Beers of Milwaukee, vol. 19

So, about that Arrogant Bastard…

All y’all’re gonna have to wait just a little bit.  First of all, I partook of some Pull Chain Pail Ale (yes, that’s how it’s spelled), courtesy of my father’s vaunted eclecticism and the Milwaukee Ale House.  Its story is rather, um, laborophilic: it’s named after and inspired by the notion of factory bosses pulling a chain (hence the name) to ring a bell announcing a union-mandated beer break; “Bucket boys would hang pails of beer on long poles and hustle cold brew out to the workers before they returned to the line.”  (This was before the labour movement decided that it gave two shits about child exploitation, I suppose.)

Pail Ale is pretty good beer, I guess.  It fails mostly because there are better beers out there, just like Flying Dog’s Canine Cruiser.  (No, I’m fucking not going to indulge your clever phontecisim.)  It falls somewhere between Rogue’s Dead Guy Ale and Okanagan Spring’s Black lager in terms of taste and character.  It’s pretty good: dark and malty without being overwhelmingly, er, dark and malty; it’s a little bit fruity without being overwhelmingly sweet or sour.

Okay, now we can talk about the Arrogant Bastard.  Er, I mean the beer, not the blogger.

I find it difficult to believe that there’s a beer enthusiast out there who isn’t already acquainted with at least the mystique of Arrogant Bastard.  AB sells by telling beer lovers this (paraphrased):

Look, you won’t like this beer.  It’s too ballsy and too beery for you.  Go drink something fizzy and yellow and quit bothering us.  Let someone deserving buy this beer.

And it worked.  I couldn’t wait to buy a bottle of Arrogant Bastard, and I probably got my money’s worth just reading the label.

But, y’know, the only product ever to live up to that level of hype was Half-Life 2.  Arrogant Bastard is damn fine beer, but I built myself an expectation that was three parts Gonzo Imperial Porter, four parts Old Rasputin, and about thirty parts the kind of intramuscular morphine I got while orthopaedists put my leg back together seven years ago.  Nothing that doesn’t metabolize to diacetylmorphine can possibly match that expectation, and Arrogant Bastard doesn’t do either.

Imagine taking a recipe for a fantastically thick, sweet, and ass-kicking porter, and adding about an order of magnitude more hops.  Yeah, now you have Arrogant Bastard, and though you might be skeptical it works.  It’s vaguely like Dead Guy, but about three times more so in every direction, and with extra hops on top of that.  Arrogant Bastard somehow manages to throw on a remarkably subtle and rewarding aftertaste with hints of caramel and chocolate, but nonetheless richly fruity and still a bit bitterly hoppy.

I still kind of wish I was drinking Old Rasputin.

For me, at least, Arrogant Bastard makes a great advertisement for their more, um, specialized beers.  There is nothing whatsoever wrong with Arrogant Bastard except for the small detail that there are two other beers out there that I prefer… and a half-dozen others that I have yet to taste.

I don’t know if I’ve been sufficiently clear: Arrogant Bastard is fucking amazing beer.  It’s not the best beer — to my particular tastes — that the entire enterprise of western free-market dynamism has been able to produce, but it’s fucking up there.

I am really looking forward to trying Stone’s IPA and stout.

Miscellaneous motoriffic mumblings

Here, have a grab-bag of vaguely-related remarks.

——

Earlier this month, Honda rather unexpectedly withdrew from Formula One competition — citing of course budgetary concerns.  From Jalopnik, we discover that

• Honda posts first half-year operating loss in 11 years

This gives me an idea about the root cause of the Big Three collapse.  It’s not incompetent management or grasping unions — it’s because they didn’t participate in Formula One.  Toyota remains in F1 competition, and they seem to be doing all right.  None of the Detroit Three has entered a car in the premier motor-racing series since I can remember, and they’ve been in pervasive and perpetual pecuniary prickles (sorry, I couldn’t resist) for about as long.  Honda withdraw from F1, and immediately post a loss.  It’s obvious, isn’t it?

What do you mean, cum hoc ergo propter hoc is fallacious?

——

Also from Jalopnik, we come across this gem:

• How to get 35MPG in a Porsche 911

Turns out it’s not necessarily what you’d expect.

Did they drive it slowly? No, not really.  Over a 402-mile route that included country and city roads in addition to the Autobahn, they averaged 52 MPH, with a top speed of 81 MPH.

