Brave New World

All,

As of tomorrow morning, all traffic to lefarkins.blogspot.com will be jumped to the new home of Lawyers, Guns and Money, www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com. Your RSS subscription shouldn't be affected, although if you're a "Follower" on Blogger you might have to manually subscribe to the new feed. We've worked very hard (which is to say that our guy, Jason Wilson, has worked very hard) to smooth out the transition process, but there still might be some hiccups.

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This is excellent news!! For Palin!!

For whatever reason, Google Reader’s “Explore” option recently started lumping all political sites together irrespective of orientation, which means that even time I try to find new, interesting voices, I’m bombarded with new, interesting-for-the-wrong-reason-but-potential-blog-fodder voices. For example:

We believe the TV show [Sarah Palin]’s producing with Mark Burnett on the wonders of Alaska will be Reaganesque in its reach of regular people.

For something written by “such good writers,” that sentence is uglier than it is stupid. The majority of Americans won’t appreciate a show about “the wonders of Alaska” for the simple reason that Americans only watch things about Alaska when its bears eat tourists. Don’t believe me? Consider Christopher Nolan’s career:

Batman Begins: $205,343,774
Insomnia: $67,263,182
The Dark Knight: $533,316,061

When his films take place in Alaska, their domestic gross drops, on average, very large numbers because Americans don’t believe that states whose moose-caribou population density (1.11/sq. mi.) outstrips its population density (1.03/sq. mi.) count as America. The idea that a successful Palin campaign could be initiated by a show about 700,000 moose and caribou picked to live in a state and have their lives taped to find out what happens when they stop being polite and start getting real—there’s wishful thinking, then there’s whatever that is. This too:

If [the show is] informative, well-produced, and showcases Palin’s Alaska, we believe it will become a cultural phenomenon. We foresee Alaskan imagery everywhere in 2011. Which is a wonderful setup for the Palin brand in 2012. Late 2010-early 2011 is also when Palin’s next book is due: a policy book on American Virtues. That will be coupled with a book tour that should end round about February 6th, 2011, the day we believe Palin will announce her presidential run. Essentially, the tour bus she uses for the book [American Virtues] will just be slightly rebranding as PALIN 2012, instead of American Virtues. Chances are, “American Virtues” will actually be her campaign motto. We can see the branding and marketing already at work.

These people should not be mocked for claiming 1) that Palin will write a book by her lonesome, 2) that it will be policy-oriented, or 3) that people can write policy books about virtues: they should be pitied for the wistful tones in which they imagine the subtle repurposing of a tour bus in terms of branding, because people who daydream in ad lingo about campaign slogans are the saddest people in the world. Then there’s the fact that, on principle, dreamers this dumb deserve pity:

Palin’s playing 11th dimensional chess that RedState’s not seeing, because it’s so focused on Romney, or dazzled by his Mattel-produced hair. She’s operating a fully-formed multimedia strategy designed to counter Dr. Utopia’s razzle dazzle and media darling status.

Follow that RedState link and you’ll find a discussion of a post at the Daily Caller that warms my heart:

[I]t is very important to point out that something like this may already be Palin’s plan (for the record, I have shared almost all of these thoughts with her via her personal e-mail but have received no response). So far, I have not seen one shred of legitimate evidence indicating that she has decided to run and some serious indications that she won’t.

Wait—Palin decide to ignore this asshole? Excellent. Anyone with any sense would distance herself from people like him, wait—did I just suggest that Sarah Palin is a person with sense? Maybe she is playing 11th dimensional chess.

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I Blame Capra

For whatever reason, the filibuster has a romantic appeal to people who should know better, and you often hear from those who dislike the current rules that changing the rules to require "real" filibusters would have some sort of salutary effect. My position continues to be that the effects of such a rule change are probably overstated, but more importantly that since the practice serves no legitimate purpose the best way to reform the filibuster is to eliminate it.

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Upcoming Web Seminar on Civilians and Air Warfare

I'll post my thoughts on it sometime afterward, but if any readers are interested in issues pertaining to war law and air power, you can register and listen in on a seminar at Harvard's Humanitarian Law and Policy Forum next week. HLPF does these seminars from time to time: the topic this time is "Protecting Civilians in the New Battlespace: Challenges of Regulating Air Warfare."

I've pasted the announcement below; you can register here.

This live seminar will examine legal and policy responses to the challenges of civilian protection in situations of armed conflict, specifically in the context of air warfare. Against the backdrop of the recent release of the HPCR Manual on International Law Applicable to Air and Missile Warfare, the seminar will address the following questions:

What are the primary features, definitions and principles contained in the Manual? How do these relate to the larger framework of international humanitarian law, or the law of armed conflict?
What is the relevance for the military of the provisions of the Manual, which are a restatement of existing law applicable to air and missile warfare?
How might the Manual contribute to enhanced protection of civilians during conflict?

Panelists and participants will examine these questions by reference to the HPCR Manual and to specific situations of air warfare.

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Queen City Subway

Wow.

