The Right Coast

Germs are destinyTom Smith

Pathogenic diseases impose selection pressures on the social behaviour of host populations. In humans(Homo sapiens), many psychological phenomena appear to serve an antipathogen defence function. Onebroad implication is the existence of cross-cultural differences in human cognition and behaviourcontingent upon the relative presence of pathogens in the local ecology. We focus specifically on onefundamental cultural variable: differences in individualistic versus collectivist values. We suggest thatspecific behavioural manifestations of collectivism (e.g. ethnocentrism, conformity) can inhibit thetransmission of pathogens; and so we hypothesize that collectivism (compared with individualism) willmore often characterize cultures in regions that have historically had higher prevalence of pathogens.Drawing on epidemiological data and the findings of worldwide cross-national surveys of individualism/collectivism, our results support this hypothesis: the regional prevalence of pathogens has astrong positive correlation with cultural indicators of collectivism and a strong negative correlation withindividualism. The correlations remain significant even when controlling for potential confoundingvariables. These results help to explain the origin of a paradigmatic cross-cultural difference,and reveal previously undocumented consequences of pathogenic diseases on the variable nature ofhuman societies.

Here.

 Lots of other interesting stuff.

 

Passivity is goodTom Smith

If you're an investor.  For professor types, I recommend the CREF Equity Fund (called something like that) that is based on the Russell 3000 index.  Broad index, low fees, very little BS.

Oil -- it's the future, I tell you, the future!Tom Smith

Via WaPo.

Obama's Last Line of Defense - 2012 Decoded

The new round of national and state surveys this week generally showing President Obama clinging to a tenuous advantage over Republican Mitt Romney reinforce the conclusion that socially liberal, upscale white women may stand as the president's indispensable line of defense in his struggle for reelection.

via decoded.nationaljournal.com

Democrats put John Roberts on trial - The Washington Post

Novelist John Grisham could hardly spin a more provocative fiction: The president and his surrogates mount an aggressive campaign to intimidate the chief justice of the United States, implying ruin and ridicule should he fail to vote in a pivotal case according to the ruling political party’s wishes.

If only it were fiction.

via www.washingtonpost.com

I suspect they're wasting their time. --TS

RealClearMarkets - Bigger Than Facebook

Let's put it this way: if you can build a $100 billion company by using the Internet to replace the college yearbook--imagine what you can do if you use the Internet to replace college.

That's what is just beginning to happen. It all became official when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology appointed as its new president the guy who is responsible for MITx, the school's free online education program.

via www.realclearmarkets.com

Fish; barrel; still funnyTom Smith

The college liberal meme.

Worth repeating.

Do you live in a bubble? Tom Smith

You have probably seen Charles Murray's quiz already; it was a blogothing a few weeks ago.  But I was taken aback by how accurately it nailed me socioeconomically (first generation upper middle class spawn of middle class parents).  Almost makes you think there is something to social science.

App Store - SpokenLayer

SpokenLayer lets you read with your ears. Choose up-to-the-minute articles from an ever expanding catalog including the best of the web. The Associated Press, TechCrunch, The Atlantic, Engadget and more read just for you, anywhere you are. We record. You listen. Repeat as necessary.

via itunes.apple.com

This looks great. Read about it in Technology Review. --TS

Krugman is the spoiled bratTom Smith

Why can't I have a job like this?  This would be where I spout with authority anything I want, irrespective of the evidence, and get taken seriously.  Yes, I have a blog, but I think I get a lot less of the taken seriously part than does Herr Doktor Professor Krugman. His latest is to argue (assert would be more accurate) that it's just not so that "Wall Street" (heaven knows who exactly that is) has increased the productivity of American firms through its machinations -- presumably he is referring to private equity deals of the sort currently being debated and the like.  In support, he cites some macro-evidence (cites is wrong; refers to vaguely more like) that productivity has not really gone up much lately.  

