Category: Good Writing

Quote of the Day

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London is a city whose two priorities are being a playground for corrupt global elites who turn neighbourhoods into soulless collections of empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, and encouraging the feckless criminality of the finance industry. These two facts are not unrelated.

—Cory Doctorow on why he and his family are leaving London for Los Angeles

It appears that much of London is being razed in order to construct empty apartments whose sole purpose is to provide a refuge for the parasite high finance class when the revolution hits their home countries.

Today’s Must Read, from Paul Krugman

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Paul Krugman makes an interesting observation in the case of the lion killing dentist from Minnesota, and it has nothing to do with the ethics of killing things for your personal amusement, and everything to do with the fact that “Skin in the Game” does not work to control healthcare costs:

Wonkblog has a post inspired by the dentist who paid a lot of money to shoot Cecil the lion, asking why he — and dentists in general — make so much money. Interesting stuff; I’ve never really thought about the economics of dental care.

But once you do focus on that issue, it turns out to have an important implication — namely, that the ruling theory behind conservative notions of health reform is completely wrong.

For many years conservatives have insisted that the problem with health costs is that we don’t treat health care like an ordinary consumer good; people have insurance, which means that they don’t have “skin in the game” that gives them an incentive to watch costs. So what we need is “consumer-driven” health care, in which insurers no longer pay for routine expenses like visits to the doctor’s office, and in which everyone shops around for the best deals.

………

But what if even the underlying premise, that individual choice will hold down costs, is all wrong?

As it turns out, many fewer people have dental insurance than have general medical insurance; even where there is insurance, it typically leaves a lot of skin in the game. But dental costs have risen just as fast as overall health spending, and it may be that the reduced role of insurers actually raises those costs. According to the post,

In the rest of medicine, insurers have an important function in limiting costs and promoting quality. The market power of Medicare and major national insurance companies allows them to insist on better rates for their customers when they negotiate with doctors and hospitals.

“There’s been less presence from all kinds of insurance payers in the dental sector,” explained Andy Snyder, who is in charge of oral health at the nonpartisan National Academy for State Health Policy. “Medicare does not cover routine dental services, and private dental coverage is far less common than private medical coverage. So, the dental industry has faced less of the cost containment and quality improvement pressures that the rest of the health care sector’s experienced over the last couple of decades.”

So more skin in the game is not just useless but actually counterproductive.

Bazinga!

Today’s Must Read

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Joschka Fischer, the former Foreign Minister for Germany has an OP/ED titled, “The Return of the Ugly German,” and it has to be read.

I will give you 2 paragraphs, and tell you to go read:

Germany has been the big winner of European unification, both economically and politically. Just compare Germany’s history in the first and second halves of the twentieth century. Bismarck’s unification of Germany in the nineteenth century occurred at the high-water mark of European nationalism. Militarism became intimately associated with German power. Indeed, Germany’s public philosophy, unlike that of France, Great Britain, or the United States, never incorporated a civilizing ideal to justify the use of military power.

 The foundation of the second, unified German nation-state in 1989 was based on Germany’s irrevocable Western orientation and Europeanization. And the Europeanization of Germany’s politics filled – and still fills – the civilization gap embodied in German statehood. To allow this pillar to erode – or, worse, to tear it down – is a folly of the highest order. That is why, in the EU that emerged on the morning of July 13, Germany and Europe both stand to lose.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Good News Everyone!

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Bloom County is returning to the funny papers, and I am stoked:

After 25 years, Berkeley Breathed is returning to his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip, “Bloom County.” Breathed announced the new incarnation of the politically-minded strip via a post on Facebook that featured him working on a new comic with the words “Bloom County 2015” at the top.

“Bloom County” originally ran from December 1980 until 1989, just two years after he won the Pulitzer. The characters, such as Bill the Cat, Opus the Penguin, Hodge-Podge the Rabbit, Milo Bloom, and Cutter John, lived on in the Sunday-only strip “Outland” from 1989 to 1995, as well as “Opus” from 2003 to 2008. When “Opus'” run ended, Breathed said he was stepping away from strips entirely and began focusing on writing children’s books. At the time, he said the political climate in the country had grown too bitter for him to continue taking a light tone on things, and he wanted to get out before things got too tough.

However, with the 2016 presidential campaign season heating up, it seems that Breathed has found something funny to talk about again:

I will miss Jon Stewart during the 2016 campaign, but Bloom County  coming back takes the sting out, at least a bit.

America, F%$# Yeah!