Did you even know Cincinnati had a subway? If the answer is "no," that's quite understandable. The subway never had a single train run through it and never served a single passenger. Planning for the subway began in 1914, with 6 million dollars in bonds being raised initially. The plan was to design a 16 mile loop running through downtown Cincinnati and around its urban core, while connecting it with the suburbs of St. Bernard and Norwood. The idea to construct the subway came from the Miami-Eerie canal. The canal winding through downtown that had once been the main means of travel and shipping for many, was now a stagnant cesspool of standing water and becoming a health hazard. The decision was made to drain the canal, build the subway in it's place, bury the subway and construct a grand street on top of it which is known today as "Central Parkway." Construction of the first phase began in 1920...

The subway exists today as a utility tunnel and a subterranean monument to a forgotten piece of infrastructure that would have changed the landscape of the city from what we know it as today. Two miles of tunnels still exist today beneath Central Parkway, as well as one other short section of tunnels crossing beneath Hopple St. The portals of the Central Parkway tunnels can be seen while drive southbound on I-75 towards downtown, just after passing the Hopple St. exit. I remember passing the portals as a kid, in the car with my dad on our way to a Reds game. He explained to me what they were and my subway curiosity was born. For my birthday one year he purchased a fantastic book called "Cincinnati Subway" by Allen J. Singer.

See also.

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Frakkin' Awkward

Who says you can't empirically observe the effect of BSG on actual politics? Former Congressman Eric Massa to a male aide:

"What I really ought to be doing is fracking you."

See? See? (Only the series does not appear to have influenced political perceptions of how to spell "frak.")

The Congressman (D-NY) resigned Monday due to a "cancer resurgence scare." Dana Milbank at WAPO has more about his train-wreck of an interview on Glenn Beck last night:

Conservatives had hopes that the now-former Democratic congressman from Upstate New York, who resigned abruptly under an ethics cloud, would deliver the goods about corruption and strong-arm tactics in the Obama White House and Congress. But instead, Massa served up an icky new confession.

"Now they're saying I groped a male staffer," he volunteered. "Yeah, I did. Not only did I grope him, I tickled him until he couldn't breathe and then four guys jumped on top of me. It was my 50th birthday."

Beck looked aghast. "Was your wife at that one?" the Fox News Channel host asked.

"No, this was in a townhouse; we all lived together, all the bachelors and me," Massa explained. "My chief of staff had a conniption and said, 'You can't live there, that's not congressional.' "

Beck tried to move the conversation in a different direction, but his guest resisted. "Let me show you something," Massa proposed, proffering a book with photos of bawdy Navy rituals from the days when he was a sailor.

"You're going to show me tickle fights?" Beck inquired.

"I'm going to show you a lot more than tickle fights," Massa promised. Beck put on his reading glasses, then judged that the images should not be shown on television.

The right's romance of Eric Massa was off to a messy start."

Frak yeah.

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Health Care Reform IS Cost Control

Dear Dr. Sapolsky,

Please view this link. The data concern public funding of health care in terms of direct government expenditure. You will note that the United States ranks third in public expenditure for health care, behind Germany and Iceland and ahead of France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and a host of other European countries. Given this, I would advise you to reconsider this claim:

The defense spending squeeze is on and will become more constricted by health care reform. It is not apples and oranges. About half of the United States’ health care costs appear on the federal government’s budget, which directly affects revenues and expenditures. European nations plead poverty when it comes to funding their militaries in large part because of the squeeze of social spending (including health care). They spend a smaller, though rising, share of their GDPs on health than does the United States, but more of that spending is direct government expenditure.

Since your premise (that European states pay higher direct public expenditure health care costs than the US) is evidently incorrect, I'm wondering whether you'd be interested in revising your conclusions regarding the "squeeze" that health care costs are putting on European defense budgets. I would also invite you to consider whether the extraordinary level of private expenditure on health care in the United States might conceivably, through some heretofore unimagined mechanism, be redirected towards defense spending, assuming that the good people of the United States viewed such redirection as desirable. I would further invite you to make some fun, back of the envelope calculations about the kinds of weapons the Pentagon could buy if we adopted, say, the NHS wholesale. Finally, I would suggest you and others concerned with the impact of health care costs on the defense budget would acknowledge the fact that we have solid, comparative data indicating that the United States has the most staggeringly inefficient mechanism for the delivery of health care in the world, and that perhaps our best efforts ought to be directed at investigating the implications of this data rather than assembling such phrases as:

Health care cost control is an illusion. No one truly can make the health care system efficient. For many illnesses, nobody knows what works and what doesn’t. An aging population assures more medical expenditures.

Yours truly,

Robert M. Farley

Via AG.

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Flu and Herd Immunity

If you're the sort of person who, like me, gets torqued about public health issues, there's a important study out in JAMA today (.pdf here) about the population benefits of the seasonal flu vaccine; the upshot is that by vaccinating a little over 80 percent of kids between 3-15 years of age, researchers were able to observe a roughly 60 percent effectiveness at reducing influenza rates throughout the study population. The results themselves aren't especially surprising -- they affirm what everyone already suspected about seasonal flu vaccines and herd immunity, and they serve as a reminder that even a sub-optimal jab is quite effective at muting the spread an unpleasant illness that kills tens of thousands a year in the US alone -- but the design of the study is really fascinating, as researchers were able to work with about fifty self-enclosed Hutterite colonies in central and western Canada, providing exactly the sort of controlled conditions that are usually beyond the reach of folks doing research on influenza vaccine efficacy. (It's also interesting to note that the study utilized the killed virus vaccine, which usually proves less efficacious in flu studies than the weakened virus.)

