Don't mess with parking

Yes, that is what you think it is

Naturally with all the important places in the country snowed in, I seem to have mostly missed out, maybe a few inches of snow.

But it did lead to a lot of interesting articles on the habits of grocery shoppers, both regularly and at emergency conditions like natural disasters (or 9-11 type events). Prices on milk and bread and gasoline should probably be allowed to go up when there's a blizzard is my only conclusion.

There's also the continued theme that the best methods to handle things are with a minimum of top-down effort. This seems contradictory with all the top-down blubbering that occurred around Katrina and all the concerted governmental and inter-governmental aid focusing on Haiti. But every story I've read of disasters and destruction leads to a safe conclusion that a society that would be well enough organized to possess a stable and effective top-down response, like lots of snow plows, is probably also a society efficient enough locally not to actually "need" them. People will simply adapt and come up with their own response. My own experience was that you can sort of rely on the "central planner" to do a bit of heavy lifting, to do the commons things like highways that nobody in their right mind will get out and handle...and that the commoners will fend for themselves in the meantime while they wait. Apartment complexes were the worst. Pretty much everybody fends for themselves (or rather, pulls together to fend for each other since the owner of the complex is not, in most cases, a local owner who is inconvenienced and thus concerned).

That's not to say that people should be expected to get out and shovel out from under two feet of snow. But it works a helluva lot better when they cooperate and coordinate naturally to handle it on their own.

a post written by a person of the intelligence expected to enjoy the super bowl advertisements

RawrWomen hawtMen need pants, Women make men weak; Rawr MORE BEER! Beer make men strong.

Mmmm fatten. More football! TV Shows taste great. We're #1!With more women! And Beer! Robots are cool[ Make fun of robot! Funny* Need car to drive to someplaceand? buy soap. 4yrols buy stock. They r smrt. Give ME chips! Jump Shark jump! Mr Burns want coke. Buy flo for dead people becuz of what song! Gogle itFrance evil! Green police&Government BAD!

-----
To be honest, that Focus on the Family ad was probably in the middle of the pack as far as things that ought be controversial or upsetting. Which is about what I figured would be the case, that it would be a roughly meaningless event.

an explanation that amused me

"Since I have a good deal of opposition on national security/foreign policy/civil liberties to anybody remotely resembling a politician capable of elected office in this country already, much less a politician who spouts off proudly the things I find abhorrent about our policies as instead things we must and should do..."

Pretty much what I said to sum up why I am annoyed with most elected officials, and why I am extremely annoyed with the many who wish to be installed in their place. Especially this one.

Things that annoy me a lot more than they should

The correct answer to "get rid of corn/farm subsidies" is not "change them into corn ethanol subsidies". Even worse, the actual answer is probably subsidize both.

Also I discovered that not only is there a corn racket going on, but there's also a corn insurance racket. Why, if there is what amounts to a fixed price floor on corn, is there a need to subsidize the insurance in the event the crop is wiped out by a flood or tornado or something? You would think it would be pretty easy to figure out how much it would cost to insure crops if the price is fixed at some bottom actuarial level.

If more people shared the rage that they had on a supposed acorn racket last year with a real corn racket, we might see this go away a lot faster. We might even see a dumb law passed that actually outlaws all sorts of meaningless subsides, so hastily and so anxiously our Congress would work on the problem.

One other weird thing:
People should not try to use Ancient Greece to argue against homosexuals serving in the military. Sparta pretty much mandated the same tripe used now for paedophilia (that gay men are all somehow paedophiles) as a required social ritual in Spartan military society. Perhaps (classical) history ought to move back to being a required course work for people who want to write editorials.

Where has this guy been?

More juice from Paul Ryan

Basically, what the health care debate boils down to is that we have been telling the American voting public that they will be able to
1) extend coverage to millions of people
2) keep the same quality of coverage and care, or improve it if you had a pre-existing condition
3) save money
4) not raise taxes

This of course, is all rather nice sounding. It's pretty much what BOTH parties have suggested is their "plan" to fix health care. But it's not actually what a health care "reform" would be. What you'd need to tell people in that case looks more like this
1) more people need to be covered. That will cost money, either as taxpayers or consumers of insurance
2) more costs need to be shared by consumers to lower their demand for care
3) your employer benefits will need to go away. That will mean that your health care plan as you know of it is probably going away too

Those are harder questions and things for people to swallow. Those three things are basically true whether you move to a single-payer British-style system or to a Singapore/Wyden-Bennett style system, the only differences are the mechanisms involved (price controls versus price transparency for example).

