You remember how McCain’s been trying to sell himself as the blunt, no-bullshit, straight-shooting maverick who’ll speak truth to power? Factis non verbis:
“The first thing I would do is say, ‘Let’s not call it a bailout. Let’s call it a rescue,’” McCain told CNN.
(Hat tip: The Liberty Papers.)
How about “an Even Newer Deal”? That might go over well.
The American economic bailout package died in the House, 228-205 against.
Looks like this was a bipartisan defeat, mostly prompted by the fact that voters, by and large, hate and despise the plan — and every single Congresscritter is up for reelection in a matter of weeks.
When the critical vote was tallied, too few members of the House were willing to support the unpopular measure with elections just five weeks away.
Ample No votes came from both the Democratic and Republican sides of the aisle. Bush and a host of leading congressional figures had implored the legislators to pass the legislation despite howls of protest from their constituents back home, who balked at the price and the perception that the government would be using taxpayer dollars to bail out greedy financial tycoons.
This sets rather an encouraging precedent — wouldn’t it be lovely if those “constituents back home” voiced loud and vociferous displeasure every time the government proposed to use taxpayer dollars to bail out private industry? I’m not going to hold my breath, mind you, but it’s an awfully pleasant thought with a pair of histrionic populists running for President.
Looking into the mechanics of the credit crisis, I came across this gem:
(Hat tip: Below the Beltway)
[S]ome of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.
“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
You have got to be fucking kidding me. Some of the biggest federal economic fucking-around since the New Deal is based on an arbitrarily chosen figure. No-one’s sure if it’s enough money to do what Dubya wants, or if it’s overkill — it’s just “really large”.
Finally, a minor shitstorm in the Canadian election campaign. Yesterday, Stephen Harper decided to show that his Conservatives are just as strong in the field of simplistic populist pandering as the Liberals and the New Democrats. He painted (heh heh) artists as gala-attending subsidy-guzzling ivory-tower elitists, and claimed that “ordinary Canadians” don’t care about the arts.
On Tuesday, Mr. Harper cast his lot with “ordinary, working people” and not with “ivory tower” justice experts or with a cultural elite he characterized as government-subsidized whiners.
“I think when ordinary working people come home, turn on the TV and see a gala of a bunch of people, you know, at a rich gala all subsidized by taxpayers claiming their subsidies aren’t high enough when they know those subsidies have actually gone up, I’m not sure that’s something that resonates with ordinary people,” he said during a campaign stop in Saskatoon.
Naturally, the Canadian arts community got a bug up its collective asshole about the comment, which apparently shocked a lot of people despite the Conservative government’s cuts to arts funding. (Which, since they’re a minority government, must’ve met with some approval from the other parties in order to get passed. But this is election season, so we’ll pass on the facts and get right to the hysteria.)
In a united press conference on Wednesday morning, leading actors and artists insisted that arts is not about galas and subsidies.
Rather, they said, it’s a resource that comes from the minds of Canadians and delivers fantastic returns in the form of quality of life, education and national identity.
I’ll spare you the details and get right to the point: those united actors and artists swear up and down that “the arts” deliver “fantastic returns” without which Canadian culture would become a barren wasteland, only they can’t give any specific examples and are forced to speak in sweeping generalities. As ever, they raise the spectre of the Americans:
“Yet we still have this feeling here that we are practically compelled to bend or dissolve within the larger picture of the American sensibility, and we don’t like it,” [veteran actor and CBC presenter Gordon Pinsent] said. “We all want to work. We’re artists to begin with.”
Apparently the American sensibility has a habit of manifesting itself in human form, putting guns to the heads of Canadian artists (you know those Americans and their guns), and forcing them to not work. And it’s all Harper’s fault, or something.
But wait: I was wrong. (Jeez, twice in one week!) It turns out that you can quantify the impact of the arts.
The performers — including Colm Feore and Wendy Crewson — noted that the arts provide 1.1 million jobs within cultural industries and contribute $86-billion to the GDP.
That’s pretty cool. (Of course, I’m still a bit vague on what “the arts” and “cultural industries” might be, and since no-one bothered to cite their fucking sources I’ll probably never find out. But as I said earlier, it’s election season; back to the hysteria!) And it makes perfect sense. See, if you’re an eighty-six billion dollar industry, you get to demand money from the taxpayers government as though you have a right to it:
They say the $45-million that the Conservative government cut from culture funding last summer could seriously damage their industry.
