Universities: Pink Collar Ghettos?

Interesting exchange in the female blogosphere, where two docs effectively debate what's been happening to men in an increasingly feminized society.

Dr. Melissa seems to have started it:

What the world needs more of is manly men. I've blogged about this before, but it's worth repeating. A girlfriend of mine told me that her three best girlfriends all have husbands that stay home while their wives work and the men sit around complaining about their wives.

Gee, what a concept. Seems some professional women like Dr. Melissa are getting tired of what kind of men the gender feminazis have succeeded in creating: an awful lot of passive wussies. Like the alleged Chinese proverb more or less says, don't wish too hard for something. You just might get it.

She continues:

Societally, it seems like men don't value or seem to be valued for manliness. A strong, hard-working, driven guy has been replaced with a soft, unmotivated, aimless man who can't make a declarative sentence or find the will to do what needs to be done. Basically, too many men have become pansies. Gay men need to butch up, too.

Somewhere between the hypermasculinity of Islamofascism and the gang culture on one hand and the effete softness of the bitchy out-of-work, tears in his beer dude on the other, there's a balance. To me, the honor, strength and drive shown by men who've been through military training serves as a good model of manly behavior.

Butch up. There you go. I'd have expressed this somewhat differently. But in this fashionably anti-het age in which we live, you get the point.

Dr. Helen, (spousal unit of Instapundit) on the other hand, gives the un-fairer sex a little more credit for creative thinking:

Have men become "pansies" (your words, not mine) using this strategy? I don't think so. They have become strategic. This is different than aimless. Aimless suggests no purpose. Men may look aimless but underneath it all they actually have a purpose--to protect themselves from a society that considers men responsible for the welfare of women and children but offers them little or nothing in return. Who can blame them?

Well, yeah. But "The Other Side" (blogger Kim du Toit) agrees with 'em both. Sort of:

I agree with both of them, a little—although I think Helen gives men too much credit for being devious and scheming—kinda like women...

You want to know why CEOs earn so much these days? It’s because of all the “teaming” and diversified responsibility which takes place in their corporations—to the point where only the “C” class can actually make decisions.

It’s the corporate version of kids’ soccer matches where nobody keeps score, lest the losers get their feelings hurt.

Here’s where the fun begins, by the way. I don’t think that men are as subtle or as perceptive as Dr. Helen thinks they are. They can recognize a game in which the odds have been stacked against them, of course—but I don’t think they work the system as she thinks they do.

What they do is refuse to play.

What’s the point of being ambitious or hard-working, when your efforts will be subsumed in a “task force” or “team” project, and others get the credit for your work? What’s the point of being a man, when all you get from it is scorn from women and from men who behave like women?

Interesting thought, which leads the Kimster to this conclusion:

And if some harpy tells them to “butch up”, they say, “Bite me”.

When women finally do get everything they wanted, I wonder whether they’ll enjoy living in the world they’ve created.

Good question. Which is what got Dr. Helen to the Pink Collar stuff we advertised in our headline. The university system is where today's men start to run into the wimpy, PC crap, since that's where spineless men and feminazis tentatively co-exist, with the feminazis holding the upper hand, so to speak. Real guys are immensely turned off by this environment, yet they're forced to endure it to get the necessary credentials, dealing with loads of anti-U.S., anti-capitalist, anti-Western spleen en route. Small wonder why guys hate school from K-8 thru post-graduate. It's insulting, demeaning, and stupid to put up with the idiotic sideshows while attempting to pursue education and fathom a career path. Plus, it's entirely too girly.

Dr. Helen describes one male's path around this nonsense to bolster her argument:

For example, I recently talked with my accountant, a man who is getting an advanced degree online. He didn't want to go to a PC university and sit through a bunch of professors putting down his gender or having him do ridiculous amounts of tedious and inefficient paperwork that he found boring. Instead, he is taking classes that he enjoys on his schedule. The male nurse at my doctor's office is getting his degree online because he doesn't want to deal with the "crap" that a regular university expects students to listen to on an ongoing basis. He stated that he simply reads the material and takes the tests and doesn't have to deal with the PC milieu that would leave him annoyed and disgruntled. Both of these men have successful careers and while I don't know what they make, I bet it is plenty enough to pay for whatever lifestyle they want to enjoy.

She concludes this round by stating:

It's no wonder universities are turning into pink collar ghettos. Men are finding other avenues that are fulfilling and fit in with their lifestyle. With the rise of technology and alternative ways to make a living and live one's lifestyle, I have no doubt that most men will find what works for them.

This is actually a pretty civil, provocative little debate. Kim and the Doctors essentially agree on the point. Real, actual men have had it up to here with liberal, PC, male-bashing nonsense, whether in the corporate or university environment. It's axiomatic to them that this is all crap. But our panelists are not quite in agreement as to how or in what manner the men are really dealing with it. Have they bought in? Are they subversive? Have they figured out how to get their own way without tipping their collective hand?

Being an actual real man with the wreckage of an intellectual career well behind me, I can help. Men DO know what they're doing. Teddy Roosevelt said it best: Speak softly and carry a big stick.

Maybe better still, to paraphrase the English meaning behind a famous (and bogus) legal Latin cliche: Never let the bitches wear you down.

Or, best of all, op. cit. above in the contemporary idiom: Bite me.

And have a nice day.

More on the Eco-Freaks and How They're Bankrupting Us

If you haven't read Luther's excellent post on Dr. Zubrin below, do it now.

I'd especially commend his conclusion, which gets to the real root of the larger problem:

Ethanol from corn or sugar is not new, does not work well, and can only be supported with subsidies and state intervention in markets. That support causes a major problem in food markets, now noticed in screaming headlines across the world. Even Greens are starting to advocate nuclear powerplants. We've known for thirty years that there's enough shale oil and gas in Wyoming to fuel America for centuries. Congress refuses to do anything except mandate bad solutions like ethanol. It is time perhaps for Congress to start representing the people, instead of a single special interest that shells out bucks for campaign money...

Frankly, I'd like to know when the average American is going to wake up and stick a pitchfork into the increasingly insane Eco-Freak movement in this country. It's THEY, not Bush, the Chi-coms, or even the Democrats who are bankrupting this country and destroying its economy. (Although the Dems do their level best to help.)

We're talking energy here. And we're talking the near-complete triumph of illogic in this situation. Let's see. Oil is too expensive, so let's make ethanol from corn to replace oil. And to make it cheaper, let's subsidize it with taxpayer money. Meanwhile, let's denounce oil company "windfall" profits while preventing them from using those profits to drill for oil on both U.S. continental shelves as well as in Alaska where such exploration might force a few dozen elk to take a 10 minute detour.

And let's not burn coal, since we have plenty of it, because it creates pollution and acid rain. Let's just sell it to the Chinese so THEY can create pollution and acid rain (without the need for any coal scrubbers) while we freeze but feel virtuous. Meanwhile, we can buy more expensive oil from the Saudis so they can fund more radical madrassas to train more radical students so they can kill even more of us so we eventually won't have to use so much energy.

And let's shut down all the wind-turbines, since they kill birds and bats. And above all, let's at least not put any of those where Ted Kennedy can see them. Let's put them all in West Virginia where all those gun-toting cretins live. And then we can shut them down, since they kill birds and bats.

And let's not build nukes, because they provide clean, green energy. Because nukes cause mushroom clouds that are harmful to children and other living things. And speaking of living things, let's not wear furs to take up the warmth slack because that's a violation of animal rights.

And while we're at it, let's not build solar farms in the desert. It creates visual pollution. And besides, solar farms don't produce oil, which we need to fuel our Hummers and SUVs and private jets as we travel the world telling people not to buy Hummers, SUVs, and private jets and to use one sheet of toilet paper per necessary room session to save our trees and save our planet.

And when the entire economy collapses, let's just blame Bush.

You think we're kidding? Just try to put the energy logic of the Eco-Freaks to work, and an ambiguous, random chain of phony, indefensible nonsense like the above is what results. It's the same far-left game, really. Listen to us, because we're better, smarter, and more virtuous than you. But when you try to parse out the message, all you come up with is the snake oil they're selling. And don't get us started on carbon credits, the latest example of popular delusions and the madness of crowds.

He's Ba-a-a-ack!

What, again? For the umpty-umpth time, Wonk is attempting yet another blog comeback after disappearing yet again. Add to deaths in the family a surprise additional wrinkle. The demise of a long-estranged relative who ended up expiring intestate. A poor idea in tax-happy Ohio.

Wonk is back in DC again, and America's lawyerly class has been enriched again. We all are definitely in the wrong profession.

Meanwhile, I'm catching up on Luther's brilliance which really has been quite non-stop, hasn't it?

Stick to Mars, Dr. Zubrin

With his alarmist call for American oil independence (“Breaking OPEC’s Grip”), Robert Zubrin joins a long tradition of pundits who have used national security as an excuse to abandon consumer markets in order to forward their Big Government schemes. Add the Mideast “oil cartel” to Japan and China as declared threats to our manufacturing base requiring protection...Whatever the merits of his argument, Zubrin sadly uses the same rhetorical device to sell flex-fuel mandates as Gore & co. make for Kyoto: if you disagree, you are a proponent of petroterrorism, or in the latter case, a polar-bear killer...Flex Fuel Folly, Henry Payne, Planet Gore National Review Online, 2/22/08

The trouble with a smart guy like Dr. Zubrin is that, with his origins in big science, funded primarily by Big Government, he has a limited understanding of such things as market. The primary principle in analyzing a market is supply and demand. In a given market, if you divert a commodity's supply, as with a government subsidy of ethanol production from corn, it will directly impact supply of corn for other purposes, such as food.