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For July 4th I give you this bit of true Americana from muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurdock:

haters can say what they want about the 4th of july but i just witnessed two dudes- one dressed as abe lincoln and the other as benjamin franklin- passionately making out on the balcony while fireworks went off behind them and half of the party, for some reason, gathered around them and chanted “USA! USA!” for like five solid minutes

god bless america

(All capitalization original)

This is awesome!

The Problem with the EU in a Few Sentences

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I strongly suggests that you read Katharina Pistor’s essay on how the EU is betraying its ultimate goal, a unified and peaceful Europe, in their dealings with Greece in her OP/ED, The Problem With a Small Europe:

News headlines notwithstanding, the fundamental challenge facing Europe today extends far beyond Greece. The real question is what kind of European Union Greece’s creditors want: a “small” one, comprising only the countries that are prepared to live by their exacting standards, or a “big” one that heeds the Treaty of Rome’s call for “ever-closer union.”

………

European integration was built on the ideal of a united Europe working together to uphold peace, generate prosperity, and advance democracy. At first, cooperation centered on the creation of a common market, with European technocrats, led by the European Commission’s then-president, Jacques Delors, pushing for a common currency, despite deep structural differences. The assumption was that political integration would follow.

That did not happen. Indeed, the approach was tantamount to putting the cart before the horse – with serious consequences, exemplified in the eurozone’s enduring crisis. Yet the technocrats are back, now advocating a fiscal union to support the monetary union, with political union nowhere in sight.

Perhaps European leaders still believe that the needed political integration will eventually occur. But, even in the unlikely event that it does, a political union that emerges from desperation to save the common currency will be very different from one built purposefully, as the Treaty of Rome envisioned, based on shared values and goals. And, in the meantime, a fiscal union without a political union is an anti-democratic nightmare.

………

In this context, it is perhaps understandable that the creditor countries are increasingly promoting a “small” EU that includes only those that are willing and able to meet their high standards. But, while this might make for a stronger euro – and even a stronger EU – it would carry a huge cost, as it would effectively force members to abandon their democratic ideals. Meanwhile, the excluded countries would be forced to engage in competitive currency devaluations and other beggar-thy-neighbor policies. The dream of shared prosperity in Europe would be dead.

This outcome is not inevitable. A common currency is a means to an end, not an end in itself. If European monetary union is not leading toward the desired end, it – not the goal of ever-closer union – should be altered. And, in fact, most Europeans favor a different means, based on greater flexibility for domestic preferences and a bottom-up approach toward further integration. In such an environment, Greece might not only survive, but thrive.

I would note that the founders of the Euro currency said that their goal was to create a uniform standard of living across Europe.

It appears that they may get their goal, but it will be lowering living standards of more prosperous nations, not raising up their less fortunate neighbor.

Not surprising when one understands that Robert Mundell, the “father of the Euro”, is also considered by many to be the “Father of Reaganomics.”

Impoverishing ordinary people is a feature for people like Mundell, not a bug.

The Military Industrial Complex Is Spending Our Military into Oblivion

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At the rate that this is going, we will be The Blaster: Flush With Cash, Running on Empty

One of the never ending claims made by proponents of the military technical revolution is that emerging complex weapons technologies create more combat power per unit of labor — that we are substituting capital for labor and technology-intensive capital goods are the key America’s competitive advantage, given America’s high cost labor. This claim is bullshit pumped out by a sound-byte addicted Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex.
For readers who think my rhetoric excessive, consider please the following series of graphics. That the revolution in military affairs (RMA) continues with increasing intensity despite such evidence to the contrary, and without substantive critical debate, says a lot about the dominant values in Versailles on the Potomac.
If the claim made by the RMA evangelicals were true, then a percentage reduction in the size of combat forces would be accompanied by a greater percentage savings in defense budgets. But as this table shows, huge reductions in force size (ranging from 56% to 69%) from the spending peak of the Vietnam War (1968) to the spending peak of the so-called Global War on Terror or GWOT (2010) have been accompanied by a 34% increase in the defense budget, after removing the effects of inflation (using DoD deflators which are biased to reduce the size of this disconnect).

Yet, as the next figure shows, compared to Vietnam, the GWOT is a tiny war, when compared in terms of troops deployed or operational tempos (e.g., total attack sorties).
………

The bottom line should be clear to even the most casual observer: The claim that the ongoing military-technical revolution reduces costs by substituting capital for labor is fact-free claptrap. Moreover the hype about this military-technical revolution, which has became ever more hysterical since the mid-to-late 1980s, has been accompanied by a dramatic worsening of the mismatch been promises and reality.