But this guy gets that. He doesn't seem too interested in selling a bill of goods that cannot exist or in having half measures. The real reason, the important reason, for the public to reform health care is not to extend more equal access to the sick, the old, and the poor. Those things can be done rather easily as a matter of looking at the bigger picture. But even though they are important things morally speaking to a lot of people, I don't think they're central to the problem. The problem is the long-term growth of costs throughout the health care system (insurance and cost of care). And it's because the measures we have used which intend to do those other nobler things are raising our long-term costs to the point that it will bankrupt our ability to do anything else in the same way that it already does for individuals with insufficient health insurance already. You have to attack the long-term growth of costs. The current bill has plantings of things that do this, and there are a bunch of different ways to try it. But it's not serious enough about it. Sort of like Waxman-Markey and climate change. If you are a big Al Gore fan, that bill royally and utterly failed to make a dent in the problem. Same thing here. This does some nice things. Some of them are important. But they're not fixing the problem, they're treating the symptoms of the disease instead of attempting to cure it.

Still when somebody in there sits down and says exactly what's wrong with the system, and then sits down and says in response to "....I’m a big Wyden-Bennett guy, frankly." with something like this:

"I have a lot of respect for that plan. If I were a Democrat, it’s the bill I’d be on. He’s got more mandates than I’d like. But if Ron Wyden and I were in a room, we could hammer out a deal by tomorrow."

- this would be an attitude I would like to see more of. It's refreshing, even if it's dishonest. John Boehner and his orange spray tan needs to be fired and replaced with this guy tomorrow. Because a serious message needs to be sent about the "politics of failure" and the ideas need to be tough minded and clearly defined. These nebulous platitudes promising us the moon and our security and so on are probably what people want to hear, or what politicians think they want to hear. But they are not solutions. And they're no different from what we hear from either side of the aisle. An opposition party needs to have ideas. It can't just sit around and reject the other guy's. There's still some stuff in there that sounds suspicious talking-point-esque. But it also sounds like he has some serious interest in tackling problems. I'm curious as to how some of these guys stay in politics personally. Ron Paul, Pete Stark, Paul Ryan, Ron Wyden, and Russ Feingold, all sort of have these pet political causes and attack them with gusto. I don't understand how they're not cynically destroyed yet.

Party at Reagan's

I'm getting tired of these conservative pundits taking up a mantle as though Reagan was the greatest thing ever and then apparently ignoring everything he ever did or said while a public figure. Say what you want about Reagan's politics (there's a lot of ugly in there for people like me), the guy tended to be a lot more consistent on principles and a little less likely to use platitudes to glaze over them than these guys. His revelers intent on electing his reanimated corpse as the next President don't seem to pay attention to substance and get caught up in the whole "Great Communicator" part of the Reagan mythos.

You can argue against supply-side economics by looking at the Laffer curve, but it looks to me like Reagan more or less intuitively understood the Laffer curve and tried to set up the taxes in a way that was simpler and more productive in the same way that Kennedy had done, and Coolidge before that. It seems, after a fashion, to have worked (revenues went up and the economy grew). His successors take this message to mean that it is always appropriate to cut taxes and that doing this will always result in more revenues and economic growth as a matter of faith (and that raising taxes will result somehow in less revenue and hamper economic growth). This is incorrect, or charitably, an incomplete application of the system.

You can argue against terrorism and torture by saying we need to treat this as a war, because wars are serious business, and we need information/revenge NOW!. Reagan signed an anti-torture treaty ratified by the Senate and his official policy on terrorism, at a time when American Marines were being blown up in Lebanon and airplanes were actually being blasted successfully out of the sky, was to treat the terrorist as a criminal when captured and put him on trial and in prison. Without beating information out of him. His rhetoric on this and the Cold War always tried to appeal to a message of America as an ideal, and that this ideal was always worth trying to live up to. It may not be my ideal (the city on a hill speech), but it was compelling stuff for a lot of Americans (obviously still is). Yet they ignore that ideal and debase it by insisting on torturing our enemies (when Reagan specifically signed a treaty into law that said "under no circumstances") and giving them revered status as "warriors" rather than as heinous criminals.

You can argue against homosexuals being accorded equal rights and treatment under the laws. Its not a very convincing argument, and it relies on a lot of revealed wisdom rather than faith and compassion, but it's one that people have been making for decades. Guess who didn't make it? Reagan. In 1978, Reagan, then a former governor and soon to be Presidential candidate, was on Harvey Milk's side in casting down against a law discriminatory to homosexuals. I'm not sure what rationale he used to arrive at this wisdom, perhaps it was arrived at through his faith, perhaps because he came from California and Hollywood, or perhaps because he was schooled in civil rights by the 60s and the figure of Barry Goldwater who didn't share this abiding fear of homosexuals with other conservative pundits and politicians (Goldwater took a sort of hands off approach to civil rights in the federal and legal arena which wasn't all that popular or great in the view of history and this reputation is deserved since he was one of the votes against the Civil Rights Act. But he also wasn't out there supporting the opposite legal arena of bigotry and separatism, at least publicly, and any laws which sanctioned bigotry were unacceptable on principle). I don't know. But he did not whip up a frenzy of hatred and fear against otherwise law-abiding citizens who wanted nothing more than the ability to live as legal equals with their peers. Maybe he didn't have to, but in appealing in rhetoric against terrorism and the Soviets with America as an idealized world, it's pretty hard to turn around and say, but fuck you if you're gay! Kind of incongruous to have a message of hope and triumph that mixes in hate and intolerance.