NASA, to which Zubrin presented his Mars Direct program some years back, had a fling with "market" back in the planning stages of the space shuttle, one which the author's father, a very successful marketer, was invited to participate in. The idea was that payloads would pay for the shuttle's operations. The author's father later said he wished he had never taken the offer, for a simple reason. A government agency has no conception of business operations. In the business world you can't call on the Commerce Committee to introduce new funding authorization if your project isn't making money. The shuttle's costs were never properly analyzed. In the end, there was no way the payloads could pay for operations if the shuttle was to be a competitive launching system.

Zubrin seems to have about the same idea regarding the energy problems of the early 21st century.

He says that all Congress has to do is “pass a law requiring that all new cars sold in the U.S. be flex-fueled” (that is, alcohol-fuel compatible) and — voila! — alcohol fuels will become competitive....(Flex-Fuel Folly, cont'd)

This kind of magic thinking has surrounded legislation for a long time, so Dr. Zubrin can't be fairly accused of original ignorance. He's only going into an old frontier where thousands have gone before.

Heavily dependent on OPEC oil, Brazil embarked on a national plan of oil independence during the last oil price panic in the 1970s. Dubbed “Proalcool,” the central government nationalized its largest energy company to goose ethanol production, massively subsidized sugar ethanol, mandated the production of ethanol cars, and mandated at least a 25 percent mix of ethanol in gasoline. In effect, government took over its domestic energy sector in the name of national security....there were unintended consequences. Inflation soared thanks to government spending and an agricultural economy now skewed towards fuel — not food — production. Brazil suffered widespread environmental degradation with the rush to convert cropland to fuel, and ultimately — with the collapse of oil prices a mere decade later — the program failed because ethanol is fundamentally an uncompetitive fuel source relative to oil....(Flex-Fuel Folly, cont'd)

The problem with many scientists is that they only see individual processes, not the whole ecology as it were. The whole direction of science since the 18th century until the stirrings of chaos and complexity theory in the 1960s was precisely opposite the strategy of studying overall views and consequences. This is great if you're trying to derive a fundamental law, such as the behavior of a gas under pressure. But that method's dependency on a closed system is fatal in large-scale analysis.

A practical understanding of broader consequences, called "seeing the big picture" by business people, is informed by market decisions too complex to analyze individually, as one might a container of pressurized helium. A business has to take the measure of consequences by broad statistical analysis in market studies. The methods aren't very different from those used to study individual processes, but are held in contempt by representatives of and advocates for state intervention in the economy. Payne emphasizes this strongly but I doubt Dr. Zubrin will pay attention until food rioters are at his local supermarket.

U.S. prosperity is due in part to free markets determining our most efficient fuel sources. Indeed, as oil topped $50 a barrel, Canadian oil sands have become viable, making that country our leading oil exporter (hardly Zubrin’s caricature of a terrorist oil country holding us hostage)...Left alone, free markets might ultimately determine that coal-to-oil is the best alternative to gas, or hydrogen, or even ethanol. . . . But Zubrin would rather strangle the U.S. economy with subsidies and decrees for an ethanol technology that has not yet proven itself worthy in the marketplace....(Flex-Fuel Folly, cont'd)

Dr. Zubrin's conceptions for interplanetary, human-crewed travel are brilliant, but as an economist, he offers very little except politically easy answers for a very complex problem that affects the entire industrial world. In sum, we have reached the stage where the quantity of petroleum is not sufficient to meet demand. Price, the most powerful indicator in a market, is shouting a message: either find a way to increase the energy output of existing supplies, or develop something new.

Ethanol from corn or sugar is not new, does not work well, and can only be supported with subsidies and state intervention in markets. That support causes a major problem in food markets, now noticed in screaming headlines across the world. Even Greens are starting to advocate nuclear powerplants. We've known for thirty years that there's enough shale oil and gas in Wyoming to fuel America for centuries. Congress refuses to do anything except mandate bad solutions like ethanol. It is time perhaps for Congress to start representing the people, instead of a single special interest that shells out bucks for campaign money, and for Dr. Zubrin to figure out a way to privately finance Mars Direct.

Luther

Dartmouth Professor Sues Students?

An irate Ivy League lecturer says she is suing her freshman students because they were mean to her in class...."Class Action", Emma Haberman, Cynthia Fagen, NY Post, 4/30/2008 -- no link

Heh-heh-heh....

Few of the professor's students deny disliking her; they just say it had nothing to do with race, gender, or any other federally-protected characteristic. Rather, the lecturer embodied that special brand of neurotic pedagogical tyranny that includes making rules against questions, refusing to interact with students, and cancelation of class for a week after the class applauded a student who contradicted Venkatesan’s opinions about post-modernism...Putting the Class in Action, Ivygateblog.com, 4/30/2008

It had to come to this sooner or later, eh? We already know from Wonker's history, which is a paradigm of what it's like to work in academia if you're not on the Left, how professors treat each other -- ad hominem attacks, lawsuits, denial of tenure assaults, usually regarding preposterous and unprovable claims about racism, sexism or homophobia. The list of lawsuits and other mean stuff surrounding those disputes is campus legend. It only follows that, sooner or later, professors would start treating their students the same way. Still, as Ivygate's writers note:

Spontaneous applause during a class on literary criticism? Obviously, there is something very wrong with this picture, so outrageously shocking as to shake Venkatesan to her very core: In a class at an Ivy League university, students were paying attention. Worse: They were engaged, and they cared....Putting the Class in Action, Ivygateblog.com, 4/30/2008, cont'd.

An obvious extension to this -- trial lawyers, take note! -- is to sue parents for allowing their children to have wrong opinions.

Luther

Gore Conveniently Silent on BioFuels & Food Crisis

With prices for rice, wheat, and corn soaring, food-related unrest has broken out in...Haiti, Indonesia, and Afghanistan...There is even talk that governments could fall if they cannot bring food costs down...One factor being blamed for the price hikes is the use of government subsidies to promote the use of corn for ethanol production. An estimated 30% of America’s corn crop now goes to fuel, not food...“I don’t think anybody knows precisely how much ethanol contributes to the run-up in food prices, but the contribution is clearly substantial,” a professor of applied economics and law at the University of Minnesota, C. Ford Runge, said. A study by...the International Food Policy Research Institute, indicated that between a quarter and a third of the recent hike in commodities prices is attributable to biofuels...Ethanol was initially promoted as a vehicle for America to cut back on foreign oil. In recent years, biofuels have also been touted as a way to fight climate change, but the food crisis does not augur well for ethanol’s prospects...“It takes around 400 pounds of corn to make 25 gallons of ethanol...roughly enough to keep an adult person alive for a year.” Mr. Senauer said climate change advocates, such as Vice President Gore, need to distance themselves from ethanol to avoid tarnishing the effort against global warming. “Crop-based biofuels are not part of the solution. They, in fact, add to the problem. Whether Al Gore has caught up with that, somebody ought to ask him,” ...Mr. Gore was not available for an interview yesterday on the food crisis....Food Crisis Eclipsing Climate Change, Josh Gerstein, The New York Sun, 4/25/2008

Yup. Mr. Gore was unavailable for what is increasingly the most inconvenient truth at all, that Green fads don't solve problems. An ecology, local or global, can't be examined in terms of any given fix without taking into account the consequences. If the DDT ban catastrophe is any indication, very few leading ecological thinkers seem able to conceive of problems and solutions in an ecological fashion.

Luther

Luther

Green Stupidity: Ethanol and the Food Crisis

---Price of corn in February 2006: $2.06
---Current price in 2008: $5.93

Oh, those Greens in their miraculous cures for all that ails the planet. Notice the nearly tripling of the price of corn in the last year and a half. You know why corn meal in Haiti and even in California is being rationed? You guessed Global Warming? WRONG!!!!!!!!! It's ethanol, that great fix for reducing bad gases in the air, also known as the great farmers boondoggle of the decade (a great favorite of Bill & Hillary Clinton, whose understanding of green may be somewhat different than when it's capitalized). Ethanol is produced from corn. Vast amounts of US cornfield acreage is being harvested to produce this fuel additive but -- oh-oh....

Factories that convert corn into the gasoline additive ethanol are releasing carbon monoxide, methanol and some carcinogens at levels "many times greater" than they promised, the government says....Ethanol Pollution Surprise, AP, cited on CBSNEWS.COM, 5/3/2002

Okay, okay, they must have cleaned that up already, but wait!

Switching from gasoline to ethanol — touted as a green alternative at the pump — may create dirtier air, causing slightly more smog-related deaths, a new study says..."It's not green in terms of air pollution," said study author Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University civil and environmental engineering professor. "If you want to use ethanol, fine, but don't do it based on health grounds. It's no better than gasoline, apparently slightly worse."...Scientist: Ethanol Would Cause More Pollution Than Gasoline, Foxnews.com, 4/18/2007

Doesn't sound good, does it? And it's not a new story.

