February 2007 Archives

Herbert Meyer, former special assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council during the Reagan Administration, has written a brilliantly concise essay titled "A Global Intelligence Briefing For CEOs" in which he describes the four major transformations going on in the world today.

1. The War in Iraq
2. The Emergence of China
3. Shifting Demographics of Western Civilization
4. Restructuring of American Business

I highly recommend reading the whole thing for an excellent overview of what's going on in the world today.

I'm no financial guru, so take this with a grain of salt, but people who make frequent long-term investments into the stocks or mutual funds shouldn't be worried by yesterday's dip in the market. First off, the drop was pretty minimal.

For some investors, this type of sharp decline can be jarring. That's probably much more so right now than usual, simply because we've had a stretch of almost unprecedented calm in the markets in recent years. Despite the pullback last summer, the major market indexes haven't had a correction — that is, a drop of 10% or more — in almost 4 years. That's the 2nd longest streak of all time.

When the markets steadily rise, day after day, month after month, year after year, it's easy to get sucked into thinking that's normal. It's not. Stocks typically move higher in a two steps forward, one step back fashion. It's unusual to get multiple years without a significant correction. In fact, it's perfectly normal to get about one 10% correction per year. That's the long-term average.

I don't report all this to scare anybody off. Quite the contrary. If you know that it's normal for stocks to pull back by 10% or so roughly once per year, it's a lot less rattling when it happens. Knowing that 2% market moves in a single day really aren't that unusual helps us stay calm when it happens for the first time in nearly a year.

Second, people who invest regularly and don't plan to withdraw their money from the market soon will actually benefit from these dips. Why? Because if you assume that the market will reach some particular height in the future, it's better for an investor if it stays low for as long as possible until that future point, that way we can keep buying stocks cheaply for as long as possible.

A growth trend of (1%, -5%, 3%, 21%) will be more profitable than a growth trend of (5%, 5%, 5%, 5%) for an investor who puts money into the market over time. The investor who puts in a lump sum at the beginning of the trend will get the same results either way, but those of us who make monthly contributions into our 401(k) will do better in the first case than in the second. A person who has to withdraw their money after the third phase of the trends above would prefer the second trend, but an investor with a long-term horizon would prefer the first trend.

Bettors on Intrade, the new non-sports incarnation of Tradesports, think that John McCain's chances of winning the Republican nomination have fallen below Rudy Giuliani's.

I personally don't think the nominee will be either of these men.

The wife and I rarely eat pizza, but last night we ordered a Cheesy Bites Pizza from Pizza Hut and it was the best thing ever. Ever. You'd think the cheesy bites would be just like the stuffed crust, but you'd be wrong because they're covered in garlic butter. We only managed to eat half a pizza between us before collapsing into a satiated puddle of greasy goo.

Pizza Hut: send me coupons.

As the secular progressive equivalent of the old Catholic Church practice of allowing wealthy Christians to purchase indulgences for the sins that would land peasants in hell, rich environmentalist leftists like Al Gore purchase "carbon emission offsets" that allow them to excuse their extravagant lifestyles that they would deny to the rest of us.

A day after a film about his efforts to combat global warming won an Oscar, former Vice President Al Gore was called a hypocrite by a Tennessee group that said his Belle Meade home is consuming too much energy.

The home's average monthly electric bill last year was just under $1,200, according to bills that The Tennessean acquired from Nashville Electric Service.

Gore's mansion is consuming more than 20 times the national average electricity and natural gas. I personally don't care how much energy he uses, as long as he pays for it, but I'm getting sick and tired of being lectured by the left that we need to conserve and reduce energy use for the sake of the environment. Al Gore is a multimillionaire, and in addition to being able to afford a gigantic mansion he can also afford to buy "carbon emission offsets" to make him feel all warm and fuzzy inside. His advise that we all go and do likewise is infuriating, because some of us have to work for a living and haven't had the opportunity to build up a loony cult to fly us around the world giving lectures for hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop.

Gore said he also buys carbon offsets: a service that tries to reduce the total carbon emissions of individuals or organizations indirectly.

"What Mr. Gore has asked is that every family calculate their carbon footprint and try to reduce it as much as possible," Gore's office said, according to Thinkprogress.org. "Once they have done so, he then advocates that they purchase offsets, as the Gores do, to bring their footprint down to zero."

Oh well let me just ratchet up my energy bill by 50% a month to buy "green power"! I've got all the respect in the world for people who come by their wealth honestly; they can spend it however they want, and if "carbon emission offsets" make them feel good then fine. Al Gore, however, isn't an honest businessman. He has set himself up as the high priest of a godless, misanthropic religion whose main goal is to thin the herd of humanity and cast us back into the stone age.

