach Kindergarten Diplomacy.

Notice that Obama’s one undisputed international success, the killing of Osama Bin Laden, was achieved through an uncharacteristic reliance on aggressive interrogations and unilateral military action without permission from anybody. If a Republican president had engaged in this sort of act, no doubt we would have heard much more hand-wringing about the dangers of a rootin’-tootin’ approach to counter-terrorism. But then that’s cowboy diplomacy for you.

Maybe it’s time to tell Barry that recess is over.

Megan McArdle looks at her own profession.

While it’s undoubtedly true that some reporters consciously repress facts which threaten their ideological priors, I don’t think that’s really the issue in most cases.  What bias does–in science, in media, in any situation where information is gathered–is affect what questions you ask.

Read it.

Read it.

Prosecutors throw the book at people in order to scare them into plea-bargaining for a lesser offense, thus increasing their conviction rate and advancing their political careers. It works, to the extent that innocent people will often plead guilty to something they didn’t do in order to avoid the catastrophic results that might ensue from the original charges in our Who Knows What A Judge Or Jury Will Do? judicial system.

Yet another way in which our political system is structurally corrupt.

Read it.

Libiamo ne’ lieti calici

Feel free to sing along.

Read it.

About six weeks ago Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama Huntsville (a center for lots of NASA activity and climate research) published an important new paper with William Braswell in the Journal of Remote Sensing entitled “On the Misdiagnosis of Climate Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance.”  Translated from the scientific lingo, the paper essentially argues that discrepancies between what the climate models say should be happening and what we actually observe happening (namely, the pause in warming over the last decade) means we still don’t have a complete picture of cloud behavior.  (This issue is closely related, though not identical, to the post I had up last weekend on Nature’s blockbuster cosmic ray paper.)  As Spencer explains on his blog: “Even the IPCC admits the biggest uncertainty in how much human-caused climate change we will see is the degree to which cloud feedback [temperature change => cloud change] will magnify (or reduce) the weak direct warming tendency from more CO2 in the atmosphere.”

Well, you can imagine what happened next.  Not content with attacking Spencer and Braswell for their heresy, the Climate Inquisition has forced the resignation of the editor of the Journal of Remote Sensing.

Smitty at The Other McCain gets some PT in.

Fisking a Maureen Dowd column. It’s the blogger version of calisthenics, really.

Read it.

The startling extent to which Labour misled the world over the controversial release of the Lockerbie bomber is exposed today in top-secret documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday.

In public, senior Ministers from the last Labour Government and the Scottish First Minister have repeatedly insisted that terminally ill Abdelbaset Al Megrahi was freed on compassionate grounds in a decision taken by Scottish Ministers alone.

But the confidential papers show that Westminster buckled under pressure from Colonel Gaddafi, who threatened to ignite a ‘holy war’ if Megrahi died in his Scottish cell.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

All caused, of course, by the surplus of Chinese males, which is in turned caused by the Chinese one-child policy and the cultural impulse in China to make that one child male.

“The one-child policy has had a considerable impact. Where you have a demographic imbalance, you have a situation where women are in demand. Sometimes, that demand is met through legitimate marriage brokers. Other times it is met by non-legitimate means,” said David Feingold, the International Coordinator for HIV/Aids and Trafficking in Unesco’s Bangkok office, and the writer and director of the 2003 documentary Trading Women.

Markets work even when you don’t want them to.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

It’s been called the Gig Economy, Freelance Nation, the Rise of the Creative Class, and the e-conomy, with the “e” standing for electronic, entrepreneurial, or perhaps eclectic. Everywhere we look, we can see the U.S. workforce undergoing a massive change. No longer do we work at the same company for 25 years, waiting for the gold watch, expecting the benefits and security that come with full-time employment. We’re no longer simply lawyers, or photographers, or writers. Instead, we’re part-time lawyers-cum- amateur photographers who write on the side.

Today, careers consist of piecing together various types of work, juggling multiple clients, learning to be marketing and accounting experts, and creating offices in bedrooms/coffee shops/coworking spaces. Independent workers abound. We call them freelancers, contractors, sole proprietors, consultants, temps, and the self-employed.

Perhaps the reason there are no jobs being created is that the very idea of ‘job’ is outdated.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

There are two ways to get money: Honestly by hard work, or dishonestly through thievery and fraud. If you vote for politicians because they promise to give you money taken from taxpayers, you are practicing the politics of thievery.

