Sorry folks, been super busy with 3 jobs now that I am working on a new startup, so time for blogging has been severely lacking.

For anyone who has been missing my blogging, I have been actively twittering lately, so follow me on there as @paxdickinson if you so desire.

I am confused. A hypothetical to illustrate:

Person A has not one single ounce of racial animus in his heart. He creates a cartoon that has a monkey in it, not realizing for one second that someone may think that a monkey in a cartoon is a secret code for black people. Not being a racist, the thought doesn’t even cross his mind.

Person B is a stereotypical racist bastard. He comes up with the same cartoon, since it’s based on a recent news incident, but makes an immediate connection between monkeys and black people, because he’s a fucking racist. Knowing he’ll get shit for it, he doesn’t publish the cartoon, but comes up with a different one without any monkeys.

Person A is now declared the new Don Imus. Person B has dodged this bullet.

In other words, not risking being seen as a racist requires constantly keeping in mind the stereotype that black people are often compared to monkeys by racists. If you don’t immediately make a connection between black people and monkeys, because you aren’t a racist, you run the risk of inadvertently printing something that will result in people accusing you of being a racist.

Actual racists don’t run this risk, because they immediately do think of black people when they think of monkeys, which is what we’re all apparently supposed to do so we don’t make a mistake and have people think we’re racist.

And Attorney General Eric Holder thinks we don’t talk about race because we’re “a nation of cowards“? Seems like we’re just sensible.

Thanks to Best of the Web for this analogy.

Does anyone still maintain that these people are not socialists? Barney Frank with today’s giant lurch towards collectivism:

Congress will consider legislation to extend some of the curbs on executive pay that now apply only to those banks receiving federal assistance, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said.

“There’s deeply rooted anger on the part of the average American,” the Massachusetts Democrat said at a Washington news conference today.

He said the compensation restrictions would apply to all financial institutions and might be extended to include all U.S. companies.

Yes, you read that right. He’s talking about a national maximum wage. If you don’t understand why this is a bad thing, I implore you to read Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, now freely available on the web.

Note that if you want to excuse her gaffe as “mis-speaking” you have to be on record as giving George W. Bush the exact same benefit of the doubt, or you are a partisan hypocrite..

This is depressing as hell, but oh so true.

Political analysts frequently consider what it means to be a libertarian. In fact, in 1997, Charles Murray published a short book entitled “What It Means to Be a Libertarian” that does an excellent job of presenting the core principles of libertarian political philosophy. But almost no one ever discusses what it feels like to be a libertarian. How does it actually feel to be someone who holds the principles described in Murray’s book?

I’ll tell you. It feels bad. Being a libertarian means living with a level of frustration that is nearly beyond human endurance. It means being subject to unending scorn and derision despite being inevitably proven correct by events. How does it feel to be a libertarian? Imagine what the internal life of Cassandra must have been and you will have a pretty good idea.

Imagine spending two decades warning that government policy is leading to a major economic collapse, and then, when the collapse comes, watching the world conclude that markets do not work.

Imagine continually explaining that markets function because they have a built in corrective mechanism; that periodic contractions are necessary to weed out unproductive ventures; that continually loosening credit to avoid such corrections just puts off the day of reckoning and inevitably leads to a larger recession; that this is precisely what the government did during the 1920’s that led to the great depression; and then, when the recession hits, seeing it offered as proof of the failure of laissez-faire capitalism.

[Read more →]

A couple of quick links since I don’t have tie to write them up properly:

The scariest graph you will ever see.

Live Free or Drown, a Wired article about seasteading. I’m really into the Seasteading concept, even before I read this article and learned that the Patri Friedman behind the project is the son of David Friedman, noted anarcho-capitalist, and the grandson of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, both of whom are huge personal heroes of mine. I need to write a nice big blog entry about Seasteading, but this article is a nice intro to the subject.

A tax cheat is now head of the IRS.

Timothy F. Geithner was sworn in as secretary of the Treasury on Monday evening, confirmed by a Senate majority that concluded that his experience in government and finance outweighed concerns about recent disclosures of some $34,000 in past tax delinquencies.

Don’t allow this to lead you to believe that you would be treated the same if you committed the same “crime”.* Do as we say, not as we do.

This reminds me of Obama’s admitted past drug use. He admits to smoking weed and snorting coke in his younger days. Presumably he doesn’t think that it would have led to a better outcome for him to have been incarcerated for that behavior, but he’s totally fine with jailing anyone who gets caught doing the exact thing he admits to doing.

Hypocrisy, thy middle name is Hussein.

* Personally, I believe that tax evasion is akin to telling a mugger you only have $20 while hiding the rest of your money in your shoe. It’s a lie, but you’re lying to a thief. Legally it may be a crime, but morally it clearly isn’t.

Saying one thing…

“We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.”

Barack Obama
On US troops in Afghanistan
August 14, 2007

…doing another.

Hours after US missiles killed 22 people in Fata, President Barack Obama convened a meeting of his top national security advisers and endorsed the decision to continue drone strikes into Pakistan…

Although US and Pakistani officials insist that the missiles targeted Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, many civilians were also killed in the attacks, making it harder for the country’s shaky government to win support for its decision to join the US-led war against terror.