With a corn-to-ethanol conversion rate of 2.7 gallons per bushel (a rate that many state-of-the-art facilities are already surpassing), the U.S. ethanol sector will need 2.6 billion bushels per year by 2010—1.2 billion bushels more than it consumed in 2005. That’s a lot of corn, and how the market adapts to this increased demand is likely to be one of the major developments of the early 21st century in U.S. agriculture. The most recent USDA Baseline Projections suggest that much of the additional corn needed for ethanol production will be diverted from exports....Ethanol Reshapes the Corn Market, Allen Baker & Steven Zahnizer, Amberwaves.com, April 2006

We knew in advance. So, what gives? Somebody must get something out of this. Whoever could that be?

Soaring land values, increasing debt and a reliance on government subsidies for ethanol production have prompted economists to warn that what some describe as a golden age of agriculture could come to a sudden end...Amid Strong Farm Economy, Worry About Increased Debt, KansasCity.Com, 4/20/2008

There you go, you starving Haitians, no corn meal for you today. To keep American farmers subsidized, the Congress has legislated that the government pay them to produce corn for ethanol, which causes farmland use for food crops to be sharply restricted, which causes prices to rise, which causes rationing. You have to be pretty f...ing green not to see that!

Oh, you Greens. Not content with the thirty million dead because of the finally lifted, thirty-year DDT ban, now you want to starve people who won't drive a Prius fueled by corn ethanol. What will you think of next?

Luther

Citigroup Fire Sale: More Bad News for New York

Citigroup Inc. said today it lost $5.1 billion during the first quarter as poor bets on mortgages and leveraged loans lopped billions of dollars from its investment portfolio...Write-downs related to mortgages and turmoil in the credit markets reached about $12 billion...The most recent quarterly shortfall at the nation's biggest bank by assets is not as massive as the nearly $10 billion loss it suffered in the fourth quarter of last year...Citigroup Posts $5.1 billion Loss, Washington Times, 4/18/08

As bad as this is, both for Citigroup's stockholders and employees and for New York, it's a good example of how private business handles a recession. It sells off assets that aren't helping the bottom line. It cuts costs. Its objective is to change its balance sheet from a disaster to a report indicating a future for the company. Once that's achieved, investors (not to mention depositors large and small) will begin putting money into Citigroup's financial products again. It's brutal, but it's real. They should send an emissary to Albany to meet with the Legislature's leaders and with Governor Paterson.

Luther

Governor Paterson's First Month

"What I want you to understand is that this is not a new governor responding to an economic crisis. This is a new governor trying to create fiscal reality.” [Governor Paterson of NY, April 7] The governor’s words give some hope that he is serious about fixing New York’s budget problems, slowly easing the tax burden, and staunching the losses from a fleeing middle class...But New Yorkers need action, not words—and certainly not the nearly $122 billion state budget that Paterson is expected to sign barely a week after his speech. While he has pared almost $2 billion from earlier budget proposals, state spending will still rise by close to 5 percent this year. To balance the budget, Paterson and the legislature did what past governors and legislatures have done: find creative ways to levy nearly $1.5 billion in new taxes and fees on New York residents and businesses....Words Not Deeds, Nicole Salinas, City Journal, 4/14/2008

For those seriously considering moving out of state to join the hundreds of thousands of tax refugees from New York City and New York State, Governor Paterson's speech was almost as startling as hearing Bill Clinton chime in with New Gingrich in 1995 about welfare reform. It was a direct assault on the assumptions that guide New York's waltz into bankruptcy. Perhaps Governor Paterson forgot something, however.

Even though Paterson is the head of a state government, an unelected Governor has no mandate to do anything but follow the legislature's lead. This bodes ill for New York State's future, because the legislature in Albany, and not just the Democrats as George Pataki's last term demonstrated, is leading the state on a spending and taxation binge that, as Mayor Bloomberg noted yesterday, is more likely to drive wealth out of state than balance a burgeoning budget. What's worse is that in New York State's major cities, including the biggest one, political discourse is entirely one-sided. In New York City, a Republican office-seeker is rarer than a snail darter in Tennesee. The local party has had to adopt Democrats, such as Mike Bloomberg, to offer serious candidates. A state lurching on the edge of bankruptcy, without serious political discussion, is more like a tottering socialist country in South America than an American state. The primary option for protecting one's self, one's family, and one's company is taxpayer and employer flight.

As Galinas and many other writers have made abundantly clear, as have we on this blog, the heart of New York State's economy is an industry that could move in toto to Jersey City in eighteen months. Modern markets or, for that matter, modern stores, don't depend on brick and mortar headquarters in a given city or state. That's why New York City has thrown billions of tax rebates to the wolves of banking and Wall Street. That same industry, financial services, is also stumbling into a major recession with the current credit crunch. Tax collection in New York State from financial services businesses, as Governor Paterson pointed out, is down 75% from last year. Bonuses will shrink, further suppressing tax revenues. Tens of thousands are likely to be laid off.

Unless the Governor can start making a governing alliance out of members of his own and what's left of the other party, and now, New York State is going to slide backwards toward 1975, a generation's work of reconstruction gone to waste.

Luther

The Market or The Fed? We'd Better Decide

Bank holding companies including Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co. have the thinnest safety cushion against losses in seven years...Credit ratings on $704 billion of bonds have been cut this year following the collapse of the U.S. housing market. Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., said last week that the downgrades may compromise bank capital ratios enough that some of the largest institutions will no longer be considered well capitalized....Falling below a regulatory benchmark that is intended to maintain a minimum level of capital to protect depositors against losses would subject banks to more scrutiny from regulators than they have ever experienced....Citigroup, Wells-Fargo May Fuel Recession by Curtailing Lending, Bloomberg.com, 4/8/08

It's that big, folks. As noted below in remarks about Senator McCain's thoughts on the subprime mortgage mess and the consequences of a panic, markets respond swiftly and efficiently. Government intervention causes increasingly dangerous problems. Why is this important?

As Fed Chair Bernanke's ill-advised bailout of Bear Sterns demonstrated, the only way for the government to rescue a badly managed institution is to print money, to paper over a financial collapse. When you do that, as time-honored a practice in Argentina as in recent years in the US, you devalue the currency. How? When value doesn't change, but the dollars that represent it increase, the dollars become worth less. That TIAA-CREF account you have that's valued at $700,000 -- check again after one of these bailouts. It may be worth ten percent less, even though the numbers stay the same. The Bear Sterns story isn't over either. Class actions suits by shareholders in both Morgan Chase and Bear Sterns are highly likely. Why? When the government intervenes to force a deal, as the takeover of BS by Morgan Chase, it sets a price which may not be indicative of real value. The Fed allowed a valuation of Bear Sterns at $2 a share, down 95% from the previous week's listing on the exchange. A little welcome flexibility got that up to $10 a share, which may put off the legal threat, but don't count stockholders out yet. Lawyers feed off this kind of thing.

The market, in Citibank's case, reinforced by regulation on capital reserves, has sent a clear message to borrowers: if prospective borrowers don't have strong collateral, long-term stability, and a substantial down payment, don't issue any paper to them. They are not creditworthy in today's market. It's an honest assessment. The Fed can't help this. That was $704 billion in questionable paper, a big chunk of which is in the hands of Citibank and Wells Fargo. Questionable paper, for all intents and purposes, may as well be toilet paper for all the value it has as an asset. If things get worse, this questionable stuff will become an expensive writedown. Then, policy trends by lending officers will become official bank policy.

These things happen. Take a smaller example. Let's say that, feeling flush after a big raise, you borrowed $82,500 to buy yourself a new Escalade. Then, eight months into the sixty-month payback schedule for the auto loan, you discovered that you couldn't afford the payments. Hey! you complain; I can't help it. Well, the people's whose jobs depend on your paying back that $82,500 loan don't have many options here. You've taken $82,500 out of their capital, which you've agreed to pay back at -- these days -- very modest interest. Now you won't meet the payments schedule. What choice do people have whose livelihoods depend upon you making responsible use of their depositors' money?

You guessed right. They send repo man. They sell the Escalade and get back maybe fifty cents on the dollar. It's not a great system for the bank, but at least they got half the money back and can loan it to somebody else. That you might have to drive an old Plymouth for a while isn't their problem. If you'd paid attention to something real in budgeting, you might have bought a Voyager instead of an Escalade. The problem here is that if they let everybody off the hook who didn't pay back auto loans, there would be no money to loan to buy cars, no employment for loan officers who issue auto loans, and layoffs at General Motors.

But wait! Here come de spitzer! (see below). The spitzer says that this loan payback business is immoral, and that you, the poor citizen, were victimized by the Satanic car salesman, who convinced you against your will to buy a car that you couldn't afford. The spitzer says "let the taxpayer buy this man's car." Or house, or factory...you see where this is going.

Once you start down the road of what's called moral risk there's no stopping. The more forgiveness there is of bad credit, the more dollars will be dumped into the economy to paper over the bad debt. The more dollars there are in circulation without an increase in value (such as paying back loans) the less those dollars will be worth. Inflation, back to the 1970s! Everything costs more and what you thought was your retirement (or house or vacation) fund is worth a lot less. Let's be honest here. This kind of "forgiveness" is nothing but government theft, transferring taxpayer money to settle accounts for people who refuse to do it on their own dollar.