I won't buy Al Gore's indulgences, and his ignorance of middle-class Americans is astounding. For whatever flaws the Christians and the political right may have, at least we proclaim that the same standards apply to everyone. Al Gore and his monstrous environmentalist ilk are the worst sort of hypocrites, modern-day Pharisees.

Luke 11:43-46

[Jesus said,] "Woe to you Pharisees, because you love the most important seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces.

"Woe to you, because you are like unmarked graves, which men walk over without knowing it."

One of the experts in the law answered him, "Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us also."

Jesus replied, "And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them."

Update:

My wife tells me that Bill O'Reilly's radio show today was exactly the same as this post. Ergo: someone should give me a radio show.

I have probably perused The Daily Kos fewer than a handful of times in my life, but I had a hunch that the lefties would have a "too bad they missed" response to the failed attempt to assassinate Vice President Cheney by Taliban rebels in Afghanistan. I wasn't disappointed as the oh-so-wittily-named "Dood Abides" mocks Cheney for not thwarting the attack. (Or something... the article is labeled "satire", but that normally requires some modicum of irony or humor.)

Hours after touching down aboard Air Force two following what the White House has described as a extremely successful Asian trip, Vice President Dick Cheney was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by President Bush in recognition of his heroism in surviving an assassination attempt by a suicide bomber yesterday in Afghanistan. Mr. Cheney was recognized for his unprecedented valor and calm demeanor in the aftermath of the explosion which Taliban forces in Afghanistan have claimed responsibility for in an attempt to assassinate the vice president.

"'Is everyone okay, are we still alive?', These were the first words that came from the mouth of this self-sacrificing American patriot," stated President Bush. "After he made sure that he and everyone around him were okay, he insisted that the dead and wounded be taken care of immediately by the Afghan government."

And instead Cheney should have done... what? One of the tragedies of the left is that they've ruined the comedic value of "edginess" by assuming it as their everyday modus operandi. Edginess is only funny when when it stands out, when the "edge" is typically respected and only rarely crossed. When everything that comes from the left is "edgy" there's really just no point anymore. It's not funny, it's just disgusting and disgraceful.

Update:

My wife tells me that Sean Hannity's radio show today was exactly the same as this post. Ergo: someone should give me a radio show.

I've always been fascinated by roads and traffic management. Optimizing traffic flow is quite a difficult problem, and well-suited to the fuzzy Artificial Intelligence domain. My wife sent me an article about some construction on the Highway 94/ Interstate 70 interchange that said that the new design will be a single-point urban interchange, also known as a SPUI.

In contrast to the more traditional diamond interchange, also shown above, the SPUI allows "opposing" left turns to happen simultaneously. The blue arrows in the diagrams show the left turns required to get onto the interstate, and the red arrows show the left turns required to get off of the interstate. As can be seen, the diamond interchange requires traffic following the two red arrows or the two blue arrows to cross each other, meaning that both arrows of the same color can't be given green lights at the same time. Thus, when the straight-through traffic is added in, the diamond interchange requires five light phases to give everyone a chance to go.

In contrast, the SPUI allows both red arrow turns to happen simultaneously, and likewise both blue arrow turns. With a phase for straight-through traffic, the SPUI requires only three light phases, thereby allowing up to 40% more capacity than a traditional diamond. Cool, huh?

In another outrageous statement from Mexico's government, Mexico's congress has complained about alleged border crossings by American workers building our wall.

Mexico's Congress has condemned what it says is a border violation by US workers building a controversial barrier between the two countries.

Legislators say workers and equipment building a section of the barrier have gone 10 metres (yards) into Mexico. ...

Mexican legislators said they had photographs and video, taken on Monday, of the workers and heavy-duty construction equipment that showed them about 10 metres inside Mexico near the border city of Agua Prieta and the town of Douglas, Arizona.

No word yet from Mexico's congress on the bazillions of Mexicans living millions of yards over our side of the border.

The most ridiculous part of the story though is that America actually apologized for the "incursion". Our leaders are pathetic, spineless wussies. That wall can't get built high enough, long enough, or fast enough to suit me.

Apparently a "preference for sons" is creating a gender imbalance in some regions of the world, though the New York Times neglects to mention how this could be happening.

More and more South Korean men are finding wives outside of South Korea, where a surplus of bachelors, a lack of marriageable Korean partners and the rising social status of women have combined to shrink the domestic market for the marriage-minded male. Bachelors in China, India and other Asian nations, where the traditional preference for sons has created a disproportionate number of men now fighting over a smaller pool of women, are facing the same problem.