This is just so irritating.  Boatloads, truckloads, industries worth of evidence exist about the effects of leveraged, PE type deals on firms.  Academics have studied the bejesus out of them.  Oh, so for example, here is a recentish (2005) article that pops up as the result of at most 10 seconds of work on Google Scholar. In a prestigious, peer reviewed journal. Looks like a pretty big study suggesting that MBOs make target firms more efficient in the UK. There must be hundreds of articles like this. (Here's an NBER paper that looks good; Steve Kaplan at Chicago.  Imagine how much you could find in whole 15 minutes!) There's room for debate I suppose but I have been persuaded for a while that private equity deals are generally swell things, and why wouldn't they be?  Why wouldn't a free market in the control of assets produce what free markets generally do?  But oh no, for Krugman some very general data points about productivity (!), which is influenced by everything from global trade, to technological change, to the freaking weather, is enough for him to conclude what he already thought, that it can't be true that people who make so much more money than he are actually right and doing good things.  And he has the nerve to call them spoiled brats.  

For my money, one of the more transparently true psychological facts in the world is that Krugman is a resentful, spoiled little troll who can't stand the fact that someone as smart as he knows he is doesn't run the world, who is unwilling to dirty himself with anything like social science when he can just in his own mind plumb the mysteries of political economy at a glance and wants to dispense with all critics with just a wave of his little hand.  The guy is a menace and his only saving grace is that the share of people who take him seriously seems to be in decline.

Michael W. McConnell: The Liberal Legal Meltdown Over ObamaCare - WSJ.com

If liberal supporters of the health-care law were as confident of the merits of their position as they claim to be, they would offer actual legal arguments, based on text, history, structure and precedent, instead of labeling justices with whom they disagree as hypocrites and partisans.

via online.wsj.com

On the way to the internet of thingsTom Smith

This has really got me thinking.

Many Catholic bishops resist a fight with the Obama administration - The Washington Post

But in recent months, a series of events — among them the Vatican’s rebuke of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, encouraged by right-wing U.S. bishops — have angered more progressive Catholics and led to talk among the disgruntled faithful of the need for a “Catholic spring” to challenge the hierarchy’s shift to the right.

Bishop Stephen E. Blaire of Stockton, Calif., broke the silence on his side Tuesday in an interview with Kevin Clarke of the Jesuit magazine America. Blaire expressed concern that some groups “very far to the right” are turning the controversy over the contraception rules into “an anti-Obama campaign.”

via www.washingtonpost.com

The crisis of big scienceTom Smith

Stephen Weinberg writes about it here in the NYRB.  Weinberg won the Nobel Prize in physics and by all accounts is a sort of genius.  I met him in 1977 or so back at Cornell where he impressed me as a very impressive and yet annoying man, only too aware of his august status, and yet with a piquant sense of humor.  Nobody's perfect.  Odd that I found it much easier to meet famous people as an undergraduate than I do now, but that is one of the advantages of youth, at least at a great university.  You get a kind of benefit of the doubt you don't get as an adult.  I also met Hans Bethe, who was all around perfectly charming, in an Old World sort of way.  

But anyway, I'm not all that sympathetic to the moans and groans of physicists who say, we must have more billions of dollars, else we shall not come to understand the deep nature of universe.  Even as to astronomers, though I am enthusiastic about astronomy, I feel the same way.  The problem is in the coercive taxation of people to pay for Big Science.  Sure, it's less of a waste than other things government wastes our money on.  In Libertarian Paradise, I might even donate some money to the Big Science Fund so they could look for bosons.  But honestly, my current budget doesn't allow for a lot of pure research on stuff I don't understand and is unlikely to benefit me.  Yeah, I admit that makes me a limited sort of altruist.