Perhaps the apotheosis of the cost and labor saving dimensions of the military-technical revolution has been the evangelical rhetoric surrounding the use of “labour saving” unmanned airplanes — drones — in the GWOT. I urge readers in denial about my bottom line to carefully study How America Broke Its Drone Force by David Axe in the Daily Beast (attached below for your reading convenience). Axe describes how the high cost of labor-intensive drone operations has broken the back of the drone force to such a point that it had to cut back operating tempos in the face of the increasing intensity of the offensive campaign waged by ISIS.

Bear in mind, the pathetic misery in the drone force described by Axe coincides with Era IV of the boom bust cycle in the preceding chart of Defense Spending.

In 1985 or so, some wag noted that with current trends, that the entire budget of the US Air Force, including personnel, would cover the purchase of just one aircraft by 2050.

At the rate we are going, we won’t have a military, just shiny hardware with no one to operate it.

Today’s must read

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Charleston and Amalek.

It’s an essay by my brother, Bear who Swims, on Dylann Root and the ethics of whether or not he can/should be forgiven by his victims.

At his bail hearing, some of the relatives of the victims, driven by their faith, stated that they had forgiven him.

My brother suggests, convincingly IMHO, that Torah forbids such forgiveness:

I cannot criticize this on their part, and would not deny them the right to do this.

This forgiveness by the survivors may be very helpful to them, in an existential way. It can help them to choose to continue on with their lives as real people, and not as victims and exemplars.

For them, as they bear the direct consequences of the act, this is a supportable moral choice. I will say that to me rage would also be a supportable moral choice. Whatever helps them.

………

But it is arrogant for the rest of us to speak about forgiveness.  Who are we to forgive, who have not ourselves been injured.

I am not, here speaking about the terrorist*.  He is an irrelevant detail.  Forgive him, if it makes you feel good.

Consider instead, Amalek.

In Torah, Amalek is a nation related to the Israelites, but an implacable enemy — see D’varim (Deuteronomy) 25:17-19**.  In later rabbinic writing, the term is used to describe all implacable evil.

The greatest of the crimes was

he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, all that were enfeebled in thy rear, when thou wast faint and weary

This passage is one of those sections of the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) that makes ‘modern Jews’, itchy, as it goes on to say:

thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget

as it doesn’t seem speak about how we would like the world to work.

However, I will suggest that this message of non-forgiveness is applicable and to the world today.

I would embrace and extend this, and apply this to people who seek to subjugate and destroy other people using scriptural justifications.

Think that Christofascists and gay marriage, ISIS and basically everyone else,  the domestic terrorists who murder abortion doctors, or the Hindu nationalists in India.  (I would note that the death toll from Hindu nationalism dwarfs that of the other three)

Not only should there be no forgiveness for people like this, but there should be no attempt to accommodate their sensibilities.

Their views are a perversion of what it means to being a civilized human being.

In any case, go read his full essay.

Finally, a Good Analogy for What Is Happening to Greece

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What the Troika is actually trying to do is not to do the right thing, they are, as Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen notes, trying to go Versailles on Greece:

On 5 June 1919, John Maynard Keynes wrote to the prime minister of Britain, David Lloyd George, “I ought to let you know that on Saturday I am slipping away from this scene of nightmare. I can do no more good here.” Thus ended Keynes’s role as the official representative of the British Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference. It liberated Keynes from complicity in the Treaty of Versailles (to be signed later that month), which he detested.

Why did Keynes dislike a treaty that ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers (surely a good thing)?

Keynes was not, of course, complaining about the end of the world war, nor about the need for a treaty to end it, but about the terms of the treaty – and in particular the suffering and the economic turmoil forced on the defeated enemy, the Germans, through imposed austerity. Austerity is a subject of much contemporary interest in Europe – I would like to add the word ­“unfortunately” somewhere in the sentence. Actually, the book that Keynes wrote attacking the treaty, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, was very substantially about the economic consequences of “imposed austerity”. Germany had lost the battle already, and the treaty was about what the defeated enemy would be required to do, including what it should have to pay to the victors. The terms of this Carthaginian peace, as Keynes saw it (recollecting the Roman treatment of the ­defeated Carthage following the Punic wars), included the imposition of an unrealistically huge burden of reparation on Germany – a task that Germany could not carry out without ruining its economy. As the terms also had the effect of fostering animosity between the victors and the vanquished and, in addition, would economically do no good to the rest of Europe, Keynes had nothing but contempt for the decision of the victorious four (Britain, France, Italy and the United States) to demand something from Germany that was hurtful for the vanquished and unhelpful for all.