[...]

The trick was to keep the 911’s engine at its most efficient point: between 1,800 and 2,000 RPM.

Not something you can easily do with an automatic transmission.  Jalopnik points out that the real story here is the degree to which driver behaviour affects fuel efficiency.  You’d hope this would be more widely known, but apparently there are a lot of people out there who take EPA mileage estimates as rigid performance figures.

——

Speaking of the behaviour of individual drivers with respect to fuel use:

• OPEC approves biggest production cut ever, market goes “meh” (Jalopnik again)

OPEC today announced it will cut daily oil production by 2.2 million barrels, a response to the shrinking price of gas. And how did the market respond to the news? Crude is down.

That sound you hear is me laughing my ass off at Hugo Chavez.

——

By the way, what’s the official explanation for the precipitous drop of oil prices from the folks who were complaining about “price gouging” when it was high?  Are the evil fat-cat otter-murdering oil execs afraid of regulatory wrath?  Have they been overcome by compassion for recession-stricken consumers and convinced to forego another windfall profit?  Did they trade in their wingtips and filet mignon for Birkenstocks and granola when the electoral college voted for Obama?

Or is the price of oil possibly a matter of what people will pay for it, based on an imperfect understanding of the tediously intellectual and dismally unsatisfying factors of supply and demand?

An airport allegory

I flew from Vancouver to Milwaukee the other day.  It sucked.  However, I found in my pleasantly smooth transition through YVR an entertaining allegory for the two countries which I, to some degree, call home.

I officially entered the United States by following a line through U.S. Immigration in the Vancouver International Airport.  That line, when I entered it, was composed of something like five hundred people — but it moved remarkably quickly.  The process had changed in character from my previous experiences: even though the individual passes through INS were more lengthy (apparently some people are being asked to scan their fingerprints and have a photo taken before being allowed to enter the United States), the aggregate process was much more efficient.

You see, previously the line was controlled by one person on the entry checking to ensure that everyone had completed their Customs declarations, and by a second person near the end directing travelers to the shortest line associated with an individual agent.  This time, there were no such controllers: the only agent was occupied with opening and closing extra ribbon-fence sections to accommodate more (or fewer) people, and we were free to choose the line we felt would move the fastest.  (Most of us were wrong; I surely was.)  But despite the fact that the process for each individual traveler took more time, I got through the INS line faster and more pleasantly than ever before.

The line for the security checkpoint was almost identical to the line for Immigration.  On the one hand, it differed by the fact that the security screeners were impressively well-practiced, and did their jobs with a minimum of fuss and interference with those of us who wanted to get where we were going.  On the other hand, the line itself crawled — probably no worse than it had before, but it was much slower than the unexpectedly-quick Immigration line.  An utterly inconsequential difference between the two lines is that the Immigration checkpoints were staffed by Americans, while the security checkpoints were staffed by Canadians.  An instructive difference between the two is that the Canadian security line featured a helpful attendant directing travelers to what he felt was the shortest security-checkpoint line.

In an effort to ameliorate this poor man’s workload, the  security-checkpoint planners had also provided a pair of assistants, each either frantically signaling that his (they were both male) line was under-employed and merited more travelers or frantically signaling that his line was saturated and should not have travelers directed thereto.  Between the three of them, they could come nowhere close to matching the efficiency with which the nonexistent director at the Immigration line had balanced the load among INS agents.

Hmm.

Beers of Milwaukee, vol. 18

I am once again in Milwaukee, visiting my parents over Christmas.  I received my first Christmas gift today: the free market gave me a broad selection of beers from Stone Brewery, including the entirely apposite Arrogant Bastard Ale (which really isn’t an accurate thing to say about me — my parents were married when I was conceived).  But for that review (and those of other Stone products) you’ll have to wait; my topic this evening is Flying Dog Brewery’s seasonal K-9 Cruiser winter ale.

I regret to inform you that K-9 Cruiser is a pretty decent beer.

See, I began my visit to Milwaukee with a cascade of air travel-inflicted misfortune, each element of which was tedious and banal but which in total pissed me all kinds of fucking off, and a day which saw me suffering scores of petty indignities with no capacity of my own for agency ended with a six-pack of Snake Dog IPA… and after the fifth Snake Dog I managed to relax.  I’d been reading Heller’s Catch 22 through most of the ill-spent day, and by the time I finished that fifth beer Yossarian’s predicament had gone from absurdly amusing to poignantly mirthful to it’s-funny-because-it’s-true to too-close-to-home and at last back to absurdly amusing and I giggled like a schoolgirl and slept like a log.

