I typically think of myself as an average guy with some nerdlike tendancies. Sometimes, however, I am faced with evidence that I may be more than a standard deviation from average in this respect.
Tonight, for example: like many other flight school students, I spent some time studying 5 and 9. Also, I had a two hour phone conversation about math, and then spent much time reading the python 2.6 changelog in anticipation of the 3.0 release.
Everybody does that. Right?
A Russian 2LT produced a rap video, set to the tune of Eminem’s “Stan,” in which he writes to the minister of defense complaining about awful conditions in his barracks. The BBC has a fragment of the video. If anyone is up in Russian enough to browse RuTube, I’d love to link to the full thing; I’d like even more to post a translation.
For his initiative, this soldier got re-based to Ussuriysk, 4000 miles from his previous post.
The House of Representatives voted down the proposed bailout today. This I approve! There was substantial opposition to the bill among just about everybody I know, and it’s good to see politicians obeying the will of the people every once in a while.
I can’t rule out the possibility that a bailout of some kind is necessary. I am not an economist; I am not up on the macroeconomic knowledge I’d need to have an opinion on the issue worthy of stating. My opposition to the bill had a lot more to do with the sense that politicians were trying to pull a fast one, and the fact that money allocated cannot be unspent, than any rational economic theory that it is better to let the market weather through it on its own.
The problem is that I don’t know any economists personally. I haven’t read any articles by economists for or against the bailout plan. I’ve heard a whole lot from politicians, who can’t be trusted to give an objective reading of the situation, and a lot from news organizations and bloggers commenting on what the politicians have to say.
A declining market hurts my net worth. The fact of the matter is that I’ve got ten times as much money in the stock market as in day-to-day bank accounts, and I’ve got the automatic transactions set up to channel a fraction of every month’s income into the market for retirement. The thing is, I can afford to wait this out. I don’t have much debt right now, and I’ve got no incentive to seek any in the short term. If it takes a decade or two for everything to recover, I’ll be annoyed at the enforced delay in recovering those assets, but it won’t affect my standard of living.
I’d love to see a well-reasoned, lucid explanation by a qualified economist showing how a bailout would help me. If such a thing were produced, I could see myself being persuaded that a bailout is the right course of action for the government. I suspect that this is true of a lot of people.
However, the absense of any such thing implies that it does not exist because qualified economists don’t believe the bailout will help the average American. Alternately, they do believe that it would, but they won’t waste the time writing a position paper on legislation that’s being pushed through an extreme fast track. They’re talking about writing and voting on an alternate bailout plan as soon as this Thursday. Without time to read and think through proposed legislation, how can it help but become a political process?
The problem with processes which are inherently political is that they are bad at predicting the worth of any given piece of proposed legislation. To get a realistic assessment, you need to go to subject matter experts. Nobody else’s opinion is worth much of anything.
In this case, I’m waiting to hear back from the economists.
Sometime in the late nineties I came across an article wondering what phrase we would use to refer to the upcoming decade. Everyone was familiar with the nineties, eighties, and so forth, but the trend didn’t easily work for years whose second to last digit is zero. Historical precedent suggested that we call these years the oughties, but that sounded stupid. Double-oughts, zeroies, and related monstrosities are all at least as bad.
At the time, I chuckled a little at the article and moved on. I figured a few years into it, a common consensus would have emerged and I’d eventually forget that there was ever confusion.
I would have been startled at what actually happened: with just over a year left in the decade, we still haven’t named it. This is intentional. If we ignore it long enough, it will eventually go away and everyone will busily pretend that it never happened. We’ll all go around acting like it was the nineties just a minute ago, we always took our shoes off at airport security, and there was only ever one Bush president. After all, if we believe hard enough that reality is nothing more than a shared belief consensus untroubled by hard facts, it’ll come true!
I have to admit, I was more impressed with McCain than I had expected to be. He definitely has a clear vision of what he believes is best for the nation. It seems hard to argue that if he is elected, he would continue the same type of aggressively stupid leadership that Bush pioneered.
Luckily, Obama didn’t try to make that argument. Instead, he showed that there was a better way. McCain had one point of argument: that he had the experience to make correct judgement calls. Obama doesn’t have as much experience, and he doesn’t pretend to. What he does have are well thought out, articulate plans. Instead of relying on the judgement of experience to guide him from crisis to crisis, he intends to anticipate the crises and head them off before they grow.
One of the telling moments in the debate was when the moderator asked exactly what the candidates would give up to pay for some sort of economic bailout. Obama listed his priorities: he will not give up on energy independence, healthcare, and education. He would like to invest in infrastructure if there are sufficient remaining funds. Everything else, by implication, could be cut as necessary to balance the budget. McCain, by contrast, had a half-baked proposal to cut federal funding for everything except military and veterans’ spending for one year. Cutting infrastructure maintenance, education, medicare–it’s hard to believe McCain actually thinks that this is a viable proposal. It’s a stunt, designed to sound good so long as you don’t think about it. There have been plenty of those recently from his campaign.
On the foreign policy side of things, McCain believes that victory in Iraq is the key to the GWOT, and he will pursue it at any price. Obama, on the other hand, believes in seeking the first causes: Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, and other terrorist organizations.