Weinberg is often quoted for having said something like "science is one of the few things that elevates human life from the status of farce to that of tragedy."  Well excuse me while I play the grand piano.  I don't really like being told that my little life and everything I love is just a pile of shit compared to the search for some fundamental particle or other.  And yet, I don't think this attitude by some scientists that what they do is the most important thing in the world is all that uncommon.  And that's fine.  You rather want your artists and scientists to think that way; it makes them passionate and willing to work for peanuts.  But it's another thing to make us pay for their passions.  I don't really want to be taxed to pay for opera, experimental music, street art, and all of that nonsense either, but that's because what's good can raise its own money and what's not we're better off without.  Tom Wolfe got it so right when he refered to the typical publically funded sculpture in a public space as "the turd on the plaza." But physics -- yes, it's beautiful but why not ask Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg (in Mark's case, might be wise to ask him sooner rather than later) to chip in a few billion instead of dinging every man and woman who is wondering how the hell they're going to pay to send Junior to MIT or even Podunk Community? And I really am unimpressed by any talk of, oh, you know in Europe they're only too happy to pay for these things.  Call me back when we know for sure they're not going dissolve in some nightmare of insolvency and collapsing social order.  When I think about it, a Page and Brin Institute of Science would probably get a lot more for each research dollar, even measured by knowledge, not dollars, than Harvard or Stanford would.

You often hear that pure science is a good investment.  In fact, at least as of 20 some years ago when I looked at this, the better answer was, we really don't know if pure science is a good investment or not, and you certainly cannot predict that it will be going forward.

Ex-James Bond OUTRAGED Over Heineken Deal -- New 007's a Sellout!!! | TMZ.com

They don't make 'em like they used to -- at least according to the guy who played James Bond in 1969, who's pissed the new Bond film has axed 007's signature martini ... in favor of a corporate-sponsored beer.

If you don't know ... the people behind Daniel Craig's next Bond flick "Skyfall" closed a reported $45 million deal with Heineken -- forcing the iconic character to drink beer in the movie, instead of a vodka martini ... Bond's famous drink of choice.

via www.tmz.com

The world continues to collapse around us. (h/t JS)--TS

Iran committed to ‘full annihilation of Israel,’ says top Iranian military commander | The Daily Caller

Iran is dedicated to annihilating Israel, the Islamic regime’s military chief of staff declared Sunday.

“The Iranian nation is standing for its cause and that is the full annihilation of Israel,” Maj. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi said in a speech to a defense gathering Sunday in Tehran.

His remarks came on the day International Atomic Energy Agency director Yukiya Amano flew to Tehran to negotiate for inspections of Iran’s nuclear program. They were reported by the Fars News Agency, the media outlet of the Revolutionary Guards Corps.

via dailycaller.com

Those darn Iranians! --TS

The Worst Union in America by Troy Senik, City Journal Spring 2012

Seen as a national leader in the classroom during the 1950s and 1960s, the country’s largest state is today a laggard, competing with the likes of Mississippi and Washington, D.C., at the bottom of national rankings. The Golden State’s education tailspin has been blamed on everything from class sizes to the property-tax restrictions enforced by Proposition 13 to an influx of Spanish-speaking students. But no portrait of the system’s downfall would be complete without a depiction of the CTA, a political behemoth that blocks meaningful education reform, protects failing and even criminal educators, and inflates teacher pay and benefits to unsustainable levels.

via www.city-journal.org

Welcome to Greece on the Pacific. --TS

Coffee Drinkers May Live Longer - NYTimes.com

As expected, the researchers found that the regular coffee drinkers in the group were also more likely to be smokers. They ate more red meat and fewer fruits and vegetables, exercised less and drank more alcohol – all behaviors associated with poor health.

But once the researchers controlled for those risks, the data showed that the more coffee a person consumed, the less likely he or she was to die from a number of health problems, including diabetes, heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, infections and even injuries and accidents.

Over all, the risk of dying during the 14-year study period was about 10 percent lower for men and about 15 percent lower for women who drank anywhere from two cups to six or more cups of coffee a day. The association between coffee and lower risk of dying was similar whether the coffee drinker consumed caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee.

via well.blogs.nytimes.com

Growing Antitax Movement Shows Irish Stoicism Wearing Thin - NYTimes.com

DUBLIN — Throughout the European financial crisis, Ireland has won plaudits for the way it has handled austerity. But growth has stalled here once again, and an incipient tax revolt is being taken as a sign that even this most stoic of nations is becoming fed up.

via www.nytimes.com

I think this tax rebellion is a big deal. Why ordinary Irish should bail out their banks and foreign creditors is beyond me. Perhaps there is something I'm missing, but a fair deal, it seems to me, would have imposed a much bigger haircut on bank shareholders and bondholders. --TS