We call it “corruption” or “bribery” when businesses give money to politicians in return for their support of legislative favoritism, but we call it “social justice” when Democrats promote programs that give money to voters who support Democrats….

Read it.

Voracious mining has hollowed out vast tracts of the north of China, leaving three million people living on ground that could collapse at any moment.

Boy, those blood-sucking corporations have gone too far. This is what corporate capitalism leads to, oppression!

Oh, wait….

Read it.

These are students who demonstrate great daring, creativity and teamwork during long hours playing shoot-’em-up multiplayer video games, a much maligned pursuit that teaches any number of valuable cognitive skills. Yet in the classroom, they stare blankly at chalkboards when they’re not stealing glances at smartphones, doing just enough to avoid being singled out and punished.

Among public school teachers and their advocates, a new phrase is in vogue: “corporate education reform.”  The conceit is that advocates of choice-based education reform really want to privatize public education, to make a profit off young people and embrace the latest corporate fads.

But history tells us that today’s public schools are the legacy of corporate fads from the 1900s, when large industrial enterprises were keenly interested in securing a docile workforce that recognized and respected hierarchies. The tinkering, self-starting spirit that had been a necessity in a frontier society was snuffed out by design. We’ve been taught that education is this constricted, standardized and homogenized thing that happens in buildings called schools in between the ringing of school bells.

Read it.

What does it mean to “look presidential,” and why does it matter? An enormous amount of the media coverage of presidential candidates is focused on whether or not he (or, very rarely, she) “looks presidential.”

Read it.

Between those who predicted a flowering liberal democracy in a post-Mubarak Egypt and those who predicted the empowerment of radical, Muslim Brotherhood aligned forces in a post-Mubarak Egypt, it is clear today that the latter were correct. Moreover, we see that the US’s abandonment of its closest ally in the Arab world has all but destroyed the US’s reputation as a credible, trustworthy ally throughout the region. In the wake of Mubarak’s ouster, the Saudis have effectively ended their strategic alliance with the US and are seeking to replace the US with China, Russia and India.

The very notion that robust internationalists like Bachmann and Palin could be thrown in with ardent isolationists like Paul and Buchanan is appalling. But it is of a piece with the prevailing, false notion being argued by dominant voices in neoconservative circles that, “You’re either with us or you’re with the Buchanaites.”

In truth, the dominant foreign policy in the Republican Party, and to a degree, in American society as a whole is neither neoconservativism nor isolationism. For lack of a better name, it is what historian Walter Russell Mead has referred to as Jacksonianism, after Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the US. As Mead noted in a 1999 article in the National Interest entitled, “The Jacksonian Tradition,” the most popular and enduring US model for foreign policy is far more flexible than either the isolationist or the neoconservative model.

Jonathan Last jerks back the curtain on Mitt Romney.

Combine that with the rest of his runs and you get a 17-year career average of 5-18. I don’t think you could find any other figure in politics who has run this far below the Mendoza line and still managed to get taken seriously as a presidential candidate. In fact, the only reason Romney gets taken seriously is his money. Strip away the $500M treasure room and the willingness to blow large chunks of his kids’ inheritance, and he’s Ron Paul without the ideological moorings and grassroots support.

Read it.

The bacteria behind the Black Death has a very unusual history. Its ancestor is an unassuming soil bacterium and the current strains of Yersinia pestis still infects thousands of people annually, but no longer cause the suite of horrifying symptoms associated with the medieval plagues. The radical differences between the two versions, in fact, led some to suggest that we have been blaming the wrong bacteria. Now, researchers have obtained DNA from some of London’s plague victims and confirmed that Y. pestis appears to be to blame. But the sequences also suggest that the strains of bacteria we see today may be different from the ones that rampaged through Europe.

Read it.

That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.

Read it.

Valerie Jarrett, a close friend of the Barack and Michelle Obama is the former CEO of Habitat Company, which managed Grove Parc, a federally subsidized apartment complex on Chicago’s South Side that can be accurately described as a slum. Jarrett is now a senior adviser to the president.

On Wednesday with great fanfare the awarding of a $30.5 million federal grant to revitalize Grove Parc–by tearing it down–was announced.