What I mean to say is that Flying Dog makes fucking magnificent beer, by and large, and that the fact that their winter ale is merely good leaves me somewhat crestfallen.

K-9 Cruiser describes itself on the label as very dark and very malty.  It is, kinda, except that when you consider that Flying Dog’s Gonzo Imperial Porter describes itself as the ne plus ultra of dark and malty the K-9 Cruiser just doesn’t measure up.  The K-9 winter ale ends up about halfway between Big Rock’s Traditional ale and Rogue’s Dead Guy ale.  It’s pretty malty, fairly sweet, and well on the darker side of the scale… but it’s just not as fucking awesome as Flying Dog’s other beers.

So basically, if I was still in Canada where I had a fairly limited selection of easily-available awesome beers, I’d be elated to find Flying Dog’s seasonal winter ale at my local liquor store.  I am, however, in Wisconsin, where I can find just about every outstanding beer on the face of this air-swathed mudball in every single grocery store… and I kinda wish I’d picked up a sixer of Road Dog porter instead.

I guess the fundamental problem with Flying Dog’s K-9 Cruiser winter ale isn’t the beer itself: it’s that they’re selling it in a fantastically unrestricted market alongside a cornucopia of outstanding ales, including Dead Guy (which is a better beer).

Half-assed defence of liberty considered harmful

“Wherever they burn books, in the end will also burn human beings.”
– Heinrich Heine

——

Today, as I’ve been reminded, is Bill of Rights Day (at least here on the Wet Coast, for a few more hours).  Of those ten Amendments, the First gets by far the most press:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

(Please note that the First Amendment restricts the federal Government, rather than authority figures in general.  Trying to lean on the First Amendment when someone deletes one of your puerile forum posts merely makes you look foolish… particularly if the forum is hosted in another country.)

With this in mind, I present the following:

• Why defend freedom of icky speech? (Neil Gaiman)

(Hat tip William the Coroner, who also reminded me of the significance of December 15th)

Gaiman makes a powerful case, which I’ll inadequately sum up with this excerpt:

And in each case I’ve mentioned so far, you could rewrite Jess’s letter above, explaining that only perverts would want to read Lady Chatterley, or see images of women being abused, or read Lost Girls or the works of Robert Crumb, and mentioning that if only one person was saved from a hug from a creepy uncle, or indeed, being raped in the streets, that banning them or prosecuting those who write, draw, publish, sell or — now — own them, is worth it. Because that was the point of view of the people who were banning these works or stopping people reading them. They thought they were doing a good thing. They thought they were defending other people from something they needed to be protected from.

[...]

You ask, What makes it worth defending? and the only answer I can give is this: Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you’re going to have to stand up for stuff you don’t believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don’t, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person’s obscenity is another person’s art.

Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.

(Read the whole thing.)

If we ban one work of fiction — even a particularly odious one — we set a legal precedent for other bans.

——

Over on Coyote Blog, we find a similar (though somewhat inverted) argument about abortion rights and the degree to which a privacy right over one’s body is implied in the Roe v. Wade decision:

• Implications of a privacy right

The first, most interesting observation for me was that none of the judges, either in the decision or the dissent, were willing to grant a strong and/or broad privacy right.  The majority opinion uses the interesting term “zones of privacy”, which immediately set off alarm bells for me since the term is so similar to the “free speech zones” term I find repugnant (the whole country should be a free speech zone, not little patches of ground with ropes around them).  Apparently, these “privacy zones” fairly narrowly include marriage, sex and procreation, children’s education and pregnancy.  I can’t think of any compelling reason that those decisions and interactions between two adults should be “private” while eating, smoking, taking drugs and medications, getting breast implants, negotiating a wage, wearing a seat belt, using a tanning booth, getting a tattoo, or using a motorcycle helmet are not “private”.

As we’ve all seen over and over in the past three months, abortion rights — tied directly to the existence of a privacy right over one’s own body — are the line in the sand for a goodly part of the women’s-rights community.  You’d expect groups like NOW to support that privacy right every time it comes up, since it’s so critical to one of their biggest concerns.

Or, you know, not.