Poll: Obama, Romney in dead heat - The Washington Post

After months of aggressive campaigning on jobs and the economy, President Obama and Mitt Romney, his likely Republican challenger, are locked in a dead heat over who could fix the problem foremost on voters’ minds, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The parity on economic issues foreshadows what probably will continue to be a tough and negative campaign. Overall, voters would be split 49 percent for Obama and 46 percent for Romney if the November election were held now. On handling the economy, they are tied at 47 percent.

via www.washingtonpost.com

What Happens When Toddlers Zone Out With an iPad - WSJ.com

More than half of the young children in the U.S. now have access to an iPad, iPhone or similar touch-screen device. For parents, their children's love of these devices raises a lot of questions.

Kids for years have sat too close to the television for too long or played hours of Madden on family room game players. But pediatric neuroscientists and researchers who have studied the effects of screen-time on children suggest the iPad is a different beast.

via online.wsj.com

SpaceX Launches for Space Station—Like "Winning the Super Bowl"

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launched today in the early morning darkness carrying what could soon be the first commercial spacecraft to visit the International Space Station (ISS).

The rocket lifted off at 3:44 a.m. ET from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida carrying an unmanned version of the private firm's Dragon space capsule.

via news.nationalgeographic.com

Maybe we can put something in the Mars constitution that really, truly limits government. --TS

Breaking: 43 Catholic institutions file suits over HHS mandate « Hot Air

Today’s Roman Catholic calendar lists May 21st as the feast day of St. Christopher Magallanes, a martyr killed for celebrating Mass during the Cristero War in Mexico. Perhaps Catholics today may want to recall St. Thomas More — the patron saint of lawyers, who was executed for refusing to agree to a mandate that gave Henry VIII the prerogative of defining religious expression in England.  Dozens of Catholic institutions filed lawsuits today against the Department of Health and Human Services over its mandate and its narrow definition of religious practice:

via hotair.com

Religious freedom is worth fighting for. Nice that occurs on the saint's day of a martyr from the Cristero War, which was a war of resistance by Catholics against socialist tyranny. --TS

OBAMA: 'This Is What This Campaign Is Going To Be About' - Business Insider

President Barack Obama pivoted to politics during his press conference at the NATO summit in Chicago this afternoon, defending his campaign ads attacking Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital.  

"This is not a distraction," Obama told reporters. "This is what this campaign is about." 

"The reason this is relevant to the campaign is because my opponent, Governor Romney, his main calling card for why he thinks he should be president is his business experience," he added. "He is not touting his experience as Governor of Massachusetts. He is saying he is a business guy, and this is his business.”

via www.businessinsider.com

Google Overtakes Internet Explorer As Most Popular Browser - Business Insider

After months of chipping away at its lead, Google Chrome has finally overtaken Internet Explorer to become most popular web browser worldwide.

via www.businessinsider.com

White House visitor logs show lobbying going strong - The Washington Post

The visitor logs for Jan. 17 — one of the most recent days available — show that the lobbying industry Obama has vowed to constrain is a regular presence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The records also suggest that lobbyists with personal connections to the White House enjoy the easiest access.

via www.washingtonpost.com

When voters go to the polls in November, even the Supreme Court hangs in the balance

Ordinarily when we vote in presidential years, two branches of the federal government are up for grabs. But this year it's all three, for whoever wins the presidency also likely will win control of the U.S. Supreme Court.

via www.azcentral.com

Europe finally awakes from its utopian dream - Telegraph

Unfeasibly enormous social security and entitlement promises were made on the basis that the free market would always provide. Nobody bothered to ask what would happen when the market faltered or fluctuated (as genuinely free markets do) or when the sense of entitlement outgrew the wealth that could be created. The problem is not unique to Europe. They are facing the same question in the US, where benefits programmes – particularly social security (the US federal pensions system) and Medicare – have become as untouchable, and as financially unsustainable, as they are here.