Back to the real world: a lot of buyers and mortgage brokers suffered irrational exuberance in the last five years. Prices and the instruments for financing them became mindboggling. Houses that were on the market in Brooklyn for $50,000 in 1996 were, for a time, valued at $900,000 in 2006. No equity loans? What's the difference between that and rent? And what's the incentive to stay for the "buyer"? Whacko thinking! Deranged financing? Tulip market redux!

We know why this happened. It was exciting. Everybody would own something. And nobody in the banks or among buyers wanted anyone to be disappointed. This was America, where nobody ever loses. Fantasy can't be sustained in any real world. Sooner or later, the market has to be adjusted to actual conditions. Hope is not enough. A lot of people can't afford these amazing prices and the saner bank officers will have to start looking at the real basis for financing credit. A good place to start: the introductory rate on a mortgage, dear lender, and dear lendee, is not a basis for budgeting next year's monthly payment. It's a sale price for the first year. The lesson always comes and it is always harsh. Contracting the mortgage market by raising standards is how this lesson is taught.

The alternative of the kind of intervention the Fed engaged in with Bear Sterns, though, is a debased currency and the risk of explosive inflation. Want to go back to the 1970s? Want your retirements accounts to decline in value by 10% or more a year? That's what Citibank and Wells Fargo, by responding to real conditions in a real market, are trying to avoid. Unfortunately, the spitzers and the Fed, during an election year especially, don't want us to remember what happens when you pour good money into a pool of bad debt.

In sum, in this election year, we're faced with spitzer promises that could sink us in stagflation for a decade, or a few years of rocky roads as credit markets recover and credit standards are constructed along more rational lines.

Luther

Global Warming Curve Upside Down? UN Not Sure

Average global temperatures in 2008 are forecast to be lower than in previous years, thanks to the cooling effect of the ocean current in the Pacific, U.N. meteorologists say....The World Meteorological Organisation's secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, said it was likely that La Nina, an abnormal cooling of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, would continue into the summer..a small number of scientists doubt whether this means global warming has peaked and the Earth has proved more resilient to greenhouse gases than predicted, but Jarraud insists this is not the case and notes that 1998 temperatures would still be well above average for the century...."When you look at climate change you should not look at any particular year," he told the BBC. "You should look at trends over a pretty long period and the trend of temperature globally is still very much indicative of warming..."La Nina is part of what we call 'variability'...."
UN Forecasters: Global Temperatures to Decrease, FoxNews.Com, 4/4/2008

Oh, that dog of variability, that cursed beast of contingency! For ten years, the trend of global temperatures has been slightly down, not up. That's not a very long time, but it almost exactly corresponds to the rising hype regarding global warming.

The problem, as Michael Crichton has described it (see State of Fear), is the use of calculated models as a substitute for evidence, what was once derisively described in the early PC days as spreadsheet knowledge. The problem with models is easy to describe. If you miss a key variable, what in the real world is described as a contingency, you will calculate utterly false results.

A classic example of this was a model developed by the Club of Rome in 1970. It calculated the demise of the human species by the 1980s. We were all going to devolve into starvelings in a universal war of attrition over diminishing resources, especially diminishing food resources. Evidently, the Club of Rome had never heard of Norman Borlaug. Food production more than doubled by the time we were all supposed to starve to death. That was one key variable. Population growth, especially in the northern hemisphere and South America, sharply declined. That was another key variable missed. Put the two together and all that remained of the Club of Rome's model by 1985 was an artifact of an era, something one might put in an exhibit at the Woodstock Museum that Senator Clinton would like the government to subsidize.

Before computer modeling came to attain the status of experimental evidence, such speculations were usually reserved to a certain class of science fiction. Antiquarians will point to some of the more spectacularly errant ideas realized in these novels and short stories, a staple of the paper pulps in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. One that arose, as computers were developed in the 1940s, was that the day would come when a few individuals with supercomputers would control the world. The writers who followed this lede had no way of knowing that more computing power than was available to the entire world in 1947 could be found in a $299 sale item at Wal-Mart in 2008. This kind of science fiction is almost always wrong, because the future is far too difficult to predict, especially in a free market economy.

It was easy to debunk this kind of fiction when the stories were bound in covers that looked like softcore pornography. (Old issues are now art collectibles on eBay.) But, after the startling realism of 2001, A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968, director), the silly symphony approach to science fiction movies, even so-called serious ones like Metropolis, gave way to an increasingly popular perception that science fiction might have a thing or two to say about things to come, as it were. That perception is very big today, but needs closer examination. Take Bladerunner.

As 2001, A Space Odyssey became after 1968, Bladerunner after 1982 became an iconic film, an artifact not only of its maker's imagination (and that of Philip Dick), but of a burgeoning political paradigm. Human beings were hurtling into a future where the environment would be poisoned by the very technology that allowed us to advance; only the rich would have havens of safety; only the rich would ever see sunlight. Beautifully designed, presented with convincing noir realism, the film's setting and background became how many people saw an impending, doomed world.

Bladerunner was released twenty-six years ago. The closest environments today to that depicted in the movie are found in China and in the wreck of the Soviet Union, not in the West. Environmental cleanups in the the Americas and Europe are so dramatic that New York, where one could feel the soot falling out of the sky in 1968, now seems like the windswept port city that it has always been. Even the air over Los Angeles, a city thicker with cars now than ever, has been transformed. An area in New Jersey west of the city where the waterways and swamps were green with toxins in 1970 is now a protected wildlife preserve. The weirs that held industrial waste are gone, the waste with them. There are more trees in the Appalachians now than there were in the 1700s. And, far from the populations reduced to serfdom as in the movie, we have more problems with overconsumption in 2008 than with workers slaving in fiery mills. Those mills are gone. The new ones are startlingly clean, the workers well paid. The Bradbury Hotels of New York have been either torn down, or have been renovated as condominiums. The hulks of tenements torched for insurance in the Bronx in the 1970s have been rebuilt or replaced. The vision of the movie, utterly convincing, of a dystopian world of the future, while it may have encouraged us to do better, was as wrong in its forecast of the future as was 2001, A Space Odyssey.

But, both are fiction. Fiction, onscreen or on the page, is an art form. Its plausibility isn't based on how true it is, but on how well it's done. Writers and filmmakers who propose futures are almost always wrong; they're creating art. And it's too complicated to imagine all of the possible variables of the next fifty to one thousand years. But, surely,the immensely powerful software and processors of today's computers, networked by the millions, can outdo a single man or filmmaking team. That must have been the temptation that drew scientists away from their initial scorn for computer calculation as a substitute for fieldwork and paperwork.

Take the weather. For five decades, the US Meteorological Service has requested more and more powerful computation assets. They've generally gotten them. Weather, a natural system, is a big problem. Ask any citizen of New Orleans. Trouble is, we've known for almost four decades that there are limits on computation of weather patterns. 48 hours is the most we can forecast. After that, you might as well flip coins. (Compare any local weather forecaster with actual results for a week.) A lobbyist pitching for more computational power for the USMS would be lying if he or she claimed that more computers would allow deeper projections into the future. It won't. Lorenz proved that in the early 1960s. Weather is a chaotic system, relatively stable, but never the same. What more computer power will do, however, and this is why the money is worth spending, is to allow richer detailing of those forty-eight hours. There, the difference between 1960 and 2008 is astonishing.

But the weather, like all other global patterns, is still a chaotic system, not a neat problem for a spreadsheet or more complicated software. As such, even with the vast computational power of the US Metereorological Service in 2005, New Orleans citizens didn't know that a) the storm would head into Lake Ponchartrain and defeat the levee system, and b) that the political leaders in the city would completely fail to meet the test the storm presented.

The same applies to any chaotic system. Such systems fall into similar patterns as they repeat processes, but they never do exactly the same thing twice. It's the difference between a hurricane striking harmlessly on a vacant part of east Texas or fatally in a direct hit on Galveston. Based on science that's now over four decades old, it's easy to aver the following: presuming to project a hundred years into the future on a global system like temperature patterns is as arrogantly presumptive as the Club of Rome predicting that we'd all starve to death in 1985.

The trouble is that computation in the abstract, working without the messy interference of contingency, such as physical evidence, is in its own way a kind of fiction factory where, instead of a year to develop and shoot a feature film, a new fiction can be produced with each variable introduced to the software. As Crichton has pointed out with considerable force, politics can introduce its own variables to so-called objective calculation. We can (and do) deny that certain physical evidence is relevant, because the evidence is politically unacceptable. And we're still left with the fact that a computational model is just that, a model, not the real thing. Taking exactly the same model, and introducing a random element (the way real events can be), we might find it just as easy to forecast an ice age. Oh,but wait: that was done before. Those who read history, or who were there, will remember the reputations put on the line in the 1970s to predict global cooling.

Luther

Kay Hymowitz's Wail About Immature Men

Young men especially need a culture that can help them define worthy aspirations. Adults don’t emerge. They’re made....,Child-Man in the Promised Land, Kay Hymowitz, City Journal, Spring 2008

When first reading this, it seemed that the author was describing young men in a blaxploitation movie set in Harlem in 1973. Directionless, overgrown teenagers, abandoned by society, seeking out pleasures, licit and illicit, utterly uninterested in the larger consequences of sexual relationships, high on one thing or another -- this was the foundation of a new hooliganism, sometimes called the Quiet Riot.