Same deal with immigration. Reagan signed onto a package of immigration reforms that allowed millions of people a path to citizenship by sweeping aside the fact that they came here "illegally". When the same idea comes up again, no thanks, we hate Mexicans (or alternatively, we hate it when Indians "steal" "our" jobs). Maybe it wasn't popular. But easier and more immigration is, at its base, the right way to treat the "American way" or the "American dream" and to make it a more fruitful reality. We are not a gated community and never have been.

For a party of people that supposedly revers the guy, they don't seem to have a lot in common with him. Yes they're still big on defence and fear the Russians and the Red Chinese and call out socialism freely as an evil that must be cast down, without actually understanding the forms of socialism and tyranny that exist (and in many cases, which they demanded as powers for themselves). Those I guess are principles and platitudes that die hard from the Cold War mentality and the power it accorded a sense of American internationalism as an ideal state of affairs. But anywhere else I am not seeing a connection between their sacred idol and the reality of principles and politics that are laying around in the modern conservative playbook. If you cannot break people from their mindsets, it seems only appropriate at this point to try to shame them into realizing the error and folly of their ways by pointing out what their heroes did in similar circumstances. It is easy enough to make this argument with religious folk by pointing out the exemplars that they are supposedly following and the hypocrisy of their own lives by contrast. I don't think it any harder to raise a political analogy when it relates to the politics.

more proof I am un-American, Senator McCarthy

Harris has been polling this question for about 25 years now.

"If you had to choose, which ONE of these sports would you say is your favorite?"

Base: All adults who follow one or more sport
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
Pro football 29 30 33 29 30 31 35
Baseball 13 15 14 14 15 16 16
College football 9 11 13 13 12 12 12
Auto racing 9 7 11 9 10 8 9
Men's pro basketball 10 7 4 7 4 6 5
Hockey 3 4 5 4 5 5 4
Men's NCAA basketball 6 6 5 5 4 5 3
Men's golf 5 4 4 4 4 4 4
Men's soccer 3 3 2 2 2 3 2
Boxing NA 2 2 1 1 2 2
Horse racing 2 1 2 1 2 1 2
Women's tennis 2 2 1 1 * 1 1
Swimming NA NA NA NA NA 2 1
Bowling 1 1 1 1 2 1 1
Track & field 3 1 * 2 1 1 1
Men's tennis 2 1 1 2 1 1 1
Pro football's lead 16 15 19 15 15 15 19

If I were to assemble a list like this of my own preferences it would look something like this
NBA (for now, it occasionally swaps with the MLB)
Baseball
NCAA basketball
Track (not so much the "field part", but I'll watch that every four years)
Women's Tennis
Volleyball
Tiger Woods (but not the PGA, which would not be listed)
NHL
Soccer (yes I said it)
NFL
Men's Tennis (lots of aces, less "tennis")
College Football (lots of mediocre teams/games, too much tribalism, and everyone gets a goddamn trophy at the end of the year it seems by getting to these meaningless pre-New Years Day bowl games)

My list looks different in part because I'm a tall guy who used to run (or at least tried to) and who is something of a cultural snob. Golf and tennis, and to a lesser extent track, are basically snobby sports, though I find golf sort of boring usually to watch (and haven't played much of any of it to think otherwise). Auto Racing and boxing or wrestling/UFC do not make any appearances in my daily life because they are not snobby sports. Ever. You can see auto racing by driving around all day and boxing doesn't have the media attention that it once might have deserved in the Ali-Frazier days. If I have to pay lots of money just to pay attention, that sounds like a pretty snobby activity, but then it's just two guys beating on each other for a while with accompanying bruises. Worse, boxing movies are better than the actual fights (and are cheaper). Horse racing is a classical snobby sport, but it's so snobby that it practically doesn't even involve human beings. Which means it doesn't merit my attention.