The high-minded moral rhetoric in favour of the harsh imposition of austerity on Germany that Keynes complained about came particularly from Lord Cunliffe and Lord Sumner, representing Britain on the Reparation Commission, whom Keynes liked to call “the Heavenly Twins”. In his ­parting letter to Lloyd George, Keynes added, “I leave the Twins to gloat over the devastation of Europe.” Grand rhetoric on the necessity of imposing austerity, to remove economic and moral impropriety in Greece and elsewhere, may come more frequently these days from Berlin itself, with the changed role of Germany in today’s world. But the unfavourable consequences that Keynes feared would follow from severe – and in his judgement unreasoned – imposition of austerity remain relevant today (with an altered geography of the morally upright discipliner and the errant to be disciplined).

Aside from Keynes’s fear of economic ruin of a country, in this case Germany, through the merciless scheduling of demanded payments, he also analysed the bad consequences on other countries in Europe of the economic collapse of one of their partners. The thesis of economic interdependence, which Keynes would pursue more fully later (including in his most famous book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, to be published in 1936), makes an early appearance in this book, in the context of his critique of the Versailles Treaty.

The purpose of the Versailles Treaty was to break Germany and German spirit, and 20 years later, Europe was at war again.

Now European powers, primarily Germany, are attempting to break Greece and Greek spirit.

This will not end well.

Today’s Must Read on McKinney, and Bad Cops, and Good Cops

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Law Professor and former police officer Seth Stoughton makes the point that needs to be made about both the incident in McKinney, and in policing generally.

He observes that there are two cops on the film, and one gets people calmed down, and other one is Eric Casebolt:

An officer in McKinney, Texas, dashes down a sidewalk, losing his flashlight as he runs past a teenage videographer toward an emergency. Seconds later, the teen with the camera walks up to another officer, one who is standing with a group of kids. “I’m just saying,” the officer is saying in a calm, corrective tone that parents and school teachers everywhere will recognize. “Don’t take off running when the cops get here.”

He thanks the videographer for returning the flashlight, then listens for a few seconds as the kids around him try to explain who was and was not involved in a prior incident. “Okay, guys, I appreciate that,” the as-yet-unidentified officer says. He responds to their concerns—that the police had detained the wrong people—by saying, “Okay, that’s what I’m saying. They’re free to go.” While not casual, the officer is composed. His tone is friendly and professional as he engages with the kids.

Seconds later, another officer, Corporal Eric Casebolt, is shown interacting with some of the same kids. His angry tone and aggressive attitude stand in marked contrast to the first officer in the video. “Get on the ground,” he commands sharply while pulling on a young man’s wrist in a way that looks like he’s trying to force the man to the ground with a painful joint manipulation (technically a supinating wrist lock or, for martial arts enthusiasts, kote gaeshi).

When that proves ineffective, he grabs the back of the young man’s head and shoves him down. “I told you to stay,” he yells, pointing a large metal flashlight at someone off camera. “Get your asses down on the ground.” Like the first officer, he lectures some of the kids about running from the police, but he takes a very different approach. “Don’t make me fucking run around here with thirty pounds of god-damned gear on in the sun because you want to screw around out here.” He is anything but composed, calm or professional.

The two officers in this brief video represent two different policing styles, two different mindsets that officers use as they interact with civilians: the Guardian and the Warrior. As a former police officer and current policing scholar, I know that an officer’s mindset has tremendous impact on police/civilian encounters. I’ve described the Guardian and Warrior mindsets at some length here and here; for now, suffice to say that the right mindset can de-escalate tense situations, induce compliance, and increase community trust over the long-term. The kids interacting with the first officer were excited, but not upset; they remained cooperative. Had they gone home at that moment, they’d have a story for their friends and family, but it would be a story that happened to have the police in it rather than being a story about the police.

………

Officers should also look out for each other, protecting their colleagues not just from harm, but also from lashing out in anger or frustration. Policing can be intensely stressful, and officers should be trained and encouraged to help their peers deal with stressful situations. When an officer is losing his cool, another officer will often be able to intervene, giving the first a chance to collect himself. That type of peer support isn’t part of modern police culture—particularly not when the officer losing his temper is a supervisor and union official like Corporal Casebolt—but it should be.

A short video of officers in McKinney, Texas, shows us the avoidable results of an unnecessarily aggressive approach to policing. But in the same video, we can see a few seconds of policing the way the way it should be done.

Remember the old days, when people called members of the constabulary, “Peace Officer”?

A warrior cannot be a “Peace Officer”.  Their job is wage war against the enemy.