I'd like to believe that the results of this study will embarrass the vaccine contrarians into prolonged silence, but I won't be holding my breath. Since vaccination rates fall well short of the 80 percent threshold in the US, the market for uninformed skepticism won't soon be disappearing. I'd also like to believe that studies like this would receive enough publicity to nudge parents away from Robert Sears' nonsensical "alternative vaccination" schedule, which urges us (among other things) to avoid giving our kids seasonal flu shots until they're five years old. Aside from demonstrating yet again that seasonal flu vaccines are perfectly safe for healthy children, the study offers the best evidence to date that flu vaccination is a socially responsible practice that benefits populations -- especially the elderly -- who tend not to respond vigorously to the serum. But as long as we can round up some asshole to claim that baking soda cures H1N1, there's little risk that sensible ideas will prevail.

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Cult of Toughness, Part XXVII

Attackerman:

Rove says that getting rid of Rumsfeld — which, of course, the Bush administration ultimately did — would’ve “damaged the military’s faith in Bush as commander in chief.” Actually, you know what really did damage the military’s faith in Bush as commander in chief? Retaining Donald Rumsfeld in the face of failure after failure after failure.

There's something really interesting to this; the uniformed military loathed Rumsfeld with wild abandon, a point which was certainly not lost on Rumsfeld (he cultivated and enjoyed their hate) or Rove. I suspect that the issue here wasn't so much "the military will lose faith if we dump Rummy," but rather "the military will interpret the dumping of Rummy as a sign of weakness." This makes sense in context of the Bush/neocon vision of the world, in which the enemy (whether terrorist, Communist, or Democrat) only understands strength; I'm just mildly surprised that the Bush administration apparently viewed the uniformed military of the United States as an enemy to be intimidated.

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Contrarian Pundits Are Not An Electoral Coalition

Via Ailes, Mikey Kaus explains the rationale for his right-wing vanity campaign:

“I believe in affirmative government and spending gobs of money,” he said. But, “I want to let people know that there are people that disagree with the party orthodoxy” on unions and amnesty-first immigration reform.

He already has a platform for his outspoken views, kausfiles.com, with a sizeable audience. So why make a seemingly quixotic Senate run?

He says he can reach people that he didn’t with his blog. And, “the time is right.”

Public disapproval of unions is at an all-time high, he notes.

“People really hate the GM bailout.” Kaus supported saving GM and Chrysler but said, “The UAW got us into this mess, so I think they should have taken a pay cut and made more concessions.”

[...]

You don’t have to be a wild-eyed libertarian to realize something is very wrong with that. But, as Kaus points out, “You can’t find a Democrat politician criticizing the teachers unions.”

That silence is hurting the liberal cause. “Unions are what make affirmative government unpalatable,” he said.

The standard objections to Kaus's everything-is-a-nail approach to seeing labor as the root problem of everything apply; that one union has negotiated an excessively cumbersome doesn't mean that labor negotiations are bad, there's little reason to believe that labor protections are a major factor in poor school performance, and blaming the UAW rather than management for the problems with American auto manufacturers is implausible in the extreme. (I note, for example, that the justifiably well-regarded Malibu, CTS, and Silverado are all UAW-made, while the pieceashit Aveo is not; it's almost enough to make me think we're not looking at the key variable here.)

But what really kills me is the idea that unions are standing in the way of the expansive welfare state Kaus pretends to want. The truth is something like the reverse -- without labor, progressive politics as an electoral force is in a hopeless position. How, exactly, does Kaus propose replacing the organizational and GOTV support that labor provides? It's almost enough to make me think he doesn't care about progressive policy outcomes at all...

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Inept Troll Of The Day

Stanley Fish. Generally, it's good to wait until there's some evidence you're right before you do an "I told you so" column in defense of a stupid thesis, but...

I guess I have to link to this again.

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Yay! The Foreigners Have Been Chased Away!

The military procurement field has been made safe for Boeing:

European defense and aerospace consortium EADS and its U.S. partner, Northrop Grumman, have handed an apparent $35 billion dollar gift to rival Boeing — by packing up and going home.

In late February, the Air Force launched a contest to replace its fleet of Eisenhower-era KC-135 aerial refueling tankers. The Air Force envisioned spending $11.7 billion on the new planes over the next five years; over the life of the program, the service plans to buy a total of 179 aircraft, orders worth a potential $35 billion.

But Northrop and EADS complained that the guidelines weighed the contest in Boeing’s favor, and threatened to pull out of the contest unless the service revised the request for bids. And that’s exactly what happened today.

God bless America. I, for one, can rest safer knowing that Boeing will face no competition in its ongoing effort to purchase the entire US Congress.

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