The NBA or basketball or baseball being at the top of my list probably wouldn't set people off that much. What probably would is soccer being ahead of the NFL. At least I assume that would, since soccer is one of those provincially European things as far as Americans are concerned that supposedly uses our name for a game (it's not called soccer anywhere else, because football of our style isn't all that popular anywhere else). My own preference for baseball over football is pretty easy to explain. Both have long historical ties to the culture of American life. Football has no history however. People may know who won the Super Bowl or the #1 ranking in college or when their favorite team won it all. But there are no numbers attached to it. Unless someone is breaking a record or being considered for their Hall of Fame, there is no history for the players themselves. There's basically none at all for several positions (offensive linemen for example), and often very scant numerical supports for others (cornerbacks and safeties). Baseball has numbers for everything. If you want to try to figure out how the Yankees won all those titles, you can go back and piece it together usually. It's pretty obvious that they've had some of the best players because their best players were leading the league in hitting or pitching statistics. Sometimes there's some luck, just like the David Tyree catch in the Super Bowl a couple years ago. But it's all there in black and white. You don't have to guess that team X had a good offensive line that year or not. Occasionally you would have to extrapolate how good the team was defensively, because this is the one statistical area where baseball is sort of vague (this is also true of every other team sport however. You can usually figure out how good the team's defense, but not quite how good the individuals are at contributing to the whole). You don't have to wonder how they scored runs or how they got people out in the same way that I would have to wonder how well a team moved the ball and scored in football back in 1971.

In a country of individualists, football is the ultimate team (collectivist) sport, with the accomplishments of almost all of its players (except maybe the quarterbacks, who perhaps not coincidentally, have lots of statistics) basically erased from history. It's even the most socialistic in the financial affairs of its teams with all sorts of revenue sharing schemes and salary caps to decrease the ability of teams to dominate over others and to provide a bottom floor of mediocrity to most cities with an NFL team (which some inspired owners have done their best to live under, I'm looking in your direction Al Davis). It seems really counter-intuitive to figure out how this happened. I assume it has something to do with the short seasons all on weekends and festival holidays (Thanksgiving) when most people have the time and energy to pursue recreational things and don't have to worry about games lasting 3 and 4 hours with minimal activity on the field in that time. But to me it constantly seems really strange that that is the all-American pastime. I recognize that baseball has, especially since football took its lead in the 70s, been mishandled and plagued by a variety of problems. It had a much bigger and more public problem with cocaine in the 70s and 80s than any sport (nobody cared about the NBA until it was mostly cleaned up). One of its biggest living historical stars has had a long and public battle concerning gambling on that game (Pete Rose). It has a longer season with many, many games, making it harder to invest the time and energy on any one game, and it has fewer teams who make the playoffs, making many cities lose interest in their teams much earlier. It has had more labour problems leading to strikes and lockouts with games missed. For a sample of how that works against fan interest, see the NBA sometime in the next two years. For some reason steroids has been a bigger deal in baseball than in football. Probably because of the fact that baseball has a history which was deemed to be under assault from chemical warfare, whereas football was undoubtedly "improved" by introducing said warfare with bigger and faster players. An All-Star game was left tied. A World Series was canceled. Its players are increasingly from Latin America rather than our inner cities, which I don't particularly care, but many Americans don't like "Mexicans", ie, anybody from south of the Rio Grande or the Caribbean. All of this is true and works against the narrative powers of a baseball team and its season. But at the core baseball is a team sport that recognizes individual achievements. I would think if anybody would look at the American way of life and attempt to summarize what Americans would strive for, that's pretty much it. We love to win things and come in first, and that's a lot easier if you work together for that collective goal. But we also want the fucking credit once its over. We ideally are a meritocracy with some collective abilities to get along.

If that's what you want, then that's not football. What football looks more like is the way Americans actually live in the modern age. We love to win things, but most of the time somebody else gets the fucking credit in our corporate infrastructure. For example the quarterback usually gets all the attention whether deserved or not. I think this is a silly way to structure my recreational attention (as though it was my normal attention). So I will put more of that attention on "European" games (soccer and hockey, I know Canada is not Europe, but Americans seem to think it is) and other games that are played around the world (tennis and basketball and baseball) and less attention on corporate soul-sucking life structured to look like a battlefield and complete with real life attrition rates.

more headlines which make no sense

"Obama wants to ax moon mission, privatize space travel. Republicans favor big government bureaucracy status quo."

That whole space thing is getting really confusing. In the sense that the "big government bureaucracy status quo" actually was one of the few government successes (it did after all put a moon mission together, caught up to the Soviets, exhibited national and humanistic pride by that accomplishment), that's fine. The question is whether we should continue that at public expense for nationalistic purposes. We've already been to the moon. Why would we need to go back? We already built the Sears Tower, why do we need to build it again? That sort of thing. But the fact that it is the REPUBLICANS who are defending these strange public expense ventures (of a mostly non-defence spending aspect), this is truly confusing. There is no rational and fundamental reason to send manned missions off to Mars at this time. Certainly not for the purposes of national pride for the glory of America and its planting of flags. For all the things that conservatives are perfectly willing to privatize, including, given the history of Xe/Blackwater, the military and national security, the idea that space exploration shouldn't be one of these makes this a very, very strange world.