The performers called on voters to reject the Tory cuts and demand that the government restore stable funding, with Mr. Feore saying the arts are crucial to Canada’s identity.
Somehow I get the feeling that very large film and music — er, “arts” — corporations are happy to misrepresent themselves as starving creative geniuses at the grassroots of Canadian cultural development. This looks like just another corporate welfare package, tarted up as they usually are to appeal to voters’ feeeeeelings.
——
Speaking of the arts, we’re going to have to change the way we speak of the arts.
Publishers and universities are outlawing dozens of seemingly innocuous words in case they cause offence.
Banned phrases on the list, which was originally drawn up by sociologists, include Old Masters, which has been used for centuries to refer to great painters – almost all of whom were in fact male.
It is claimed that the term discriminates against women and should be replaced by “classic artists”.
Naturally, this comes from Britain — which I presume will shortly expunge “Britain” from its vocabulary and replace it with a set of latitude/longitude/elevation coordinates to avoid offending immigrants from other nations. Oops, I wrote something offensive:
The list of allegedly racist words includes immigrants, developing nations and black, while so-called “disablist” terms include patient, the elderly and special needs.
It comes after one council outlawed the allegedly sexist phrase “man on the street”, and another banned staff from saying “brainstorm” in case it offended people with epilepsy.
Surely verbs like “outlaw” and “ban” are potentially offensive as well, given that they imply a hierarchical power relationship and reinforce the status quo (that was Latin; am I being elitist?) while subconsciously discouraging those in (hmm, how to phrase this without offending?) positions whose leadership potential has yet to be fully actualized (whew!) from advancement. I shall write my MP directly.
——
It just wouldn’t be right to write Misanthropy without poking fun at some particularly asinine aspect of security theatre. Courtesy of Bruce Schneier:
[Clay Hodges, general manager of Cash Special Utility District] explains all the district’s hydrants, including those in Alexander Ranch, have had their water turned off since just after 9/11 — something a trade association spokesman tells us is common practice for rural systems.
“These hydrants need to be cut off in a way to prevent vandalism or any kind of terrorist activity, including something in the water lines,” Hodges said.
But Hodges says fire departments know, or should have known, the water valves can be turned back on with a tool.
You’d think that everyone who’d successfully completed grade school would immediately understand that this is a ridiculously bad security tradeoff. Schneier surely does:
One, fires are much more common than terrorism — keeping fire hydrants on makes much more sense than turning them off. Two, what sort of terrorism is possible using working fire hydrants? Three, if the water valves can be “turned back on with a tool,” how does turning them off prevent fire-hydrant-related terrorism?
But… but… but… zOMG Terr’ists!!!11
——
It would also be something of a let-down if I didn’t poke fun at British policing. This week’s case is unusual, however, as it stems from British police doing a magnificent job:
Most of the plods’ aura of thuggishness comes from their propensity to fuck with people who aren’t causing any harm. (See, for example, roughly half of the posts on this blog.) They generally make time for this by ignoring the people who are causing harm. You might therefore suspect that a police chief who insists that his officers investigate real crimes would, along with the rest of his force, be held in high regard.
You’d be mostly right.
No-nonsense Essex Chief Constable Roger Baker has won widespread support for his back-to-basics approach. And his tactic has paid clear dividends, with thousands of fewer crimes reported last year. But in an incredible move, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary questioned whether sending officers to every reported crime is the best use of resources.
Recall that the same government which issued this comment also suggested that police should “target” a three-hour response time to emergency calls. I suppose they’re being made to feel rather inadequate by a police force which does its fucking job.
The long-time reader will not be surprised to hear that I have some thoughts on the current state of the markets. Among other things, I’m somewhat frustrated with the cycle of crisis-bailout-bigger crisis that’s been going on since people — or rather, investment bankers and politicians — started noticing that most mortgage debt was of dubious quality. (I’m also annoyed with the shrill “progressive” hecklers who insist that this is entirely a failure of free-market ideology, though I suppose it’s a bit idealistic to expect shrill “progressive” hecklers to read Hayek.)
That long-time reader will have to wait a little longer for me to rant and rave about the credit crisis du jour, as I plan to actually learn something about the subject before I do so. (I suppose it’s a bit idealistic to expect shrill “progressive” hecklers to… never mind.) However, a much more astute economist than I is doing the same thing — educating himself before he rants — and he’s doing it publicly.