But, wait, this long and windy complaint is a general description of single young men in 2008. It's no longer Them (dark, foreboding, handsome, good at basketball); it's all single young men. While young women have become the New Woman, young men have become idle, video game freaks who just want some trim before breakfast.

Single women in their twenties and early thirties are joining an international New Girl Order, hyperachieving in both school and an increasingly female-friendly workplace, while packing leisure hours with shopping, traveling, and dining with friends...(Child-Man in the Promised Land, cont'd)
Of course, Hymowitz fails to point out that it's illegal for there to be a New Boy Order, you know, where guys work together toward helping one another, where they're regarded as a disadvantaged class in school and therefore given vastly more assistance than so-called "advantaged" students. When was the last time you heard about a public education campaign to assist the huge number of male students at the tipping point of dropping out of school? When was the last college campaign you heard about to help male students over the hump of required courses in areas where many may have problems?

And on the job, the writer's own experience suggests that the virtues of the New Girl (aggressive, assertive, hard-charging, and in control) are denied to the New Boy. The motivation to succeed has been undercut by a new privileged class and the order's enforcers in upper management.

Fact is, the game now is not a transformation of the old game, where boys were somewhat advantaged (except for little matters like required military service). The new game simply inverts the old. At least in the old days the girls had marriage and motherhood to look forward to. Funny thing -- some of these brilliant columnists should read a serious anthropologist like Robin Fox -- men unmotivated by the prospect of being a part of family and society tend to turn into video game freaks, drunks, and losers. It is also worth noting that, for thirty years, the propaganda from all points of the compass has been that men are dangerous, destructive, over-aggressive tyrants. After a while, the target of constant propaganda may begin to believe the lies and start saying "yeah, that's what I'm really like."

There is also some doubt in this writer's mind about the superiority of a New Girl culture of shopping, travel and dining. When that culture is upheld by the necessity to wage war for resources, this writer knows who pays. It ain't the New Girl driving the Escalade.

Luther

Senator Clinton: Lying A Career Style?

The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes...Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career...Why?...“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”...Watergate-Era Judiciary Chief of Staff: Hillary Clinton Fired For Lies, Unethical Behavior, Dan Calabrese, North Star Writers Group, 3/31/2008

Oh, Hill and Bill, those naked days of youth are coming back to haunt you. Change the rules midstream? Hillary will do it. Violate the Constitution? Hillary can find a way. Show contempt for Congress? Hillary can. The Empress's new suit is nakedly lawless. Even the Democrats are saying so now.

Luther

McCain's Clear-Eyed Observations on Mortgage Madness

Rising home prices led lenders to lower their standards, McCain said. “Some Americans bought homes they couldn't afford,” he added, “betting that rising prices would make it easier to refinance later at more affordable rates."...Wall Street helped inflate the housing bubble, McCain argued, by betting big on mortgage-backed securities. When housing prices started to decline and foreclosures started to rise, a widely dispersed network of investors found themselves owning a lot of questionable mortgage debt, which sent investors into a panic...In McCain’s formulation, irresponsible lending and borrowing created the problem, and uncertainty is at the root of its spread throughout the financial community. If accurate, this diagnosis demonstrates the folly of the Democrats’ proposed cures, which would reward irresponsibility and increase uncertainty among investors....Thumbs Up, Editorial, National Review Online, 3/28/2008

If you listened carefully to the plan offered by the junior Senator from New York, Clinton's prescription for the mortgage panic, simply and honestly described by the Senator John McCain, was a promise to alleviate the panic by stimulating more of it. What, you say?

If a debt market is running scared because there are widely distributed doubts about repayment of mortgages, a policy where the government guarantees that people with mortgages don't have to pay will instead guarantee that the debt market will panic even more. Such a policy would entirely undercut the mortgage security business, sending it into a depression. That's Senator Clinton's plan. Carefully denying the truth so artlessly expressed by Senator McCain, she proposes a policy that will make the truth even worse. Why? Let's lay it out point by point:

1) Securities based on mortgages have strong prices when people pay back their loans, making for a) happy investors, and b) more mortgages, and c) more houses built, and d) more happy owners.

2) Holders of securities based on mortgages panic when the word gets out that people are not paying back (or have been relieved from paying back) their loans. What happens?

a. Prices of securities based on loans plunge.
b. In response, banks and mortgage brokers re-introduce high standards for getting loans.
c. Following that, credit tightens;
d. Fewer mortgages are granted;
e. Foreclosures rise;
f. The homebuilding industry starts to shrink;
g. Existing home sales go south;
h. Then, constituents for both parties become unhappy.
i. Politicians start to spitzer.
j. If politicians succeed in spitzering, market collapses, later described as the popping of a "bubble" in real estate.
k. If politicians fail in their efforts to spitzer, market corrects, credit conditions improve, people are happier, especially home buyers, banks, mortgage brokers, and taxpayers.

It isn't very complicated. Just look at the fiscal history of any bank.

How long are we going to keep voting for people who think without the bother of checking against the facts? Don't listen when politicians spitzer about mortgages. The better idea is to sort out your problems, negotiate with your bank or mortgage broker, cut expenses where possible, work out an agreement, and change your expectations to meet real conditions, not false hopes. The latter are the specialty of prostitutes and look at who has to pay!

Luther

Obama/Bloomberg? NonPartisan? Ha!

He was only the warm-up act for Sen. Barack Obama's economic speech in New York on Thursday, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg sparked plenty of speculation by sharing the stage with the Democratic presidential hopeful...Could There Be an Obama-Bloomberg Ticket? CNN, 3/27/08

For those easily fooled, this news item will come as a surprise. Isn't Bloomberg a Republican who's brought New York's city budget into balance?

Well, actually, you've been fooled if you believe that. Bloomberg, a multibillionaire and, until 2001, a lifelong Democrat, managed the deficits that came out of the 9/11 attack on New York with substantially higher property and other taxes. There have been no substantive spending cuts. Instead, as tax revenues have risen with the real estate and stock market boom of the Bush Administration, there has been a substantial increase in spending. That's how New York came to have a surplus in a few years under Bloomberg, a surplus now in serious danger. With the financial services industry reeling under the credit crunch, New York City's budget is going out of whack. Except for the fact that Bloomberg refused to lower taxes, to return the surplus to the taxpayers in other words, the city would already be in substantial deficit.

Bloomberg is also a change advocate of the most pernicious sort. Bloomberg to people: eat what I say you should eat; don't smoke; drive what I say you should drive; pay more taxes. If you're not easily fooled, the gossip about a marriage between the Mayor of New York and the Senator from Illinois is probably the truest news story run on CNN in years. The "nonpartisan" label is similar to standard glosses in society page announcements used to veil differences that might end up in divorce court. That's a prospect unlikely to happen with these two. The only objection to their marriage might be from those conservatives who object to incest.

Luther

Policy by Avoidance: Why Liberals Always Get It Wrong

Obama seemed to suggest that families in America escape poverty by patiently accumulating wealth and passing it on to future generations—when in fact millions of Americans of all races leap out of poverty within a single lifetime through their own initiative, not their inheritances. We are long past the time when the legacy of Jim Crow laws and other forms of official discrimination can explain black poverty rates...Getting Poverty Wrong, Stephen Malanga, City Journal, 3/21/2008

Stephen Pinker, at times probably the most hated scientist at faculty meetings in Cambridge, has written extensively about the modern propensity to deny human nature. (See his book The Blank Slate: Modern Denial of Human Nature, Stephen Pinker, 2002) Policy wonks (the Clintons, the Obamas, the McCains) become enraged by opinions that suggest something other than Social Construction determines what lives people lead. Under this political idea, nothing good happens unless a Democrat (or pseudo-Democrat) proposes and executes a plan. The notion that human beings, at birth, contain the foundation for much of what they'll need in life, especially the will to look after themselves and their families, is deeply offensive to modern left/liberals. They still believe in the 18th century notion that human beings are blank slates, whose personalities and success in life are only written in by politically correct ideas and liberal 5-year plans enforced by an all-powerful state. It is arguable that an entire political movement over the last one hundred years has been based on what Pinker and many other scientists have demonstrated time and again is a false notion, that human beings are helpless and ignorant without the intervention of the state. When a Spitzer is on the loose, however, beware!

Reading Obama’s speech prompted me to look at his larger economic policy proposals, especially those aimed at combating poverty. Clearly, he believes that our economy is failing many Americans, and to help the impoverished, he proposes everything from tax credits for the working poor to a higher minimum wage. In fairness, on these issues, he’s not much different than his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton...Yet both candidates are largely missing the point. While they insist that strengthening labor unions or protecting homeowners from foreclosures will alleviate the hardships of the poor, the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census remind us that the breakdown of the traditional two-parent, married family is a far greater contributor to poverty in America than many of the supposed shortcomings of our economy....(Getting Poverty Wrong, Malanga, City Journal.