This was by far the strangest justification: "The “Seinfeld “era is not an era for Odyssean adventures." I'm not an expert on the Odyssey. It's a been a while since I read it (the Iliad was a better read for me). But I recall a lot of mishaps and misfortunes besetting Odysseus and his hapless crew as he attempts to voyage home and tempts the humility of man against god.

That's hardly the example one wants on our minds in the presence of space flight, which, among many other ventures of human beings is one of the greatest prides "against god" as it were, and has already a history of famous mishaps. Before even trying to get back to the moon or to Mars. And many of them at public expense, rather than at the cost of personal pride.

Other weird things in the news:
I haven't seen any blow back yet for Obama doing a few minutes of the Georgetown-Duke telecast with Kellogg and Lundquist on Saturday other than the focus on his serious repose throughout (which is more or less how I watch games in person, so it's really confusing for me personally).

I am less amused by theories that Presidents should be doing nothing with their time but sit around and work at hard problems for Americans. I think this mistakes two things. First that Presidents are actually still human beings and have private wants and amusements of their own, like basketball games, which are somehow made to be unofficial functions that they still must conduct with a certain amount of dignity. Look at the "requirements" for throwing out the first pitch at an All-Star or World Series game for people who are rarely if ever former baseball players and the ideal that Obama somehow must not betray some obvious appreciation for a good play much less a rooting interest, other than his beloved White Sox or Bulls, which many fans would probably forgive with his being from Illinois. I much prefer Obama when he acts like a human being, makes a few jokes, swats a fly, wears his tired and baggy jeans to throw out a pitch, and so on because it keeps me aware of the second problem: that Presidents should not be the source of our physical salvation for all our problems. That's our job. Presidents are entitled with certain legal powers and a somewhat broad mandate to conduct foreign policy (for the purposes of national security). They don't have a job lever under the desk that preserves our mortgages and fiscal security and cannot give us better educations and so on. And they do still like to watch a football or basketball game once in a while. Reagan famously didn't work these long hours when he was in office. I can't get worked up about it when Obama (inevitably) takes an hour or two to fill out a March Madness bracket for ESPN on TV.

Sorry, but that complaint is just about as stupid as the Republicans whining about private and international space exploration instead of publicly funding NASA for extravagant future missions. If you need an idea how hard he's working at the job, watch his hair from the campaign to now. You can track Presidential tiredness and effort by looking at the physical tolls it takes on the men we appoint to the office (Lincoln is the most famous visible example, one assumes FDR experienced this, there's also the famous Kennedy painting and photos of him standing alone looking as though the weight of the world is on him). Obama is a roughly young man by comparison to our usual preference, so he should have somewhat more energy than, say, another Reagan would, but even he isn't immune to the ravages of pressure and time.

some things just have to be said

Obama did a Q&A of sorts with Republicans at their meeting.

It went, depending on your political persuasion, pretty well. The one Republican there who came off looking like he knew what he was talking about, without references to simple pre-conceived talking points, was Paul Ryan (the deficit and budget hawk. Incidentally, I am now extremely jealous of Wisconsin residents. Between Feingold and Ryan, they seem to have picked some experts up there in policy, one's a civil libertarian galore and the other's a virulent anti-pork, anti-spending budget watchdog, good times. They have their flaws, but their virtues are worth some vices).

This went over much better still than the SotU address as far as addressing partisanship issues. I've noticed for example some GOP/tea-partish types who went for the drill, baby, drill part of the speech...but seemed unaware that it's been in the Senate version of Waxman-Markey for months now with a bill that ultimately very much resembles what he outlined in his speech the other night. And that hasn't gone anywhere because of: tada, their heroes in the GOP (and a couple moderate Democrats who were awaiting Ben Nelson style treatment for their state). The ideas have been incorporated. Bipartisanship, of the sort invisioning actual government accomplishments, historically revolves around a sort of give-take relationship. Somethings from this side are put in, some things from that, and then a bill is born. It's messy. It is sometimes politically risky and unpopular, and it often results in messy bills that aren't as effective as they should be, but things are done in this way because it's impossible, not to mention dangerous, to govern a country with just one ideological mandate on how to govern.

What also does not work is something more like this
"I want this in the bill"
"Okay, so if that's in there, will you vote for it"
"I cannot vote for it and I won't"
"Then why should I put it in?"

Which is basically what we've had. Obviously you are going to end up with a partisan-looking bill if
1) you paint everything as a partisan bill
2) you vote on a straight partisan basis and support nothing, regardless of whether it supports your ideas or not (or, ideally, the ideas your constituents supported you to enact or remove).
3) the majority opposition learns 1 and 2 to be the case and since you have declined honest partisanship, you will be ignored.