How long will freedom survive in the face of mass rage at the loss of the economic security that has come to be seen as a basic human right? People were told that they could have lifelong protection from want without any restrictions on their liberty or their economic self-determination. So now the cake has been well and truly eaten and had. The EU is going to have to admit sooner or later that this fantasy has run its course.

via www.telegraph.co.uk

Joe Sixpack Get Lost! | The Daily Caller

The increasing premium on skills and smarts promises to bring us an uglier society in the form of a meritocracy where those who are rich can think not only that they’re richer but that they’re better. That doesn’t simply threaten the incomes of the unskilled. It corrodes the traditional American idea of social equality–the idea that we’re “equal in the eyes of each other.” Cheering on young professionals–while urging the non-professionals to hurry up and do some learnin’–doesn’t make the problem better. It makes the problem worse. Even if it increases GDP.

via dailycaller.com

I worry about this; it seems already to be happening. It's made worse because we have a meritocracy with a twist. Unlike the UK and France (not that I want to go there)we don't have mostly merit admissions to elite universities, but rather a weird combination of merit plus legacy plus affirmative action plus social affinity (no Future Farmers of America please). --TS

Under 25 colleged educated more unemployed than non-college educated for first time Tom Smith

via Instapundit

Probe underway in remote area of Honduras after gunfight involving U.S. drug agents - The Washington Post

MEXICO CITY — Police and human rights activists headed to an isolated river town along the Honduran coast Thursday to investigate what happened last week during a gun battle that local officials say left four innocent people, including two pregnant women, dead in a drug bust orchestrated by U.S. agents.

Relatives began to come forward, trying to convince investigators — and the U.S. government — that those shot were not drug smugglers, but locals who use the rivers as roads and were moving from place to place when attacked in a raid by Honduran police flying in U.S. helicopters and aided by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents.

via www.washingtonpost.com

Son No. 3 spent a couple of weeks over winter break in Guatemala at an RC mission. Not Honduras but similar in some ways. Some local boys stole the wallet or iPod or something of one of the American kids. But some other local kids said, we know who stole it. So they went to the thieves' house and demanded the property be returned. No, the thieves said. You'd better, said the other local kids. What if we don't, said the thieves. If you don't, we call the policia. Oh no, don't do that! they said. In Guatemala, the policia wear black fatigues, sunglasses, drive black pickups, and carry submachine guns. If they pick you up, you may or may not be seen again. The thieves promptly returned the wallet or whatever it was. Law and order, Central American style.

Census: Minority babies are now majority in United States - The Washington Post

For the first time in U.S. history, most of the nation’s babies are members of minority groups, according to new census figures that signal the dawn of an era in which whites no longer will be in the majority.

Population estimates show that 50.4 percent of children younger than 1 last year were Hispanic, black, Asian American or in other minority groups. That’s almost a full percentage point higher than the 49.5 percent of minority babies counted when the decennial census was taken in April 2010. Census Bureau demographers said the tipping point came three months later, in July.

via www.washingtonpost.com

It begins: Catholic university drops all health-insurance coverage in response to HHS mandate « Hot Air

Actually, it’s not just the mandate, but also the costs that will drive Franciscan University to bail out of the health-insurance business.  Before now, the Catholic institution required all students to carry health insurance; those who did not have them were required to buy insurance through the school.  That’s not entirely dissimilar to the ObamaCare mandate, although of course attendance at the school is entirely voluntary.

via hotair.com

Editorial: "Disappointed But Not Surprised"

Late last Friday, Georgetown University announced that U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius is the featured speaker for an awards ceremony at the University's Public Policy Institute. This news is a disappointment but not a surprise.

As is well known, Secretary Sebelius is the architect of the "HHS mandate", now federal law, which requires all employers -- including religious institutions -- to provide health insurance coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and contraceptives for its employees and redefines religious ministry to exclude Catholic social services, hospitals and universities if they serve or employ non-Catholics. Given her position, it is disappointing that she would be the person that Georgetown University would choose to honor.