Oh wait, I understand. His original complaint wasn’t that we were “air-raiding villages and killing civilians”, it’s that we were “JUST air-raiding villages and killing civilians”. As in, we should be doing other things, as well as continuing the “air-raiding villages and killing civilians”.

My mistake. Probably a lot of people who voted for him thought he meant something different, too.

Iowahawk is a national treasure. This spoof of The Odyssey is an instant classic.

Speak to me, O Muse, of this resourceful man
who strides so boldly upon the golden shrine of Potomac,
Between Ionic plywood columns, to the kleig light altar.
Fair Obamacles, favored of the gods, ascends to Olympus
Amidst lusty tributes and the strumming lyres of Media;
Their mounted skyboxes echo with the singing of his name
While Olbermos and Mattheus in their greasy togas wrassle
For first honor of basking in their hero’s reflected glory.
Who is this man, so bronzed in countenance,
So skilled of TelePrompter, clean and articulate
whose ears like a stately urn’s protrude?
So now, daughter of Zeus, tell us his story.
And just the Cliff Notes if you don’t mind,
We don’t have all day.

Nothing seems more appropriate.

If Branford Marsalis keeps speaking truth like this, he’s gonna need a bodyguard.

When Barack Obama makes his New Year’s resolutions, at the top of his list ought to be the following: “I will not allow America to become New Jersey.”

I missed this during the election, but it’s still funny as hell.

Obama to gay marriage advocates: Go fuck yourselves.

The story of the second-biggest* Ponzi scheme in history keeps getting more and more interesting.

A hedge-fund manager friend called last night to talk about Madoff. He wanted to talk about just how ugly the unraveling of the Madoff saga was likely to get. And if the first name on his lips was (obviously) Madoff, the second was Bayou. Bayou was a fund that blew up and was revealed in 2005 to be a fraud with some $450 million in investor losses. Bayou is memorable for two reasons. One is founder Samuel Israel III’s staged suicide. (He eventually rose from the dead and turned himself in after prosecutors went after the girlfriend who helped him disappear.) The other is a legal precedent set in the Bayou case that should scare the heck out of anyone who once invested with Madoff but who managed to get out safely in the last few years: Any investors who managed to take out profits from a fund like Bayou before the fraud was revealed had to give the money back.

On the face of it, the Bayou ruling (which stories in the Wall Street Journal and Forbes have, to their credit, noted) seems reasonable: If some early investors made outsized gains, doesn’t it make sense for them to pay back the money to those who lost everything? But, as this fund-manager friend pointed out, it has some pretty extreme implications.

The obvious consequence of Bayou is that a country-club friend who’d given his money to Madoff and then gotten suspicious can’t just take his money out and then go to the cops. If he reports his suspicions, he’s likely to be asked to repay any of those 10-percent-a-year “profits” he’d accumulated for a decade. This is bad enough. But there’s more to it here.

Much of the money that Madoff managed came from people who’d written a check not to Madoff directly but to so-called “funds-of-funds”: hedge funds that had raised money from investors. A few of these funds-of-funds, such as Fairfield Sentry and Tremont Group’s Rye Investment, had billions of dollars invested with Madoff and teams of auditors to track it. These companies should have wised up to what was going on much earlier.

Thanks to the Bayou court decisions, however, the moment Madoff was revealed as a fraud, any money that these funds-of-funds would have managed to take back would become gains that have to be given back to be redistributed among all the losers in the Madoff scheme. Now, this sounds bad enough, but … again, there’s more. There’s no time limit on the gains they’d have to give back, so any fund that outed Madoff could be on the hook for any profits it had gained from its Madoff investments for years back. So, as my fund-manager friend puts it, “The question people have to ask is not, ‘Do I have money in a fund that has exposure to Madoff now?’ but, ‘Do I have money in a fund that that has ever invested with Madoff?’ ”

This is like an NFL referee reversing a call at the end of a game for a play in the first half, and going through the rest of the game making changes to the outcomes accordingly. “OK, you guys wouldn’t have gotten possession there at the end of the half, so you lose that touchdown, but you probably would have gotten that 3rd quarter interception anyway, but statistically blah blah blah..” It’s going to be a mess.

* The largest, of course, is ongoing.

Today is the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. The 21st Amendment, repealing the 18th Amendment, was ratified on December 5th, 1933.

I would like to hoist my glass to the fact that, at the time of Prohibition there was near-universal agreement that the Federal government did NOT have the power to ban alcohol nationally without a Constitutional Amendment. These days of course, with the current interpretation of the Commerce Clause in cases like Gonzales v. Raich, the power of the Federal government to “regulate commerce” allows for the criminalization of growing a plant on one’s own property for one’s own personal consumption. Why is that considered “commerce”? Because, the Supreme Court says so.

We’ve come a long way, baby.

Tanzan and Ekido were once traveling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling.

Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection.

“Come on, girl” said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.

Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. “We monks don’t go near females,” he told Tanzan, “especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?”

“I left the girl there,” said Tanzan. “Are you still carrying her?”

—
A collection of Zen Koans.

Obama Attorney General choice Eric Holder calls for “reasonable regulations on how people interact on the internet”.

I’d wouldn’t define “reasonable” as anything more than “none” in that context, but I have the feeling that he feels differently.