That's just how it works. That's basically what Obama has tried with this last week or two to point out. I give him some credit for that. I wish he had more of my political outlooks, but I honestly don't think somebody from my side of the fence could get elected in a national election in the first place. This is why I am certain that he's hardly the next coming of Lenin or Marx (such a person could not get elected anymore than I could because they are way too far out of line with the national political spectrum. Take a look at where the Socialist party polls in this country, there's your Lenin and Marx and it's less popular than people like me). For all the leftist comparisons made to Bush as the next Hitler, the same criteria applies. There are aspects of the statism of both Bush or Obama that compare favorably to fascism (corporatism). But these are not new aspects to American culture and politics, and they're not really sufficient reasons to envoke Godwin's Law as the first step to getting people to pay attention to these things as reasonable problems. Or at least, getting serious people capable of effecting changes in the structure of society and governance. There's a very long road to serfdom and totalitarianism and the things that have gone on are somewhere around step 5 or 6 on a 20 step process. Step one would be something like: form a government, provide it with powers and the use of force to enforce those powers. I'm pretty sure most Americans are comfortable with that step even I am somewhat warily so. I am likewise pretty sure many Americans are actually far more comfortable than I am about steps 5 and 6 (things like a military industrial complex for the purposes of national pride and pointless wars and things like spending money with the appearances of providing jobs and income to people), regardless of how much they appear to whine about such things. Obama pointed that out with the fact that they (GOP representatives) were still showing up at the ribbon ceremonies to build some of these wasteful pet projects.

Much of the problem with a decentralized philosophy is that it often has very little to do in a modern political environment. It's very easy to say: this program is stupid, we should kill it. It's another thing to get the votes arranged so that it dies. It's one thing to say, we should deregulate more of our economy. It's still another to look at things like structural rules and regulations and come up with a way to change how the game is played so that it benefits consumers and businesses alike by having fewer, or even no, overarching central controls (airline deregulation is the most famous example here but the deregulation of energy in California is a famous example against such things). People have a hard time looking at the health care sector and imagining what could be on the other side of that if we really reformed it. That's why talking about all this as a "reform" has been pretty silly to someone like me. Free market advocates are swooning over Singapore all the time because they have a pretty good idea how to implement that here, at least some of it (parts of it may be more cultural artifacts that will be difficult to copy and parts may be technocratic advantages to one-party rule that is more plausible in a city-state environment than a nation-state with dozens of major special interests and regional variations). Most voters do not because the "how" involves a pretty radical shift in how we make health care decisions and pay for them. It's just not possible to explain Economics 101 to everyone in a way that they will patiently examine and then go out and weight the costs and benefits of a potential reform and make decisions to support or oppose them. It's far easier to go out and explain this to people who can affect changes in a marginal way around the edges and nudge the direction of health care back toward a market environment. This is why there were some things in the Senate version of the bill that I liked. There was a lot I did not, but because it was broad enough it contained little bits and pieces of seeds to allow things to go in a number of directions, somethings would go toward markets (such as beginning to nip at the employer tax benefit exclusions) and somethings would go toward centralization. In a sense it was an admission that we cannot do a gigantic change like this in a sweeping way from a centralized position but we have to do some little changes in a bunch of different directions to see which ones might work and which won't. It's actually a very favorable admission for a government to make (the issue with it is largely that it has historically been incredibly hard to kill programs that don't actually work to benefit anybody alongside those that do).

That's sort of the price of politics in a realistic world. You accept what is possible in order to get where you ultimately want to go. If it was a legitimately terrible bill, I would have said so and more openly opposed it. I think it's a bad bill, and an incomplete solution to a very big problem that could be resolved very easily by some sweeping reforms (Wyden-Bennett or single payer in other words). It contains some bad seeds like the Stupak amendments regarding abortion funding which I believe are unnecessary (because of the pre-existing Hyde amendments), or the money to bribe Nelson into voting, and what I regard as some hollow cost controls rather than realistic ones (because the cost controls are subject to political moves rather than technocratic rules of cost-benefit analysis, as we saw with the breast cancer screening recommendations that got nixed earlier this year). But it still contains some seeds that are promising. For Republicans to go out and proclaim a new era of Socialism is disingenuous as a result. For starters, things on this front haven't changed that much from 2008 or from 2004 or from 1994 or from 1980. In fact the only major reform toward socialism that has been actually passed by the government regarding health care in decades was passed by many of these same Republicans (medicare part D, probably a political sop to buy off old people because of the attempts to reform social security in addition to this, which seems to have worked. At least, old people don't seem to know that medicare is from the government and don't seem to mind backing Republicans as a result of new benefits that appear to have been installed by them if they are aware of that). For another, they could have introduced more things that would have mixed more market capitalism in and they never seemed all that interested in doing so. Tort reform is necessary, but it's basically a small stick in a very big stick castle that needed to be re-built. It's hardly the lynch-pin of serious reform.