Founded in 1789 by John Carroll, a Jesuit priest, Georgetown University has, historically speaking, religious roots. So, too, do Harvard, Princeton and Brown. Over time, though, as has happened with these Ivy League institutions, Georgetown has undergone a secularization, due in no small part to the fact that much of its leadership and faculty find their inspiration in sources other than the Gospel and Catholic teaching. Many are quite clear that they reflect the values of the secular culture of our age. Thus the selection of Secretary Sebelius for special recognition, while disappointing, is not surprising.

via www.cathstan.org

How John Roberts Orchestrated Citizens United : The New Yorker

“You’re saying this isn’t covered by it,” Scalia continued.

That’s right, Olson responded. All he was asking for was a ruling that the law did not prohibit this particular documentary by this nonprofit corporation during those thirty days. If the Justices had resolved the case as Olson had suggested, today Citizens United might well be forgotten—a narrow ruling on a remote aspect of campaign-finance law.

Instead, the oral arguments were about to take the case—and the law—in an entirely new direction.

via www.newyorker.com

And I'm glad it did. Why the First Amendment should distinguish between a video on demand (protected speech) and a TV commercial (not) eludes me entirely, but then I probably lack the legal insight of the New Yorker's Supreme Court reporter. Here is something that is very rare -- a law professor or judge, let alone a reporter, who evidently thinks "I seem to be letting how I want the case to come out to be influencing my analysis; I must resist that." I cannot recall a single instance of anybody even hinting at such a thing when I was in law school.

Romney Leads Obama in CBS/Times Poll: How Bad Is It? : The New Yorker

In my neck of artisanal, hormone-free Brooklyn, the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, which shows Mitt Scissorhands leading “The First Gay President” by three points, landed with a nasty thud. “I can’t believe he might lose,” my wife said when she spotted the offending numbers on the Web. “People are really willing to vote for Mitt Romney? They hate Obama so much they’d vote for Romney?”

via www.newyorker.com

Brooklyn should probably be just a territory of the US, like Puerto Rico. --TS

Colleges grow their waitlists, leaving more students in limbo - chicagotribune.com

While no one tracks the number of college applicants nationwide who are wait-listed, admissions experts and high school guidance counselors agree that the ranks have swelled in the last five years. That leaves more students consigned to the halfway house of admissions, where they are unable to celebrate an admission or mourn a denial.

via www.chicagotribune.com

Yeah I guess I amTom Smith

Yale Alumni Magazine: God & White Men at Yale (May/June 2012)

On a sweltering Friday in June 1921, a 54-year-old Yale economics professor named Irving Fisher delivered a major speech at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The pain of the recent war in Europe was still fresh, and Fisher was troubled by the quality of those who had died, and the damage to “the potential fatherhood of the race” by the loss of so many young men “medically selected for fighting but thereby prevented from breeding.”

In light of these losses, the issue, it seemed to Fisher, was that graduates of leading universities were failing to do their reproductive duty: the families “of American men of science” averaged just 2.22 children, versus a national average of 4.66. (Or as he put it, perhaps too lucidly, “The average Harvard graduate is the father of three-fourths of a son and the average Vassar graduate the mother of one-half of a daughter.”) This “race suicide” among “the well-to-do classes means that their places will speedily be taken by the unintelligent, uneducated, and inefficient.”

To prevent that, immigration from certain regions needed to be sharply curtailed, and birth control “extended from the white race to the colored” and to other “undesirable” ethnic and economic groups, ideally under the control of a eugenics committee established to “breed out the unfit and breed in the fit.” Otherwise, “the Nordic race … will vanish or lose its dominance.”

via www.yalealumnimagazine.com

Fascinating and disturbing. Eugenics and allied strains of thought still have a strong influence (heritage?) in American progressive thought. --TS

Maybe I should try this/more fun than MMA? Tom Smith

Don't see many of the girthonally challenged though.

California's Jerry Brown offers budget plan to close $16-billion gap - latimes.com

"I'm linking these serious budget reductions … with a plea to the voters: Please increase taxes temporarily," Brown said at a morning news conference.

via www.latimes.com

"Temporarily." ROFL. --TS

'Swamp People' star Mitchell Guist dies - CNN.com

Mitchell Guist, a star of the reality TV show "Swamp People," died Monday in Louisiana.