Go have a read at Cafe Hayek, if you’re interested in this sort of thing. Russell Roberts is posting what amounts to a well-educated cross between research notes and stream-of-consciousness speculation, and much like Bryan Kaplan he’s doing a marvelous job of keeping an open mind.
Some of you may recall that, back in January, I waxed sarcastic about the British Columbian provincial government’s plan to double public transit ridership by 2020, via the simple expedient of spending fourteen billion dollars on, uh, stuff. At the time, I assumed that the province had a cunning plan to come up with that fourteen billion dollars — probably involving taking it out of my pocket (and everyone else’s) in the form of municipal, provincial, and federal taxes.
I was wrong.
(Hey, it happens sometimes.)
Turns out that our fearless leader, Premier Gordon Campbell, simply expects fourteen billion dollars magically to appear out of thin air. Or perhaps he’s banking on the profitability of a provincial government side project, which evidently involves refining pixie dust into unicorn giggles.
Doubling transit ridership by 2020 is an important part of the B.C. Climate Action Plan, the provincial roadmap to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 33 per cent from 2007 levels by 2020.
In Metro Vancouver, TransLink’s ridership would have to grow by about five per cent each year in order to reach 550 million riders by 2020. TransLink is projecting growth of only 2.3 per cent for the next four years.
After 2012, TransLink is projecting a deficit and plans to reduce service levels, slowing projected growth to just 1.5 per cent each year.
According to the provincial government, TransLink’s on the hook for just south of three billion dollars for this transit plan — never mind that they’re projecting a deficit four years from now. (And if TransLink plans to reduce service while predicting continued growth, I doubt very much that they’ll be able to maintain a public transit system that people will want to use.)
So who’s expected to contribute the rest of the money?
The plan requires $11.1 billion in new money from the province, the federal government, TransLink and municipalities.
So far, Ottawa has only contributed about two per cent of what has been requested. [...] And another $500 million is expected to come from municipalities outside the Lower Mainland, none of which has been committed so far.
Of course: municipal, provincial, and federal taxes.
Would it be paranoid to suggest that this plan was set up to fail conveniently? If everyone involved manages to kick in as much money as Campbell asks, he’s a hero; if not, it’s someone else’s fault. Blame the tight-fisted Feds in Ottawa, with their Ontario-Quebec fixation and apathy towards the West; or blame the miserly municipal mayors, who can’t see beyond property tax increases to the glorious future. Given that the provincial Liberals just cancelled the fall session of the legislature, and are setting themselves up as the “fiscally conservative” party for a February election, I rather doubt that they’ll exert themselves to find their share of the money required.
Might be fun to watch if I can get out of the province before the shit really hits the fan, though.
My department’s grad student society recently bought a foosball table. Turns out that a lot of our grad students are enthusiastic — and mostly skilled — foosball players. (Who would’ve thought?)
So I’m playing a pickup game of 2v2 foosball this afternoon when my partner and I realize we don’t know each other. We introduce ourselves between points, and another player asks where he’s from.
“I’m from Iran”, he replies.
I do a double-take.
“No, which lab?”
(Computational biology, it turns out.)
I’d like to report that we all rejoiced in our obvious accepting open-mindedness, but the conversation then turned to an argument of whose field’s major conferences had the lowest acceptance rates. Still, it beats the hell out of jingoistic nationalism.
——
Every once in a while, I come across a headline which reduces me to helpless convulsions of bitter laughter. Most of these headlines come from the British press, and this one’s no exception:
The notion that someone agitating for the teaching of creationism could be a “science education expert” is, to put it politely, about as credible as the notion that someone sworn to a lifetime of abstainance should be your final authority on how and whom and why to fuck.
Sure, the intuition behind the notion sounds reasonable enough:
The Rev Prof Michael Reiss, director of education at the Royal Society, said that excluding alternatives to scientific explanations for the origin of life and the universe from science lessons was counterproductive and would alienate some children from science altogether.
He said that around one in 10 children comes from a family with creationist beliefs. “My experience after having tried to teach biology for 20 years is if one simply gives the impression that such children are wrong, then they are not likely to learn much about the science,” he said.