Shades of the late Patrick Moynihan! In a hugely misinterpreted analysis of poverty, published during the Nixon Administration, the late Senator Moynihan warned that, unless government policy was constrained by what he impolitely called "benign neglect", economic conditions among African-Americans were likely to get worse, not better. Government policy, Moynihan posited, was actually the largest cause of poverty, especially among African-Americans. Such policy did this in several pernicious ways: encouraging out-of-wedlock childbirth (for more aid to dependent children); discouraging presence of a father (presence of a working age male in the household prevented welfare assistance); and more generally, substituting a poverty-level survival income for the will to get a job. The best solution, Moynihan suggested, was to let people learn how to take care of themselves and their children. This message was greeted as treason by Democrats, another proof of the malfeasance of the Nixon Administration. Exposing a fiction, hoping to better the lives of Americans, was the late Senator's treasonous act. Liberals preferred to continue denying the truth, in order to continue ordering up policies based on lies.

And that's how liberals, by denying evidence (to protect the delicate sensibilities of their constituents), always get it wrong. Why do we keep electing these idiots? Pinker would probably say the following: because of our inborn capacity for hope, we are also vulnerable to hopeful lies. And Pinker would likely advise: to avoid being sucked in by lies, pay attention. Each of us is born with eyes and ears and the intelligence to assess what they see and hear. Use them. What's on display for anyone to see is a history of liberal plans for how we should spend our money, and the consequences to us and to the economy when we listened. The false economy of the Clinton/dot.com era, the inflation of the Carter era, the trillions spent on "relief of poverty" from the Johnson Administration onwards, the trillions more spent on "fixing" public education -- how much evidence to do you need to realize that liberals always get it wrong? Hope and change based on what's out there can transform the world. Based on fictions and denial, they can bring chaos and ruin.

Luther

New York and Cleveland Spitzered Enough?

The term "Spitzer" belongs in the dictionary, and its definition should be "any politician." We ought to think of all politicians as Spitzers. No, they don't all have lurid involvements with prostitutes. But they all have an inflated view of their superiority over the rest of us...The Universal Spitzer, Arnold Kling, TCSDaily.com, 3/28/2008

A Spitzer a day keeps prosperity away?

From the sound of it, you couldn't go wrong saying that in downtown Cleveland. TCSDaily's Arnold Kling has made a nice coinage out of a name.

Suppose that we define "Spitzer" as someone who believes in the aggressive use of political power. A Spitzer believes it is his mission to tell us what to do for own good...Is Barack Obama--who also comes from a Harvard Law School background, and who identifies the "audacity of hope" with government expansion--a Spitzer? Absolutely. Is Hillary Clinton--who sees the the state as a substitute for a village, making it also a substitute for the family--a Spitzer? Positively. Is John McCain--who Virginia Postrel describes as "an instinctive regulator who considers business a base pursuit"-- a Spitzer? Unfortunately, yes....(The Universal Spitzer, Arnold Kling, TCS Daily.com, continued...)

Could spitzer be a verb? Imagine a politician saying "I'd sure like to Spitzer you; the taxpayers can pick up the tab."

One thing is certain. When a Spitzer shows up at your door, quadruple your prices for anything he or she wants!

;-)

Luther

Mistake On the Lake Continues to Play Out

Wonk recently returned from another trip to his ancestral home, Cleveland, Ohio, "The Best Location in the Nation," that decaying Rust Belt town that was once, for a brief shining moment (in the 1920s), the nation's Second City before Chicago grabbed that moniker more or less permanently.

Today, like Detroit, Cleveland is largely a burnt-out husk of its former industrial glory. Entire neighborhoods emptied overnight over the past 2 years as wave after wave of foreclosures hit homeowners with marginal incomes and ridiculous interest-only or 2/28 mortgages they never understood and never should have signed. Cleveland's thuggish underclass then finished the job by stripping each foreclosed house of anything of value, turning huge blocks of the city into the kind of thing you see in apocalyptic films like "Mad Max." Guess that's "progressive" politics in action. Except now there's nothing left to redistribute.

As if Cleveland hasn't already sunk far enough into the primeval slime, Clevelanders have demonstrated their almost suicidal fear and self-loathing by electing and re-electing, time after time as their U.S. Representative, none other than Denny Kucinich, Cleveland's own Boy Blunder. Obviously bored by the hometown crowd, he's spent more time in recent years traveling across the U.S. and foreign nations alike, badmouthing his country and promoting his never-ending Harold Stassen-like quest for a Presidency that will never be his, since even most Ohioans know he's an idiot. Except in Cleveland which will probably re-elect this certifiable moron and Marxist darling who, apparently, still has deep psychological problems with any authority other than his own.

The primary problem with cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Toledo, et. al. is the refusal of the general population to recognize that the Democrats they ritually put into office year after year are old-fashioned 1930s machine pols who raise taxes on Joe Sixpack to enrich themselves and their cronies while letting their once bright cities rot out from under them. Sort of the Saddam or Mugabe effect in slo-mo. Cleveland's politicians in particular, aided and abetted by The Plain Dealer, arguably America's worst newspaper after the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, routinely trash businesses, and now banks as Enemies of the People. And then they and their constituents scratch their heads wondering where all the jobs went. Gosh, I don't know.

Until folks up in northern Ohio learn a little bit more about the laws of cause and effect, they're doomed to residing permanently at the bottom of the American economic barrel. Why people do this to themselves has always been beyond me, but there you go. It's why I never moved back.

Back Again, Kicking Eliot While He's Down & Out

Greetings, Earthlings. Wonk is back, after being scarcer than truth in the Obama and Billary campaigns over the past month. Continuing fallout from earlier cited family matters continues to intrude. But what a delight that Luther has returned from his own recent hiatus to help former NY Governor Spitzer down from his lofty pedestal. (HazZzMat: "Governor" Spitzer: Why They're Cheering on the Floor of the Exchange.) Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

We learned long ago that the more self-righteous, the more sanctimonious the politician is, the more likely he's a closet perp awaiting discovery.

What Governor Paterson Faces in New York

It is breath-taking to consider how different New York looks this morning compared to only a week ago. Back then, Eliot Spitzer was seemingly ensconced in the governorship and Bear Stearns was a financial house valued by the market at something on the order of $30 billion...[Today the whole company was sold for 10% of its value of last Friday]. Seven years ago our city was attacked by a barbaric enemy, who came down out of the skies and killed thousands, destroying in the process the buildings that symbolized our commercial and trading spirit...But within only a few years, our city has rebuilt if not ground zero then the physical space needed to conduct our commerce, all in one of the greatest building booms and surges of optimism in history....The New York Sun, 3/17/2008.

If you've followed the story closely, as many New Yorkers have, it's more breathtaking than the editors at the Sun have written in today's lead editorial. Despite this brilliant recovery, New York State is dominated by tax and spend liberals in both parties. With tax receipts plummeting with the crisis in financial services, budget deficits are climbing rapidly in Albany and threatened in New York despite Mayor Bloomberg's best efforts. In the Democrat Assembly and the Republican Senate, politicians are falling over themselves to spend more money that we don't have, holding out the promise of taxes, more taxes on a state already taxed more heavily than any other, including California.

What's worse, many giant projects felt necessary by state and regional authorities have become financial disasters. The transportation center near ground zero is a total flop. While the MTA has rebuilt the basic elements of the network that crisscrossed downtown Manhattan, including the lines that went directly under the World Trade Center, the "center" is an empty lot. The Second Avenue Subway, a project already three years and several billion dollars late, won't open until 2012. The Ratner socialism-for-the-rich Atlantic Yards project, which depends heavily on eminent domain and the destruction of several neighborhoods, can't find private financing.

And yet, despite regulatory and tax conditions that would drive most entrepreneurs out of state, as so many have left upstate and western New York in the last two decades, vast numbers of new small businesses have swum against the flood of regulations, bureaucratic entanglements, and monsterous tax rates to build new, stable neighborhoods across the city. Politicians and political investment have done none of this. They have only stood in the way, hands out for more tax money.

It was a surge in which Bear Stearns was an important part, both in terms of its business, which surged until the latest downturn, and in terms of philanthropy, where managing directors were expected to give at least 4% of their annual compensation to charity... Bear aficionados searching for epitaphs may find themselves flipping through Alan C. Greenberg's book, "Memos From the Chairman," which includes one prescient note dated March 13, 1979: "It certainly looks like we have a dynamic future in store as long as we remember the words of the famous philosopher Haimchinkel Malintz Anaynikal: 'thou will do well in commerce as long as thou does not believe thine own odor is perfume.'"...(After the Bear, cont'd)

Greenberg's conception never bothered private citizen Spitzer, Governor Paterson's predecessor. His preposterous hypocrisy, while not quite rivaling Caligula, is, sadly, representative of a whole political class in New York State, a class that has, with rare exceptions, like Mayor Bloomberg, stood fast on the principle that nothing so serves their constituents as taking money and property from everybody else, a time-honored tradition going back to Roscoe Conkling. Private citizen Spitzer crossed the line, but there are many just on the other side.

And one should not imagine that the failure of one private company, and the tottering of another (Citigroup), is proof that the thieves in Albany were right. These disasters are instead a disturbing, real demonstration of the foolishness of the politically driven business model in New York: nothing is so good as the financial services industry; nothing else is worth giving tax incentives to. Fact is, banks and brokerages are the foundation of the New York State. The political judgment that promoted this result bears unpleasant comparison to farmers who plant one crop year after year. When that crop fails, there's nothing left. This is already close to the case in western New York, where you can drive for a hundred miles in some directions and find only ghost towns.