• Selective libertarianism (Coyote Blog)

When it comes to defending abortion, women’s groups are great libertarians. They will point out that abortion is about the right to choose and about protecting the “fundamental civil and human right of women to make the most intimate decisions about their bodies and their lives”.  Its about not letting the government interfere with individual decision-making or a “woman’s right to privacy”.  Its about assuming women are grown-up enough to make difficult choices about their fetus and their own health and safety.  Opponents of such choice are “ultra-conservatives trying to deny women control over their own bodies”.  (all quotes from the NOW web site).

So, women’s groups seem to be good libertarians concerned with the primacy of women’s decision-making over their own body.  Except when they’re not.  NOW has been feverishly campaigning to get the government to limit a women’s right to choose breast augmentation, despite the fact that the science is overwhelmingly behind the safety of implants.  Sure, as in any medical procedure, there are some risks, but I defy anyone to tell me that the risks associated with breast implants are greater than the risks associated with abortion.

Banning breast augmentation surgery seems like a particularly nasty thin-end-of-the-wedge for pro-choice activists, because as an invasive surgical procedure it’s at least glancingly related to abortion, and any precedent on body-privacy rights set by such a ban would seem (to me; I’m not a lawyer and I don’t play one on the internet) to hold greater influence over Roe v. Wade than, say, a ban on smoking in bars.

Similarly, bans on works of fiction — because they curtail freedom of expression — seem to me to hold greater influence over really critical protected speech, such as political and philosophical writings, than bans on stuff like child pornography (where there’s clear harm to a clear victim, rather than the “what-if we maybe might save the life of just one child” normally associated with fiction bans).  Perhaps I’m overreacting, but it seems like a worryingly small leap from banning “dangerous” fiction to banning political parody, and from there to banning “dangerous” political speech.  That looks like a slippery-slope fallacy when I write it out at the comfort of my keyboard, but it’s happened many times before.

——

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!
– Barry Goldwater

What does it mean for justice to be served?

“Justice” is sort of like “fairness” — it’s a powerfully compelling concept, probably an evolved adaptation to some extent hard-wired into our emotions, which we can’t seem to define properly and which, when we try to apply it by legislative fiat and violent coercion, generally just ends up hurting people.  We all want it, but we all have different ideas of what it entails.  Just like “fairness”, I’m starting to get sick of hearing about “justice”.  At the same time, arguing about what “justice” — or “fairness” — means tends to generate the sort of thorny questions and dilemmas that lead one to learn something about oneself.

For example, have a look at this:

• Woman blinded by spurned man invokes Islamic retribution (Washington Post)

Ameneh Bahrami once enjoyed photography and mountain vistas. Her work for a medical equipment company gave her financial independence. Several men had asked for her hand in marriage, but the hazel-eyed electrical technician had refused them all. “I wanted to get married, but only to the man I really loved,” she said.

Four years ago, a spurned suitor poured a bucket of sulfuric acid over her head, leaving her blind and disfigured.

Late last month, an Iranian court ordered that five drops of the same chemical be placed in each of her attacker’s eyes, acceding to Bahrami’s demand that he be punished according to a principle in Islamic jurisprudence that allows a victim to seek retribution for a crime.

My first reaction was “She got a bucket of acid; he gets ten drops?  What’s just about that?”  (If you’re looking for an outrage fix, there’s plenty in the WaPo’s article; for example, you might read the bit where Bahrami was hosed off in the parking lot by “a worker” rather than properly decontaminated and debrided by doctors.  Particularly galling is the bit where Bahrami’s attacker insists that he hasn’t done anything wrong.)

The marvelous thing about the internet is of course that opinions vary.

• An eye for an eye (Feministe via memeorandum)

Dripping acid into someone’s eyes is not a “justice” system by any stretch. So while I’m glad this crime is being taken seriously and that the woman has had a chance to speak out against the man who attacked her, I am horrified that the punishment may be torture.

Women’s rights cannot be severed from human rights. Women’s rights at the expense of human rights are no rights at all.

The United States Bill of Rights (in the Eighth Amendment) provides protection against “cruel and unusual punishments”.  The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides (less) protection (in Section 12) against “cruel and unusual treatment or punishment”.  The question, of course, becomes: “What constitutes cruel and unusual punishment”?