So for them to have to sit there and take it while they get read the Riot Act by Obama was a pretty good start. For them to do so while trying to engage him in serious questioning was also a good start (because it made them look even worse). There are some quibbles around some of the facts used by both parties involved, and certainly some about the implications of some policy choices that can be made (particularly the stimulus bill's effectiveness). But some of the key facts the public seems to care about are the ones like "this is socialism" or "this was Obama's deficit" and "he's not listening to us, this is a partisan bill", and he pushed back hard against these. I think they can do this sort of messaging effectively against Pelosi because she strikes me as hyper-partisan (and a very effective one at that, far more so than Reid or Obama). I don't think they can do it against Obama, because he strikes me as more pragmatic than partisan. He's still to the right of me on a lot of civil liberties, and his positions on the current wars, and somewhere to the left of me on a lot of economic positions. But that doesn't make him the next Mao or Hitler or Duce either.

with friends like these...

"Back in New York City, you can feel the tremors in the social bedrock, if not in the earth’s crust, as T. J. Randall would have it. An online video game, designed recently by libertarians in Brooklyn, called “2011: Obama’s Coup Fails” imagines a scenario in which the Democrats lose seventeen of nineteen seats in the Senate and a hundred and seventy-eight in the House during the midterm elections, prompting the President to dissolve the Constitution and implement an emergency North American People’s Union, with help from Mexico’s Felipe Calderón, Canada’s Stephen Harper, and various civilian defense troops with names like the Black Tigers, the International Service Union Empire, and CORNY, or the Congress of Rejected and Neglected Youth. Lou Dobbs has gone missing, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh turn up dead at a FEMA concentration camp, and you, a lone militiaman in a police state where private gun ownership has been outlawed, are charged with defeating the enemies of patriotism, one county at a time."

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/01/100201fa_fact_mcgrath?currentPage=all#ixzz0eLRLEoTG

Very often I have to look at the political situation and wonder whether I am disenfranchised from it enough. And then I see stuff like that and I realize that apparently this is the closest thing most Americans have in their minds when they consider third party politics and arrangements. It isn't some philosophical assumptions that arrive them supporting a political party and system that doesn't exist anymore. It's more like a reactionary sentiment that is fueled by some sort of fear. The cynicism I have over the corporatism that influences and is influenced by Washington politics does not extend to spouting random conspiracy theories like those made popular in the X-Files during my youth, things like FEMA and the government is coming for your guns and NAFTA is there to sell us to the aliens in Mexico or Canada or whatever with some new North American government and secret black helicopters. X-Files is funny entertainment. It is not a coherent political message or agenda. When those are the sorts of people that people associate with "libertarianism", I have some serious reservations about my choices in political persuasions. Most of my own experiences within libertarian philosophy and its attending policy positions are with academics. Sometimes they propose things that look a little nutty or that will simply not happen. But they also don't sit around complaining about NAFTA and black helicopters and FEMA (except to say that usually private markets work better than the coordinated solutions of governments like FEMA).

I continue to look at the Tea Party movement as a joke, consisting largely of people engaged in a massive act of group therapy with an as yet incoherent political agenda or message. I would guess their diagnosis of the problems are boiled down to a simple "they're taking our country away" only it's unclear who the "they" is or which country they are talking about (it is abundantly clear that most of the people tending toward social conservatism within this movement haven't been anywhere outside their own intellectual bubbles to see what the rest of the country consists of). It does appear to have gotten its act together and figured out at least that all politics is local. It's not clear if it has figured out that voting against the other guy (which appears to be some of the motivations behind Scott Brown voters) is not a serious political movement. It will get some attention when it works, and when it fails (as in NY-23), but it will be difficult to take what is essentially a message about decentralization and create any sort of stable philosophy about the directions of government. This has been the problem of libertarianism as a general ideology for any party (especially the Libertarian Party) for decades. It will remain impossible if other attending demands again resurface as the economy continues its inevitable recoveries. It is pretty easy to get people of any stripes to coordinate their agitations when their jobs are threatened, or when the prospects for their children seem dimmer, because people are generally more pessimistic about the economy anyway than people who study it for a living. It will be much harder to govern based upon that agitation however.