There will be much backward looking, as there was after September 11, 2001, at how the collapses we've just seen could have happened. Our own instinct, in the case of Bear Stearns, is to look to whether it is possible to transmit true price signals with an unsound currency. But this is a time to remember that the resilience that is the hallmark of New York and to work at fashioning the right policy prescriptions in the months and years ahead...(After the Bear, NY Sun, cont'd)

A creative political administration in Albany is the one that will find some way to attract a more complex business mix to the state. This will involve tax policy, development ideas, and negotiations with major unions. It will involve, as the new Governor of New York said in his inaugural address, "taking actions that we are not used to taking."

A new administration is being assembled in Albany, and before long another will be assembled in Washington. Both of them will be all too tempted to tax the most successful...at producing capital and other gains. There is growing talk among the Democrats of protectionism. It is a good moment to study how the Great Depression came upon us. What is needed now is a renewed commitment to protecting the ability of and, importantly, the incentives for people to take risks, to make investments, to create jobs, and to make profits. Many governors and financial houses have come and gone, but those principles have produced the resilience that has made New York so great. (After the Bear, Editorial NY Sun, 3/17/08, cont'd)

The ideas prominently expressed in The New York Sun are not often taken seriously in New York City, the home, after all, of left-liberal journalism from television networks to The Times. But one hopes that Governor Paterson of New York does. He shows more signs of doing so than the sanctimonious liar who preceded him, and it's a good thing. A lot more than the future of one former star from Yale is at stake. The future of New York State stands on the brink. The new Governor of New York knows that. The time is fast coming for action. May God bless Governor Paterson's search for answers with good sense and a willingness to deal with what is, and not with what seems to be.

Luther

Who Is That Masked Man?

"Who's next?"

Luther

A DAY LATER, CLINTON EMBRACES SPITZER...

Oh, wait, she's about to punch him. Damn, should have taken that shot two seconds earlier!

Oh, forgot the rest of the headline...

'S LICENSE AGREEMENT.

You get to cheat in the press, right?

Luther

Spitzer Understatement of the Week

For a supporter, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer sure hasn't done Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton any favors lately....Hillary Clinton's Spitzer Problem, Peter Baker, The Washington Post, 3/13/08

Not surprisingly, Senator Clinton has removed all traces of hooker hunting, private citizen Spitzer from her Web site. It's a trick she learned from the Chinese communists. If someone offends you, pretend he doesn't exist.

Luther

Ohoh-'bama!

Sen. Barack Obama's pastor says blacks should not sing "God Bless America" but "God damn America."...In a campaign appearance earlier this month, Sen. Obama said, "I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial." He said Rev. Wright "is like an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with," telling a Jewish group that everyone has someone like that in their family...Rev. Wright married Obama and his wife Michelle, baptized their two daughters and is credited by Obama for the title of his book, "The Audacity of Hope."....Obama's Pastor: God Damn America; U.S. To Blame for 9/11, ABC with Brian Ross

I'm sure John McCain is glad he doesn't have an Uncle Joe Billy who screams about woodpiles and rape from the pulpit.

Luther

What a Difference a Masthead Makes

As New York's de facto governor, David Paterson, readies himself to take the reins of a vast state government, he and his aides are scrambling to assemble a policy agenda out of the ruins of the Spitzer administration....Paterson Sets Albany Shakeup, Jacob Gershman, The New York Sun, 3/13/08

The above was the lead front page article in The New York Sun the day private citizen Spitzer took a dive off his divorce lawyer's desk. The Sun was the only New York paper to run an article about what was coming next. The Times led with hooker hunting, private citizen Spitzer's resignation set as if it had been the landing at Normandy. Predictably, The New York Post ran soft core photos of "Kirsten", with a lot more on Friday. The Sun hardly agrees with Governor-by-default Paterson on one issue but his picture filled a quarter of the paper's front page. Why?

Governor Paterson is the story. The Love Gov is history.

Luther

Spitzer: What Some New Yorkers Are Saying

Please explain to me how getting a divorce is similar to cheating on your wife with a prostitute while holding a public office that fashioned itself around ethical and straight-shooting morals....J. Williams, Editorial Reply, J. Williams, Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, 3/11/2008

Some will need that explanation, especially over at Senator Clinton's office.

Traveling a day early to Washington using taxpayer dollars is a great idea if it were to attend meetings to lobby for more funding for NYS. Staying at one of the most expensive hotels in Washington shows a lack of respect for taxpayers but I'm sure it isn't worth the additional waste of tax dollars to create a task force to investigate or to have the State Troopers follow his every move. A good scolding would work. But to travel a day early on our dime and to stay at one of the poshest, most expensive hotels in what is already an expensive city in order to engage in an illegal activity is not only criminal it is immoral and reprehensible. And again, on our dime. To show how big his ego has gotten and how "untouchable" he felt he had become he did all of this in spite of taxpayers but then he chooses the night before Valentine's Day as a poke in the eye to his wife. Personal? Private? Baloney !...(Editorial Reply, 'SnowBoy', Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, 3/11/2008)

Eliot "Snow White" Spitzer doesn't have a friend in SnowBoy, that's for sure!

In my opinion, whether Spitzer is a Republican or a Democrat is beside the point. He broke the law, and should step down. The whole thing is sad and disturbing, for his family but also the people of New York, especially since he demanded such high standards from all of us. This is not merely cheating on his wife while in office or having a gay love affair. Neither of those is illegal....(Editorial Reply, 'Elignore," Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, 3/11/2008)

In a long lost innocent age, say, 1983, this was considered the standard American view. Oh, Dutch, where are you when we need you the most?

Luther

Spitzer: Perspective from Nicholas Wapshott

A number of New York crooks and their lawyers could be forgiven for indulging in a little schadenfreude last night at Governor Spitzer's oblique confession to having consorted with a prostitute. After picking up glittering prizes at Princeton and Harvard, the governor set out on a brilliant legal career in which he liked to pose as a combination of Mob buster Eliot Ness and class warrior Robin Hood. Time magazine even named him "Crusader of the Year."...Prosecuting Himself, Nicholas Wapshott, The New York Sun, 3/11/2008

That schadenfreude was visible on the subway this morning at 6:30 when the writer was on his way to work, people howling with laughter at the headlines and the stories -- hell, the spectre of the Lone Ranger partying with a high-end tart. Fact was, though, that the Love Gov had a powerful, impressive start, with the sky (i.e. the White House) a reasonable goal.

Ah, but don't play Saint Michael in New York City. People will be looking for you, down the avenues and streets, in the clubs and bars, and with relentless fury. Every Assistant DA, professional and amateur sleuth, not to mention the crowds who love to see a public burning, were waiting for a fall. No one but the poor woman married to the Love Gov was crying. And I doubt very much that people were weeping when Savanarola was torched in a public square in Florence either.

Wapshott's article, however, should be required reading in public schools and public and private universities. This is what really happens in politics. Forget the thirty second spots and the endorsements. Stick with what they actually do.

Word is that the Love Gov's favorite Senator was rather silent about all this. One can't imagine why.

Luther

"Governor" Spitzer: Why They're Cheering on the Floor of the Exchange

The revelation that Spitzer enjoyed the services of a high-end Washington call-girl ring may bring with it federal charges - and likely means the end of an exceptionally maladroit administration...It's been forgotten now, but the former "Sheriff of Wall Street" rose to power by his own rules. After all, he began his career by using his father's money to systematically cheat the spirit - if not the letter - of the state campaign-finance laws to win office as attorney general. He then spent years engaging in elaborate denials about those shenanigans, with vague apologies mixed in as necessary when caught in his lies...As attorney general, he started out by taking on genuine malfeasance on Wall Street - but ended up prosecuting petty cases in order to bully companies into installing his cronies in key corporate positions...His first year as governor was one magnificent botch....Gov. Longshot? David Patterson's Unusual Rise, Fred Siegel, The New York Post3/11/2008

There is nothing quite so satisfying as the sight of a sanctimonious hypocrite confessing his sins in public. As a result, New York may soon go from suffering Eliot Spitzer's blind ambition to the competent ministrations of an African-American.

(Patterson was) a longtime minority member of the state Senate before becoming lieutenant governor; he'd bring to the governor's office the legislative perspective and understanding of how the capital works that Gov. Steamroller has so notably lacked...He even gets along well with Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno; he just might be able to bring a welcome spirit of openness to Albany....(Gov. Longshot, cont'd...)

The old saw never sounded as true: Justice is blind. And New Yorkers are more likely to get a healthy vision from a governor who can't see than from a lying hypocrite who can't tell the difference between a love affair and a honey trap.


Luther

Hillary's Service Record

Well, we're getting back to what resembles normal after dealing with unfortunate events earlier this month, and we were intrigued with this observation, nested essentially three references deep from its initial mention in Instapundit:

When Hillary tells you that she has lots of experience, she doesn’t really tell you what the experience is, but you’re supposed to imagine what it must have been. She must have been sitting in the Situation Room when the Joint Chiefs of Staff were making their judgments about how to proceed in Iraq and elsewhere. She never says that but that’s what you’re supposed to fantasize... Hillary’s claim to have had a lot of experience in government is [BS]; she doesn’t have any experience. She’s been a senator for [a few] years but she’s not talking about that; she’s talking about sleeping with the president for eight years as if that’s prepared her to run the country.