Three months in jail would probably be considered “cruel and unusual punishment” for jaywalking (though it beats a shit-kicking).  It would probably be considered absurdly light for rape or murder.  It might be considered appropriate for selling pot*.  I’m not so much trying to defend my knee-jerk reaction as morally justified, here, as I am trying to point out that what constitutes “unjust punishment” is somewhat ambiguous.

Wait, hang on: we’ve deviated slightly from the where that point began.  I started by talking about cruel and unusual punishment, and ended up equating that to unjust punishment.  With that in mind, it’s no longer obvious that justice — whatever it is — can’t be cruel.

When we bring up “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”, we tend to focus on the dismemberment implied by the axiom: if someone cuts off your hand, you’re justified in cutting off s/h/its hand.  The part that we miss is — in modern legal terms, at least — more metaphorical: it states that punishment should be proportional to the crime.  If you steal my iPod, I’m not justified in burning you alive; at most, I can insist that someone steals (er… confiscates) your iPod.  Maybe a judge is justified (there’s that root again) in demanding that you return my iPod and buy me another one — inflicting upon you the same net loss that you inflicted upon me.  This is a very personal sort of justice (if that is indeed what it is): what you’ve done to me, I can do to you.

This gets harder to implement with more abstract crimes.  If you get convicted of selling pot, how does the judge quantify the harm you’ve supposedly caused?  Does s/h/it insist that other people sell you as much pot as you’ve sold others?  If you sell pot to a chemo patient (who uses it to suppress nausea and maintain a healthy appetite) and to a self-absorbed teenager (who uses it to hide from reality and inadvertently wreck s/h/its career), do the two outcomes cancel each other out?

In trying to rectify this situation, we’ve come up with a system in which we try to map concrete, real-world harm onto a much more abstract system of prison, jail, parole, fines, and damages, spanning both criminal and civil courts.  The O.J. Simpson trial is destined to become the archetypical example of this upgefuckery, where Simpson was found not-guilty but nonetheless, somehow, liable.

Now — riffing off the Feministe post — we’re not even really talking about “justice” any more — we’re talking about a “justice system” (excess scare-quotes elided).  And from a legislative perspective, that’s where the rubber hits the road.

What we’re trying to do with our justice system remains somewhat obscure.  I can think of five things off the top of my head that the justice system is trying — or supposed to be trying — to accomplish:

1. Punish wrongdoers.  You fuck with us, we’ll fuck with you back.
2. Deter prospective criminals.  This is distinct from 1. in that the punishments inflicted are no longer directed at those who’ve done, they’re directed at those who might do.
3. Warehouse criminals.  We might not want to hurt you for the sake of vengeance, but we don’t want you walking free around our nice little society any more.
4. Rehabilitate.  The idea is not to punish or sequester criminals, nor to deter others from committing crimes, but to turn criminals into people who won’t commit crimes.
5. Satisfy the rest of society.  If justice — whatever it is — is indeed an emotional compulsion, then maybe the justice system we have is simply geared towards giving emotional satisfaction to the victim (and the rest of “civilized” society).  No-one’s likely to tell you that they support the death penalty (for example) because it makes them feel good; they’ll probably start by talking about deterrence or punishment.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably guessed that my answer lands firmly upon “5.”.  I’m not convinced that I’m just being cynical** about the whole thing, either; there’s reason to believe that everything from 1. through 4. works — kind of, a little, sometimes, but not always.  We’re constantly barraged with news about heinous and outlandish crimes (see for example “O.J. Simpson”, above), but not necessarily because crime’s increasing — more because media coverage is increasing, and reporting new and ever more execrable violations of human dignity is good business for the newsies.  Maybe a “justice system” that’s geared toward satisfying people’s emotional senses of justice really does do the most good, in aggregate, for the most people.

But of course such a justice system would abrogate the rights of the individual, and take with it the underpinnings of any reasonable moral code.  At this point, when we dispense with the icky details of the perpetrator and the victim and restrict ourselves to more comfortable abstract notions, we’ve built a system where actual harm — chemical burns, for example — is subordinated to the intellectual and emotional comfort of larger society.  Justice — as it applies to the individuals involved and the harm derived from their actions — becomes less of a concern than the perception of justice by the uninvolved, and becomes more and more… well, unjustifiably coercive.

In my opinion — worth what you paid for it — Ms. Bahrani had every right to kill her attacker in self-defence when he assaulted her in 2004.  But now?  I don’t know.  (I don’t have an answer, but I surely do respect the question.)