This is a failure of paedagogy. The theory of natural selection does not repeat not claim to be the capital-t Truth — it merely claims to be a better tool for explaining the past and predicting the future than those that came before. (Actually, this is a second-order failure of paedagogy. The symptomatic failure is creationists’ kids failing bio exams. The causal failure is education majors failing to learn the fundamental principles of science.)
This story does, however, have a happy and heartwarming ending: Reiss quit his fucking job.
Not only that, but the Royal Society managed to cut some of the more extreme interpretations of the guy’s statements off at the knees:
The Royal Society reiterated that its position was that creationism had no scientific basis and should not be part of the science curriculum.
“However, if a young person raises creationism in a science class, teachers should be in a position to explain why evolution is a sound scientific theory and why creationism is not, in any way, scientific.”
In a better world, science teachers would be scientists themselves, and would already be teaching the explain/predict model of science rather than the popular bullshit notion that science is just another belief system tarted up in lab coats and coke-bottle glasses.
The Optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, the Pessimist fears it is true.
Most people are neither, so there’s still some hope.
This week’s Misanthropy will be delayed until my work schedule gets slightly less ricockulous. To tide you over ’til then, I’m going to make fun of Charlie Rangel.
Suppose for a moment that I’d failed to report $75,000 worth of income to the taxman.
No, back up for a moment. Suppose first that I make at least $75,000 per year. Now suppose that I failed to report $75,000 to our dear benevolent friends* the government thugs with shotguns Tasers shotguns and Tasers. You’d be surprised, mostly because you’d expect some horsie cop to have shot me thrice in the back of the head (in self-defence, of course) or at least stuffed me in a prison cell without Internet access.
We have thus established that you, dear reader, don’t think I’m an elected official.
WASHINGTON — Representative Charles B. Rangel said on Wednesday that “cultural and language barriers” had hindered him from understanding the finances of his Dominican Republic beach house, and vowed to repay several thousand dollars in federal taxes he owes after failing to report $75,000 in rental income from the villa.
Okay, fair enough. So far, so good. There’s a grand and glorious tradition in what started out as and remains a reasonable approximation of a free country — namely, America (fuck yeah!) — that one is permitted to earn money and (I know, this is stretching credibility a bit, but bear with me) keep it. Rangel, being a Congresscritter, should be expected to set an example for his constituents (if not the rest of the nation) — so it’s reasonable for him to want to safeguard his earnings from the aforementioned thugs with shotguns and Tasers**. In different circumstances, I might applaud his intransigence.
In these circumstances, however, I just point and laugh. See, Rangel is one of the people who writes tax law in the United States of America. And he has been one for over thirty years.
But hey: it’s not like he’s a bad person — as far as he’s concerned.
“I personally feel I have done nothing morally wrong,” he said. Pressed by reporters about how, given his position and background, he could be ignorant of the tax rules, he answered: “I never had any idea that I got any income.”
(I’m somewhat less than convinced.)
Honestly, though: I’m with Rangel on this point. I don’t think he’s done anything morally wrong in not reporting his income. Living under the protection of privilege while he passes laws that force his constituents (and the rest of the country) to surrender their income — sure, that’s morally wrong (on both counts). But if Rangel wants to take on the risk of owning a rental property in a different fucking country, and dares to ask a reward for renting it out to people (like that champion of the downtrodden, Bill Clinton — no, seriously; read the article), more power to him.
Of course, all this talk about ethics is missing the point.
The congressman nonetheless said it was unfair to judge his long career in public service based on the ethics complaints. Hours before the news conference, he was included on a list of the 20 most corrupt members of Congress released by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an action he called “sad and unfair.”
Y’see, it’s not about ethics at all — it’s about seniority. He’s had a long career; he’s fucking earned the “right” to dick around and flout his own laws. God dammit, y’all, he deserves to skim a little off the top of the public-funded trough… by virtue of the fact that he’s never been caught ’til now!
——
* I know it’s hard to believe that government thugs with shotguns and Tasers are our dear and benevolent friends. Nonetheless, Christians have been okay with the idea that their omnibenevolent god will send them to Hell for an eternity of torture if they jizz on the ground for about the past six thousand years — and Christianity isn’t exactly pushing the boundaries of religious credibility. I therefore expect the idea that government loves us and wants us to be happy to be an uncontroversial one.
** Well, I suspect that in the States it’s more common to have one’s earnings confiscated by thugs with M4s and Tasers. But let’s not quibble.