He was aboard a boat near Belle River Landing in the southern part of the state when he appeared to have a seizure, said Assumption Parish Sheriff Mike Waguespack, citing an unidentified man who was with Guist.

The reality show star then fell on the boat.

via edition.cnn.com

Well at least a gator didn gettim. --TS

Private equity ok for me but not for thee

President Obama’s in New York City today, doing two pricey fundraisers, with tickets going for $5,000 and $35,800 respectively. And apparently, it occurred to his campaign that attacking Wall Street vehemently the day of high-dollar fundraisers wasn’t a smart move.

So during a conference call today attacking Mitt Romney for the GST Steel bankruptcy and layoffs (which occurred two years after Romney had ended his involvement in the day-to-day workings of Bain), Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter was quick to stress that it wasn’t that the administration objected to private-equity firms. “No one is questioning the private-equity industry as a whole,” Cutter said, even as she laid the blame for the layoffs at Romney’s feet, saying that he lacked the values to be president and had shown himself incapable of caring about the middle class.  

via www.nationalreview.com

Ironically perhaps, I can hardly think of a better preparation to be POTUS than private equity investing. Traditionally, PE firms buy into distressed, over-leveraged and frequently poorly managed companies, and turn them around by cleaning house. Isn't that exactly what the USA needs? --TS

Is It Time to Quit the Roman Catholic Church -- or to Join? - Ricochet.com

That it is high time to quit is the claim of an advertisement that appeared on p. A5 in last Tuesday’s Washington Post. An earlier missive along the same lines appeared in The New York Times on 9 March, and I will have to say that I heartily welcome the attacks mounted by the Freedom from Religion Foundation of Madison, Wisconsin—for they are designed to force the lukewarm to ponder what they really think, get off the fence, and take a stand. In this regard, they are doing for the Catholic Church in the United States what the hierarchy has shied away from doing for almost a half century.

via ricochet.com

Greek Collapse, and Why Maimon Schwarzschild

Here is a very interesting piece by Francis Fukuyama on the politics and culture of "clientelism", which is what there is in Greece, but not in Germany:

Clientelism occurs when political parties use public resources, and particularly government offices, as a means of rewarding political supporters. Politicians provide not programmatic public policies, but individual benefits like a job in the post office, an intervention on behalf of a relative in trouble with the government, or sometimes an outright payment of money or goods.

[I]t is often the most efficient way to mobilize relatively poor and uneducated voters and get them into the polling place. Such voters often care less about programmatic policies than an immediate personal benefit like a job or the equivalent of a Thanksgiving turkey.

Germany, Scandinavia, Britain, and the Netherlands have never been dominated by clientelistic parties, while Italy, Greece, Spain, and Austria have been. As Martin Shefter pointed out in his 1993 book Political Parties and the State, the reason for this difference had to do with the relative timing of the consolidation of a modern Weberian bureaucratic state and the onset of democracy...

This is why the whole project of deepening Europe into a fiscal union seems to me like such a fairy tale. Outside pressure will never succeed in bringing about change by itself unless it can be allied to internal forces that themselves want reform. In Italy, these forces at least potentially exist, but in Greece they seem altogether absent.

The piece has a lot of depth and analytic detail. Read the whole thing. I tended to ignore Fukuyama for many years, because the "end of history" seemed to me such a ludicrous idea. But this piece is impressive, and convincing.

And a propos of Greece, here is a fascinating and distressing documentary about Greece, the euro (currency), and the social catastrophe that is unfolding in Greece. The film is made and narrated by Michael Portillo, the Eurosceptic Tory politician. Portillo is very impressive. One of the things he brings out dramatically is that almost no one in Greece (or in Germany) shares Portillo's own view about the euro. The film makes clear, though, the human costs of the Greek crisis. Highly recommended!

Finally, here is the latest on the likelihood of Greece exiting (or being expelled) from the euro. Things will be awful for the Greeks, more or less for the indefinite future, almost regardless of what happens. There is no guarantee, to put it mildly, that the ripple effects won't be bad, or worse than bad, beyond Greece as well.

Rich people Tom Smith

Americans mostly like them.  Though most Americans don't have that much contact with rich people. Just saying.