My opinion — and yours, and most everyone else’s — doesn’t matter nearly as much as we’d like to think.

——

* I find it absurd that pot’s illegal while alcohol and tobacco aren’t, but as of yet no-one’s asked me to vet Canada’s drug laws

** I am, mostly

At a certain point, irony stops being amusing

…and starts putting my dick in a knot.

I showed you that, so I could show you this:

• ‘Che’ relevant to American politics (Politico.com)

Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.  He’s photogenic in two colours and the right lighting (then again, so’s everyone else).  He’s an icon of rebellion to zillions of iconoclastic undergrads who want to show off their disgust with the status quo by the simple expedient of buying sweatshop tee-shirts from the local Hot Topic.  (I never got into Che-worship even as a high-school vest-pocket Marxist, but I think that can be credited to my father.  He’s a Russian Lit scholar with a finely-honed appreciation of  that nation’s history who was not-quite-quietly horrified by my juvenile attempts to one-up his leftism.  Thanks, Dad.)

Che was also a sadistic torturer, a brutal statist murderer, and an inveterate racist.  I write “was” in this paragraph, because the human being Che is dead.  I wrote “is” in the previous paragraph because the brand of Che is still very much alive and selling shit.  That’s the irony, see?  Isn’t it ironic?  Don’t you think?

Gah.  Sorry ’bout that.

The galling thing about this particular irony is that everyone involved — with the possible exception of the Filipino children silk-screening the tee-shirts — seems entirely sincere about the whole thing.  From the article above, we find this magnificent excrecence from Hollywood director Steven Soderbergh:

We’re certainly seeing the result of what happens when you make profit the point of everything, where money that’s being earned doesn’t represent any particular product or labor on anybody’s part. That can’t sustain, because it’s magical thinking. It can’t go on indefinitely, because eventually it crashes.

This is where the irony stops being amusing: when a Hollywood fucking director starts lecturing me about the evils of the profit motive. Why do you suspect you got the money to make your paean to Mr. Tee-shirt, Mr. Soderbergh?  One of those grasping capitalists who pays your contracts figured that a shit-ton of disaffected middle-class snowflakes would shell out big bucks for a chance to watch a four-hour commercial about their version of the Nike Swoosh.

For more reaction to Soderbergh’s opinions:

• Soderbergh on Che Guevara’s continuing relevance (Reason Hit and Run)

For more on Che himself:

• Killer Chic (Reason.TV)

It’s not the cars

I must confess to being a bit of a Chevy fanboy.

Well, mostly I’m a Corvette fanboy.  I think I saw a Corvette C3 when I was seven or eight and decided, then and there: that’s what sports cars are supposed to look like.

Fast-forward twenty years, and I’m watching ALMS.  When I’m not drooling over the RS Spyders, I’m drooling over the C6.R GT1s, because, again, that’s what sports cars are supposed to look like.

In all the kerfuffle about the auto industry buyout* I keep hearing the same line, over and over:

The Big 3 just don’t know how to make cars anyone wants to buy.

Bullshit.  Those two ‘vettes are heaping piles of sexy.  I want one.

It’s not just me, and it’s not just Corvettes, either.  Megan McArdle dug up the top-selling cars in the US last January — you remember that, when oil prices were skyrocketing and Detroit’s lack of credible hybrids was killing them?

1. Toyota Camry: 31,601
2. Honda Accord: 23,957
3. Nissan Altima: 21,635
4. Honda Civic: 20,993
5. Toyota Corolla: 20,736
6. Chevrolet Impala: 17,544
7. Chevrolet Cobalt: 17,310
8. Chevrolet Malibu: 14,105
9. Pontiac G6: 13,942
10. Ford Focus: 11,600

See?  Completely dominated by hybrids — in the fevered imaginations of dipshit pundits**. Out here in the real world, Sparky, things look a bit different.  Sure, the top five cars are Japanese — but the next five cars are American.  Going by these stats alone, Mitsubishi and BMW should be begging for a bailout, not General Motors.

It’s not just the US, either.  McArdle again:

• Why can’t American firms make small cars?

In other words, four of the top ten cars in Europe last year were small cars made by an American company (Opel is GM’s European marque).

Maybe there’s something else going on.

• Mismanagement at the Big Three (Mises blog)

It was a dead heat. General Motors sold 9.37 million vehicles worldwide in 2007 and lost $38.7 billion. Toyota sold 9.37 million vehicles in 2007 and made $17.1 billion.