The irony is thick here. Jarrett’s Habitat runs Grove Parc into the ground, and now the federal government funding its demolition and the building of its replacement.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, Sen. Dick Durbin, and US Rep. Bobby Rush attended the Grove Parc ceremony. Jarret was not there. In fact, no mention of her role in mismanaging the unhappy homes was mentioned by the Chicago Sun-Times or the Chicago Tribune.

Looks like the President’s job creation strategy works about as well as his other ‘initiatives’. What a guy.

Read it.

No wonder Johnny can’t read. His teacher can barely read, too.

Don Boudreaux, Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University, spanks a college president who ought to know better.

MIT President Susan Hockfield lists America’s “trade deficit in manufactured goods” as one of our “problems” (“Manufacturing a Recovery,” August 30).

I disagree that specializing in producing services such as neurosurgery, web design, and education – and then exchanging some of these for manufactured goods produced by people who specialize in producing such things as MP3 players, kitchen flatware, and snow domes and other trinkets – is a problem. But if I’m mistaken and Dr. Hockfield is correct, I wonder if she’s aware of her role in worsening this problem.

Every non-American student who enrolls at MIT spends dollars purchasing, not American manufactured goods, but American-produced educational services. In consequence, the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods rises with every non-American student enrolled at MIT.

If Dr. Hockfield truly worries about America’s trade deficit in manufactured goods, she should impose a moratorium on the admission of foreign students to MIT.

In addition, she can move to close MIT’s Sloan School of Management (whose graduates regularly export their services as business and professional advisors – thereby increasing America’s trade deficit in manufactured goods) and to close MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning (whose graduates produce no manufactured goods and who also sell their services to foreigners and, hence, also intensify the “problem” of America’s trade deficit in manufactured goods).

If Dr. Hockfield is right, then a significant portion of America’s problems are being created right there on the Charles.

It’s truly amazing how many people with Ph.D.s turn out to have the intellectual power of a box of rocks. Perhaps the initials really mean ‘Phantastically Dumb’.

Read it.

The German newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung observed shortly before the Cancun summit last year: “The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”   What prompted this conclusion was a candid admission from a UN official closely involved with the climate negotiations, German economist Ottmar Edenhoffer: “But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.  Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this.  One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.  This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

The origins of the financial crisis and the Great Recession are widely attributed to “market failure.” This refers primarily to the bad loans and excessive risks taken on by banks in the quest to expand their profits. The “Chicago School of Economics” came under sustained attacks from the media and the academy for its analysis of the efficacy of competitive markets. Capitalism itself as a way to organize an economy was widely criticized and said to be in need of radical alteration.

Although many banks did perform poorly, government behavior also contributed to and prolonged the crisis. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates artificially low in the years leading up to the crisis. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two quasi-government institutions, used strong backing from influential members of Congress to encourage irresponsible mortgages that required little down payment, as well as low interest rates for households with poor credit and low and erratic incomes. Regulators who could have reined in banks instead became cheerleaders for the banks.

This recession might well have been a deep one even with good government policies, but “government failure” added greatly to its length and severity, including its continuation to the present. In the U.S., these government actions include an almost $1 trillion in federal spending that was supposed to stimulate the economy. Leading government economists, backed up by essentially no evidence, argued that this spending would stimulate the economy by enough to reduce unemployment rates to under 8%.

Read it.

Look at the picture. Quick, which one is the First Black President?

Answer: The one who looks like a white guy.

There’s modern America for you.

Don Boudreaux, Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University, spanks another (purported) economist (who ought to know better).

Prof. Peter Morici
University of Maryland
Smith School of Business
College Park, MD

Dear Peter:

In your guest blog-post yesterday at CNBC you argue that the destruction caused by hurricane Irene will spark a “process of economic renewal [that] can leave communities better off than before” (“Economic Impact of Hurricane Irene“).  Central to your argument is your claim that, because of the rebuilding, “the capital stock that emerges will prove more economically useful and productive.”

In other words, whenever assets still in use are destroyed, wealth will thereby be created – that is, people whose assets are destroyed will be made richer – because these destroyed assets are replaced with ones that are newer and more productive.

I hereby offer my services to you, at a modest wage, to destroy your house and your car.  Act now, and I’ll throw in at no extra charge destruction of all of your clothing, furniture, computer hardware and software, and large and small household appliances.

Because, I’m sure, almost all of these things that I’ll destroy for you are more than a few days old (and, hence, are hampered by wear and tear), you’ll be obliged to replace them with newer versions that are “more economically useful and productive.”  You will, by your own logic, be made richer.