We pondered this for a moment and came to an interesting thought: if the "service" Hillary is referring to is indeed defined correctly in the last paragraph above, wouldn't there have actually been at least one significant "break in service" during that period of time?

Hey, look, bloggers have to have a reason for getting up in the morning, right?

Death in the Family

Blogging's been a little sparse in these here parts for some time as Luther struggles with "progressive" attitudes at his place of employment while Wonker continues trying to evolve a strategy to create some much needed black ink at his.

But Wonk's putting issues aside this week and heading to Ohio (which we hope is still somewhere on the map after all those foreclosures) to deal with the final rites for his dad, who passed away a couple days ago after a long struggle with Alzheimer's. As with all such cases, this is a bittersweet moment, since dad actually left us a long time ago, in the sense that he no longer had a clue as to who we were. Nonetheless, you could see him early on still struggling to stay on this planet, mentally, as more and more pieces of info began to depart forever and his life lost its moorings.

Having lost mom last Christmas, this time after her own long fight with multiple sclerosis--which she managed to survive until she was an astonishing 85 years of age--well, that probably sent what was left of dad's memory into deep space, as often happens when a longtime life partner (in this case, almost 60 years) departs. As we gathered after the service to pick up the pieces, Dad started hitting on Mrs. Wonker, which was actually pretty funny, since he'd cordially despised her when Wonk was a'courtin many moons ago. That was sure a sign.

It's been a tough 3 years or so with all this going on. As more and more Boomers are finding out, longer lives aren't always the blessing you think they're going to be. Care for ailing parents, an ailing spouse, or both, is expensive, tough, and time consuming, and it forces a lot of compromises and changes to deal with it--in Wonk's case, the termination of several longtime efforts in the literary field which had meant a lot and were actually starting to make some headway. But family, ultimately, is more important than anything, since it's all you've got on this plane of existence, and they're the only people who likely won't desert you when you're up against it. So you gather round the flag and do your best. After all, for all the family sturm und drang, that's what the parental units always did for you.

Now the curtain has fallen on Act II, as our own Greatest Generation Wonkers proceed to their eternal reward, that mysterious light in the distance where you know there's a better world and where all is well. Which, emotionally, is passing strange to think about on a personal level--as the oldest kid, Wonk is now the next dude up at the exit gate. Gives you the willies when you think about it long enough.

So it's up to Ohio for a few days to close one chapter and open a new one in the never-ending pageant of life, which is still a pretty good cliché for describing how things seem to work. I'll see you when I return. In the meantime, by all means, enjoy the long weekend.

Toledo to Marines: Drop Dead! (But Not Here)

Apparently inspired by the Idiotarians running Berkeley, California, who declared the U.S. military not welcome in their nuclear- (and brain-) free zone, the Mayor of downtrodden Toledo, Ohio essentially pulled the same stunt:

The 200 members of Company A, 1st Battalion, 24th Marines, based in Grand Rapids, Mich., planned to spend their weekend engaged in urban patrol exercises on the streets of downtown as well as inside the mostly vacant Madison Building, 607 Madison Ave.

Toledo police knew days in advance about their plans for a three-day exercise. Yet somehow the memo never made it to Mayor Finkbeiner, who ordered the Marines out yesterday afternoon just minutes before their buses were to arrive.

"The mayor asked them to leave because they frighten people," said Brian Schwartz, the mayor's spokesman.

Gee, they're PAID to frighten people, you moron.

Interestingly, in this version and this one, we're unable to learn hizzoner's party affiliation. Idiotarian, for sure, but what's his real party? Can anybody guess? Try here.

Ohio, particularly northern Ohio, is losing jobs hand over fist, so what does this dope do? Gives his town another black eye. Real smart way to attract new businesses. That haven't already been deterred by Northern Ohio's socialist tax structure. Smart move, dude.

And in case you hit the link, Hizzoner is, of course, a Democrat. Who no doubt supported the troops before he didn't.

Little Mazel Tov for Maazel's Distasteful Remarks

The Washington Times noted that NY Philharmonic conductor Lorin Maazel is more than a little irritated that some Americans are criticizing the orchestra's upcoming concert trip to the world's Heart of Darkness, otherwise known as North Korea:

"People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw bricks, should they?" demanded Mr. Maazel. "Is our standing as a country — the United States — is our reputation all that clean when it comes to prisoners and the way they are treated? Have we set an example that should be emulated all over the world? If we can answer that question honestly, I think we can then stop being judgmental about the errors made by others.

Sarah Bryan Miller in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch gets right to the point posthaste:

For decades, some people have trivialized the horrors of Stalinism by putting McCarthyism in the same league. We can now update that comparison: the music director of the New York Philharmonic, Loren Maazel, has compared the United States to North Korea....

Because the insular country of North Korea is notable for (among other things) starving millions of its people, having one of the world’s most appalling records on human rights, pursuing an aggressive nuclear weapons program, and celebrating an astonishing second-generation cult of personality built around its (arguably insane) hereditary dictator, Kim Jong-Il, the Phil has taken considerable flak for its decision.

After taking a momentary, career-salvaging detour to issue a predictable, rote slap at the Bushies, Miller, thankfully regains her composure and her judgment:

If Maazel wants to claim that playing a concert for a collection of well-connected apparatchiks will help to foster international understanding, that’s his prerogative. But in attempting to put the United States on the same moral footing as the Stalinist hellhole that is North Korea, he trivializes the tragic sufferings of millions of people.

We agree. Maazel's casually thoughtless indulgence in moral relativism, which no doubt played well in New York, is another tiresome example of the entertainment world's generally adolescent grasp of world affairs.

A Shockingly Inconvenient Truth

Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.

To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better "eyes" with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth's climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.

And they're worried about global cooling, not warming.

Read the rest here.

Seems the REAL cycles have to do with sunspots, and we're in store for a return to the icebox effect by roughly 2020. Wonder what that'll do to futures in carbon credits. Of course, the Global Warming nuts don't care. Hell, it's all Bush's fault anyway.

Love It or Leave It?

Love of country must always be qualified these days, lest anyone think you are unaware of slavery, insufficiently regulated railroad stock offerings, Lester Maddox or the attempt by Philip Morris to conceal the addictive nature of cigarettes. Say “I love this country” at a dinner table with strangers, and it’s like shave and a haircut without the two bits. But? But?

--James Lileks

The indispensible Instapundit provided the link to Lileks' words of wisdom today. Lileks, of course, goes on to describe his irritation at the truth of his own observation. It's really just another example of the miserable political correctness the average American seems to casually accept today.

Well, I don't.

I love the U.S., warts and all. Moreover, I'm grateful to have been born here and to live here, and Mrs. Wonker has been equally grateful to have had the opportunity to legally emigrate here and become a citizen.

Our National past, a process of learning and enlightenment, is what got us to the fortunate place we are today. Both can only truly occur in an environment that permits such progress to unfold unhindered once we achieve consensus.

I never make apologies for the U.S. I leave that to the self-loathing idiotarians of the left. Blaming America First is not a game that either I, or any self-respecting sentient American citizen, can afford to play.

HillaryCare: Listen to Me or Watch Your Wallets

People actually laugh at Wonker when he accuses Hillary of harboring a socialist agenda. Well if you don't believe me, why not ask Hillary herself? Ever doubt that Hill still stands foursquare behind the socialization of healthcare in this country? Well, think again:

Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday she might be willing to garnish the wages of workers who refuse to buy health insurance to achieve coverage for all Americans.

She's aghast that Barack Obama has the temerity to disagree with her:

The New York senator has criticized presidential rival Barack Obama for pushing a health plan that would not require universal coverage. Clinton has not always specified the enforcement measures she would embrace, but when pressed on ABC's "This Week," she said: "I think there are a number of mechanisms" that are possible, including "going after people's wages, automatic enrollment."

Check out the aggressive, punishment-oriented verbiage here, "going after people's wages." It's an astonishingly blatant statement of intent, one that should give all voters, including well-meaning liberals, some pause. Hillary's belligerence is a great example of the smug, condescending attitude elite Democrats display toward the rest of us. Like the Stalinists they are, we're either going to willingly submit to their will, or, by God, they'll force us to.

Clinton said such measures would apply only to workers who can afford health coverage but refuse to buy it, which puts undue pressure on hospitals and emergency rooms. With her proposals for subsidies, she said, "it will be affordable for everyone."

Take that, you Gen X slackers who'd rather spend your money than fork it over to The State. We'll just take that money away from you before you get paid, to make health coverage "affordable for everyone." So there. And who gets to determine which voters are slackers who have the money but refuse to "buy" the package? Why Hillary, of course. Take it to the bank.

We actually appreciate Hillary's candor this time around. We hope voters will take her at her word. And really think before voting.

Unless, of course, you don't mind Hillary's Garnishment being added to the FICA, Medicare, Federal, State, and Local taxes that already reduce your take-home pay to a pittance.

Back Again. Really.

Wonk and Luther have been experiencing technical difficulties on a number of fronts over the last month. But with Super Tuesday looming, it's time to get back in gear, so here we go.