That was the second best sales total in GM’s 100-year history and the biggest loss ever for any automaker in the world.

So.  Toyota, that shining paragon of automobility (or that slant-eyed devil import brand, if you prefer), with its far-sighted hybrids and vaunted reliability and resale figures, barely managed to break even in vehicle sales with the decrepit stumbling giant of the Rust Belt, crippled by delusional management and out-of-touch designers… General Motors.  But GM’s losses nudged into the territory normally associated with national governments, while Toyota made a handsome profit.  Why, oh why, might that be?

Ralph Reiland, in the article I just cited, singles out the UAW first and foremost.

More specifically, the hourly compensation cost for labor, including benefits and retirees’ costs, at the Big Three is $73 per hour, compared with $44 per hour at a Toyota factory with American workers in the U.S.

Further, it takes fewer hours of labor to produce a car in Toyota’s U.S. plants than at the plants of Detroit’s automakers.

[...]

Under UAW contracts, additionally, laid off workers are transferred to a jobs bank and receive 95 percent of their full pay and benefits to not work. This year, the cost to the Big Three will be an estimated $478 million, about $70 million less than Honda spent to build a brand new factory in Indiana.

(There’s a lively debate in the comments, with plenty of numbers being slung around and almost immediately denounced as false.  Now, everyone’s an expert on the internet, but I’d have hoped that a writer for Mises blog would cite his sources.)

Whether it’s all the unions’ fault or something else entirely, it seems pretty clear that the problem isn’t sales.  It isn’t even revenue: the Big Three are making plenty of money.  The problem is that they’re spending far, far more.  The Big Three are wealth destruction machines on a scale normally reserved for government bureaucracy.

But of course that’s not what the pending auto bailout wants to address.  They’re more interested in boosting advertising:

• Just when you thought the auto bailout couldn’t get any worse (Below the Beltway)

The draft rescue plan for Detroit sent to the White House by Congress yesterday calls for the appointment of a “car czar” who will oversee the Big Three automakers’ expenses over $25 million — which, by extension, would include media buys. Based on Advertising Age’s estimates of spending by General Motors Corp., Chrysler and Ford Motor Co., that would give the as-yet-unnamed car czar control over some $7.3 billion in marketing spending in the U.S. alone.

and developing “Earth-friendly” cars that either already exist or that don’t have a market:

• Bridge loan to nowhere (Wall Street Journal)

All three restructuring plans are heavy on promises to build the “green” cars that a Democratic Congress wants built. GM promises 15 hybrid models by 2012 and 37 miles per gallon on average for its cars. Chrysler commits to putting flex-fuel engines, which can run on ethanol or gasoline, in half of its cars. Ford promises to save 16 billion gallons of gas by using “advanced technology” and to invest $14 billion to improve fuel efficiency.

[...]One Congresswoman wanted to know why they couldn’t hit a 50-mpg fuel-economy target by 2015. Another asked whether, maybe, they weren’t selling enough cars because everyone in America was waiting with baited breath for the coming revolution in fuel economy.

[...]

Yet amid all the hopeful talk about the brave, new green car world, the men from Detroit were studiously silent on whether they can sell these new cars at a profit any better than they can their current lineup.

(This is as good a time as any to remind you that one reason we don’t already have those small, low-emission, fuel-efficient cars is none other than the fucking government. The Clean Air Act, for example, prohibits the sale of “Partial Zero-Emissions Vehicles” in all but eight states:

• It’s the evil awful car companies again

And California, that bastion of automotive environmentalism, only recently rescinded a four-year ban on the same sort of low-emission fuel-efficient diesels that Europeans have been buying for years now:

• Diesel delusions diminishing?  Doubtful

So as far as I can tell, the Big Three are being castigated in part for toeing the government line.  Surprise, surprise.)

I have a feeling that this is just going to keep getting worse.

——

* I’m writing “buyout” rather than “bailout” because, judging by the terms with which we’ve been presented, it’s closer to full-blown nationalization than to the finanicial bailout.

** I was just as wrong as they were, in this post among others.  Here’s what I said about 2003:

The housing bubble market was in full swing, taxes were low, and the Big Three seemed to be doing fine despite the fact that no-one really wanted to buy their cars.

This is what happens when you post stuff to the internet based on “common sense” rather than doing your research.