Just send me a note with some times that are good for you for me to come by with sledge hammers and blowtorches.  Given the short distance between Fairfax and College Park, I can be at your place pronto.

Oh, as an extra bonus, I promise not to clean up the mess!  That way, there’ll be more jobs created for clean-up crews in your neighborhood.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

Read it.

The fashionable-food meme comes up against reality in the Wall Street Journal.

Unfortunately, my homemade-lunches plan hasn’t been going too well. Just before the last school session ended, my son declared the spinach-rice concoction — a recipe I conjured to get some greens into him — “the healthiest lunch anyone in Millburn township eats,” so now, he simply won’t touch it. Ouch!

Inconvenient truth: The reason everybody wants to move to the U.S. is so that they don’t have to eat all that disgusting foreign food any more. Political correctness stops where a child’s stomach begins; kids are natural libertarians.

Thankfully, aside from the spinach-rice protests, my daughter still seems happy with the chopped fruit, carrots, yogurt, cheese, mixed vegetable rice and sandwiches I’ve been sending with her to daycare.

Well, that may be ‘home-cooked food’ back where Anusha Shrivastava came from, but not in America. Try Campbell’s soup or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and you’re problems are solved.

Read it.

The federal government has sued a major trucking company for its firing of driver with an admitted alcohol abuse problem.

I feel safer already.

Alcoholism is classified as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the suit maintains, and therefore employees cannot be prohibited even from driving 18 wheelers due to their histories of abuse.

I’m waiting for them to rule that Bush Derangement Syndrome is classified as a disability under the ADA. Shouldn’t take too long now; it’s pretty widespread.

If the EEOC prevails, of course, it will mean that Old Dominion will still be liable both for any damage to life or property that results from a potential relapse by one of its recovering drivers – which in turn increases the risks involved in investment in the company – and for the cost of trying to ensure that such damage never occurs. All of these new burdens will raise Old Dominion’s cost of doing business, and hence the cost of everything they transport. And all of this can’t possibly ensure that a recovering driver does not relapse without the company’s knowledge.

Whoops, don’t go giving us economics, now — we all know that the government can’t consider any of that; it’s trying to save jobs and fight the recession.

Read it.

Hint: No, it just shuffled around already-employed people.

How very stimulating.

Read it.

Solyndra was touted by the Obama administration as a prime example of how green technology could deliver jobs. The President visited the facility in May of last year and said  “it is just a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism and the fact that we continue to have the best universities in the world, the best technology in the world, and most importantly the best workers in the world. And you guys all represent that. “

And we all see how well that worked out. Win for Obama.

I guess this is the new Obama Jobs Program: Send $525 million to a fashionable ‘green’ company that then goes bankrupt and puts over a thousand out of work. Not sure how this differs from the old Obama Jobs Program, but I guess he’ll keep doing the same thing until the result is different. (Now, what was that defined as…?)

Read it.

Post-’60s liberals, with the president as their standard bearer, seek to make a virtue of decline.

Yeah, it sucks to be us.

Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s sane brother) gets a nomination to be a Patron Saint of Dyspepsia.

The moment has come to admit that I loathe the Arab Spring and almost everything about it.

It looks to me pretty much like a football crowd armed with AK-47s and bazookas, with the added ingredient of Islamic militancy. Why am I expected to like it?

For we are all supposed to approve of it. Every media outlet, every politician, every church pulpit, treats it as an unmixed Good Thing.

Not me. I look at these wild characters in baseball caps and tracksuit bottoms blasting ammunition into the sky (often killing or injuring innocents far away, but they don’t care) and I am mainly thankful that they are a long way off.

So of course he must be a raaaaacist.

Read it.

During the George W. Bush administration, liberals became so unhinged that a psychological condition called Bush Derangement Syndrome was diagnosed. Years later, some on the Left still suffer from it. The phrase has been turned to other uses, but W. has been the undisputed champion when it comes to bringing out the insanity in political opponents.

Until now. We saw it here in Minnesota, and now we are experiencing it on the national stage: there is something about Michele Bachmann that causes liberals to make fools of themselves. I can’t explain it, but it’s true.

I can explain it. They’re deranged, hypocritical, intellectually dishonest haters. That’s their whole life. Without that, they’ve got nothing.