Peace Officers do not wage war against an enemy, the protect their fellow citizens.

In antiquity, when a “Warrior” took a town, he was supposed to take any male child that he found, and dash its brains out on the cobblestones.

This is not a proper model for policing.

I Mourn Vinnie Musetto

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He wrote Amazing headlines for the New York Daily News:

V.A. “Vinnie” Musetto, a longtime former New York Post editor known for writing the tabloid’s most famous headline more than three decades ago, died early Tuesday morning at the age of 74.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, Musetto’s daughter, Carly VanTassell, told Capital. He had entered end-of-life care at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx recently after receiving a sudden diagnosis.

Musetto had a long career at the Post, where he worked for more than 40 years as an editor and later as a film critic, a position he held until August 2013. He had retired two years earlier but continued writing film reviews until the Post cut off his freelance assignments.

He is most well known for coming up with the headline “Headless body in topless bar” in 1983. It was the type of lurid, can’t-make-this-stuff-up story that the tabloids live for, about a man who fatally shot the owner of a topless bar and forced a hostage to decapitate the body.

The headline was one for the history books and remains an object of fascination among newspaper wonks. But Musetto’s personal favorite is another infamous headline that he wrote, said VanTassell: “Granny executed in her pink pajamas.”*

I aspired to be 1/10 as good at writing headlines as he was one day.

*Velma Barfield, the first women executed in the US after the death penalty came back in 1976.

Headline of the Day

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In this article, Emil Mella argues that Sanders positions, and the response to the campaign, make him a far more credible candidate than the mainstream press and mainstream political establishment would lead you to believe:

Okay, sorry, America. That title was a bit rude. And crass. And uncalled for. I’ll admit it.

But please just do the entire world a favor now, and just gently pull with your neck, softly now, easy does it, so that perhaps your collective head is not as far inside of your rectum as it currently is, and kindly make sure that said head is on top of your shoulders, where it belongs, you know, thinking, and stuff.

Thanks.

 Read the rest.

If you are such a delicate flower that you need a version that is safe for radio:

EDIT: As many people have now pointed out, this article is fairly vulgar and crass, and can really seem to alienate a lot of people with my often off-color brand of humor. For that, I apologize. Here is a much calmer version of this same article, that doesn’t involve me cursing like a sailor or referencing heads and buttocks linking in any way.

Personally, I think that the profane version is a better read.

I Quote the Prophet, Bear Who Swims

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Over a year ago, the Bear Who Swims predicted to me (via email, not his blog) that the Europe was on a path to another war.

If you follow the history of Europe, there seems to be one every hundred years or so.

Well, now the Shrill One, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, is making allusions to seeing the same thing:

U.S. officials are generally cautious about intervening in European policy debates. The European Union is, after all, an economic superpower in its own right — far too big and rich for America to have much direct influence — led by sophisticated people who should be able to manage their own affairs. So it’s startling to learn that Jacob Lew, the Treasury secretary, recently warned Europeans that they had better settle the Greek situation soon, lest there be a destructive “accident.”

But I understand why Mr. Lew said what he did. A forced Greek exit from the euro would create huge economic and political risks, yet Europe seems to be sleepwalking toward that outcome. So Mr. Lew was doing his best to deliver a wake-up call.

And yes, the allusion to Christopher Clark’s recent magisterial book on the origins of World War I, “The Sleepwalkers,” is deliberate. There’s a definite 1914 feeling to what’s happening, a sense that pride, annoyance, and sheer miscalculation are leading Europe off a cliff it could and should have avoided.

………

Yet there seems to be more to it than lack of trust. Some major players seem strangely fatalistic, willing and even anxious to get on with the catastrophe – a sort of modern version of the “spirit of 1914,” in which many people were enthusiastic about the prospect of war. These players have convinced themselves that the rest of Europe can shrug off a Greek exit from the euro, and that such an exit might even have a salutary effect by showing the price of bad behavior.

But they are making a terrible mistake. Even in the short run, the financial safeguards that would supposedly contain the effects of a Greek exit have never been tested, and could well fail. Beyond that, Greece is, like it or not, part of the European Union, and its troubles would surely spill over to the rest of the union even if the financial bulwarks hold.

I generally agree with my brother, aka “Bear who Swims”, that Europe is heading back into what seems to be a once a century path to conflict, though I differ in degree:  He posits a shooting war, and I expect something analogous to a Cold War along with a dissolution of the EU.

And once again, I’ll blame the Germans.

H/T Stephen Saroff      o o  The Bear who Swims      
                        (_)_____o      
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                         oo    oo