In short, Obama won this debate. McCain presented himself and his points well, but his positions just can’t hold up to reality. His speeches didn’t stand up to scrutiny, and he showed himself to be willing to make absurd proposals so long as they sound good. Obama was calm, articulate, and ready to lead. He stuck to the truth, and was willing to admit when his opponent had a good point. This is the man we need to elect.
The road in front of Fort Rucker’s Enterprise gate performs an S curve down a fairly steep hill. The average speed for drivers at the top of the hill is around 65 mph; everyone knows that at the bottom of the hill, their speed will be zero to have their IDs checked at the gate. Depending on how much traffic into the base there is at the moment, the line of cars queued up can be a few hundred meters long. The shape of the road prevents people from seeing how long the line is until they are nearly upon it.
Braking late raises the risk of becoming unable to brake hard enough to avoid rearending someone. Braking early ensures that more aggressive drivers will maneuver around you and get ahead in line. It’s interesting watching people choose when to begin their deceleration and inferring truths about their personality.
I tend toward a cautious aggression: I begin braking, softly, at a point which ensures that even if the queue extends as far as I have ever seen it, I will not cause an accident. Speed, in this context, becomes a resource that I hoard until forced to dispose of it by traffic. It’s an essentially centrist approach, pleasing to neither passengers who demand defensive driving nor to ones who want to spend as little time on the commute as possible. However, I usually end up with a pretty good position in line without ever facing moments of real risk.
I’m curious to see in the debates tonight how close the candidates come to a centrist, presumably populist approach, and how far out they go to appease the extremophiles among their supporters. Their problem is analogous to the braking problem: how close to the center can they come without angering their hardline supporters at the edges?
Definition of Posse Comitatus:
The Act prohibits most members of the federal uniformed services from exercising nominally state law enforcement police or peace officer powers that maintain “law and order” on non-federal property.
However, the Army Times reports:
The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.
Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.
It’s no secret that the Army’s experiences in Iraq, Somalia, and other low-intensity conflicts have brought new focus to peacekeeping operations. They’ve even got their own Official Military Phrasing: Stability and Support Operations.
From the Army Times:
The 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.
…
This new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.
From the globalsecurity definitions:
Support Operations provide essential supplies and services to assist designated groups. It relieves suffering and helps civil authorities respond to crises. In most cases, Army forces achieve success by overcoming conditions created by man-made or natural disasters.
That’s all right, then; that seems to be the intent of the posting. There’s nothing wrong with using troops to aid in disaster relief, and if the military was overflowing with troops with nothing to do in light of our long history of peaceful foreign policy, there’d be no real problem with designating a unit to that express purpose.
However, it is important to remember that Support operations are extremely closely associated in the military mind with Stability operations:
Stability Operations apply military power to influence the political and civil environment, to facilitate diplomacy, and to interrupt specified illegal activities.
Given troops trained in SASO operations, stationed in the US, I do not trust President Bush not to abuse their capabilities and attempt use them to influence the political and civil environment. Posse Comitatus exists precisely to prevent this sort of use within the US. Now, it has been substantially weakened.
I will close with this section from the wiki:
HR5122 also known as the John Warner Defense Authorization Act was signed by the president on Oct 17, 2006 John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007. Section 1076 (Text of Hr5122) is titled “Use of the Armed Forces in major public emergencies”.
Removing the legalese from the text, and combining multiple sentences, it provides that: The President may employ the armed forces to restore public order in any State of the United States the President determines hinders the execution of laws or deprives people of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law or opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws. The actual text is on page 322-323 of the legislation.
As of 2008, these changes were repealed, changing the text of the law back to the original 1807 wording, under Public Law 110-181 (H.R. 4986, Section 1068,) however in signing H.R. 4986 into law President Bush attached a signing statement which indicated that the Executive Branch did not feel bound by the changes enacted by the repeal.
President Bush Signs H.R. 4986, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 into LawToday, I have signed into law H.R. 4986, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008. The Act authorizes funding for the defense of the United States and its interests abroad, for military construction, and for national security-related energy programs.
Provisions of the Act, including sections 841, 846, 1079, and 1222, purport to impose requirements that could inhibit the President’s ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as Commander in Chief. The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President.
GEORGE W. BUSH
THE WHITE HOUSE,
January 28, 2008.
7e11 dollars. When the most convenient notation for a figure is the scientific, you’re talking about either a whole lot or a tiny amount. The exponent here is positive, so we know that it’s a ton, but trying to imagine that sum in terms of money just boggles the mind. It is too much money to properly understand.
The bill is in plaintext. It’s maybe a page long. It’s got some interesting parts to it. Try section 8.
Presumably the plan isn’t to just take the money and burn it all in the form of $1 bills, warming all of North America, preventing people from needing to spend any on heating this winter, so that they can spend the money on something more economically stimulating. If it was decided to do exactly that, though, there would be no legal recourse.
Get on the phone with your representative, today. Take the half hour or whatever and call them. A bailout is bad policy in general, and this one is so stupidly implemented it is hard to imagine something worse. We cannot let this just happen to us.
(For a more in-depth argument against this, look here.)