What exactly do they want done for example? Even if it is "stop doing this, or that" rather than the alternatives of "pass health care reform" et al, you still need a way to enact a plan to stop doing this or that, from cutting the funding to voting against it. I haven't seen one to focus on what is one of the apparent primary concerns of tea partiers: the national debt and deficit spending. How do they plan to address the situation? We still don't know. Getting outside of the economic boxes, and into these bizarro worlds like gun control fears and conspiracy theories will not help. And that's basically inevitable. A country that gets its information filter primarily from google searches (that they themselves select where to go and what to look for) and muttering incoherent slogans about freedom is not very likely to have sensible ideas on the direction that that country is going in and how to arrest whatever problems they perceive.

A political movement like this appears to be gaining some sensibility and looks to be trying to kick Palin and other national figures to the curb. I think this is sensible, mostly because if Palin comes to be seen as "your" party or the voice of that movement, that whole movement is fucked. I think at its core much of the politics of the last 3 years or so suggests that many Americans have arrived at a conclusion that enough is enough and that the directions we have gone are incorrect, foolish, or dangerous. Some of that I would agree with. I don't see how Palin offers any hope to that, but to many disaffected people she does, by playing off their fears of elitism and technocratic decisions as are presently made. What they don't seem to realize is that she's basically the same tired agenda. She's not a fighter for some new agenda; she's the same agenda dressed up and calling it by a different name. I think this was true of Scott Brown and it appears, thus far, to be true of Obama. American voters are basically suckers and American politicians know this and profit by it, either by getting elected or by mouthing the words and getting paid directly (as Palin is doing). The difference I think between the tea partiers and me is that I look at Washington and don't ask how it got the way it did. I know how it gets that way: all you have to do if you live here is look in the damn mirror. You did this Americans. Take ownership of it. You demanded things and reacted when people promised them to you. You never started paying attention to see if they were followed up with. You caused the problem, not Washington bureaucracy and not Wall Street or Detroit's or the teacher's unions or anything else that seems now to be sleeping around in the political sense with each other.

Much of the libertarian philosophy relies on the idea that it is better not to give things too much central power and control, even supposedly rigid social morals, so that they can be flexible and adaptive, and so we can re-evaluate them when we need to change them. Social morals, like the complaints referenced in that piece about homosexuality for example, are thus better left not to politics and used to construct museums as testimonials to our beliefs (the better to allow them to be mocked and deconstructed by those that know how), but to individuals. I think this is usually offering some pretty consistent policies to governing. There are some exceptions, like public externalities, that require government or at least public interventions and negotiations to resolve. But you're better off leaving a lot of things to impersonal forces and not worrying too much when the country veers off in a direction you don't like. It may veer back later, or it may not matter very much to you personally. I don't understand social insistence on sexual conformity because nobody requires you to have sex with people you don't want to. I don't understand an insistence on religious observance for our political class because many people don't make such requirements in their daily lives and should know how hollow and fragile their commitments to their chosen faith really is. I don't understand resistance to ideas about the universe and its mechanisms for operation because these ideas have shown to be reasonably good interpretations of empirical evidence, but this is largely because I understand the empirical evidence as being reasonable and acknowledge its existence in the first place I suppose. To the extent that I worry about these things, it is not usually because there are lots of people who disagree with me on these points (that is admittedly troubling sometimes). It is because there are lots of people who disagree with me in the way of how to implement these things as public discourse and policies. I don't see why my kids, should I ever have any, should have to pray in school (if they don't want to, I don't plan on instructing kids about religion at all, if they want to I may ask some questions but that's about as far as I'm willing to go to frame their worldviews). Or why any friends who happen to be gay should have to conceal their sexuality and marry someone they do not love instead. Whose sensibilities are offended when these things happen? Nobody's. If you or your children are religious, you are welcome to instruct them to pray on their own time or to offer sanctimonious acknowledgments of the goodness or greatness of your personal god for your successes in public. If you aren't homosexual, you are welcome to find worthy and willing partners for your attempts at monogamous life-long happiness. You are not somehow altered into some demonic abomination or indecent power by allowing others to practice their freedoms (those that offer you and everyone you know no harms save some affront or offense, neither of which is a protected status under the law or at least, neither should be).

As a test of societies, I think it speaks much more highly when it is capable of tolerating its most outspoken ideas. I will admire the initiative of these anonymous weirdos in Brooklyn for building an imaginary land of fear and persecution for those who love their constitutional freedoms, much as X-Files was amusing. I'd prefer it if they didn't give others the impression that I was an ally in their cause by using a philosophy of classical liberalism as the title for their politics. But I am not one to squash their opinions and worldviews for suggesting that somehow ACORN is about to take over the US and put us on track for a super-country incorporating Mexico and Canada and so on. I think these opinions are dumb and unfounded. I don't know how to convince them that they are wrong. I've argued and tried using facts, but facts are ignored in a world where you can select your own. So it looks like the best option is to simply allow people to coordinate into their own groups and use decentralized sources of power. If they want to run a country or state or city on their basis, let them. I will find a place that will "run" it more to my liking instead.