Sounds like there's a story just begging to be reported! How can a "preference" for one gender actually result in a population imbalance? I've written about using abortion and infanticide for gender selection in the past, but perhaps the barbarity is more widespread that I had previously imagined. I expect that the left-wing media shies away from the story because they want to avoid any incriminating the blessed sacrament of abortion in any way.

(HT: James Taranto.)

I hate doing taxes. I spent more than five hours yesterday afternoon transferring numbers from one form to another, and it would have taken a lot longer if not for TaxACT. I really resent the complexity of determining how much money I've got to hand over to the government, and I'm always left with the nagging feeling that I did something wrong that's going to land me in jail.

Let me just say to any potential future auditor: I did my best. I try very hard to be as accurate as possible, and I err on the side of the Treasury. I attested at the end of the filing process that all the numbers were true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, and that's right. The fact of the matter is that after five hours of crunching numbers everything was a haze and I don't fully understand all the fields the software wanted me to fill in. I took line 934 from form 1040-WTF and put it in field XJ-09 like the software told me to, so I hope it's right.

There's got to be a better way to fund the government, no?

Update:

Nope, we're going to have to file an amended return for federal and both states. Yay. I filled out our moving expenses form wrong, thinking that lines 1 - 3 were for our moving expenses above what my employer reimbursed, not including. So most of the reimbursed moving expenses were wrongly counted as income. At least we'll get some additional money back. Good grief, could this be more complicated?

The United States' ambassador to Iraq has apologized for the arrest of a leading Iraqi politician's son who was held by American soldiers who were suspicious of his travel between Iraq and Iran.

U.S. troops detained the son of Iraq's most powerful Shiite politician Friday as he returned to the country from Iran, keeping him in custody for nearly 12 hours before releasing him, Shiite officials said. The U.S. ambassador apologized for the arrest.

Amar al-Hakim, son of Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, was taken into custody at a crossing point and was transferred to a U.S. facility in Kut, according to the elder al-Hakim's secretary, Jamal al-Sagheer. ...

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said the arrest was being investigated but stressed that Washington did not mean any disrespect to al-Hakim or his family.

"I am sorry about the arrest," he said. "We don't know the circumstances of the arrest and we are investigating … but he is being released."

The specifics may not be out yet, but the general circumstances are pretty clear:

U.S. authorities have complained about Iranian weapons sales and financial aid to major Shiite parties in Iraq, especially the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Both Washington and Iraqi leaders have vowed that no one would be exempt as a major security operation is under way in Baghdad.

President Bush should retract the ambassador's apology and issue a statement supporting the American soldiers doing a dangerous job protecting the Iraq-Iran border. Even if the arrest turns out to have been unnecessary, we don't need to apologize for vigorous border enforcement. Our troops aren't in Iraq fighting and dying so that Amar al-Hakim can shuttle back and forth to Iran uninspected.

I found this story rather amusing. Hat tip: KNIGHTofKNEE.

A newly prominent group is working to keep atheists out of government.

Annie Laurie Gaylor speaks with a soft voice, but her message catches attention: Keep atheists out of government.

Gaylor has helped transform the Freedom From Atheists Foundation from obscurity into the nation’s largest group of nondenominational Christians, with a fast-rising membership and increasing legal clout. ...

“What’s at stake is our culture's heritage of spirituality in our civic institutions,” Gaylor said. ...

Its leaders say the surge in membership reflects a U.S. population that is becoming more religious and growing conservative alarm since Democrats' midterm election victory.

“There was a feeling that there was almost a near secular-left takeover of our government and that we better speak up now,” Gaylor said. ...

“We’ve applied some very needed pressure to keep atheists and non-believers out of government office,” said the elder Gaylor, 80. “We hope we’ve done some educating that will be lasting.”

I'm not sure what I think about this.

Anyone with an interest in the gritty details of the planning behind the 9/11 attacks should read Edward Jay Epstein's summary of Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzon's investigation into the connection between the hijackers and a Spanish al Qaeda cell.

In an interview, Mr. Garzon explained to me through an interpreter that the support of the Spanish cell began in the early days of the plot and continued up until the attack. He described evidence that ranged from video tapes that Spanish police had confiscated from the home of one of the Spanish conspirators, which methodically surveyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center from five different angles in the late 1990s, to a phone call intercepted by Spanish intelligence in August 2001 (at a time when the hijackers were buying tickets on the planes they planned to commandeer), in which an operative in London informed Yarkas that associates in "classes" had now "entered the aviation field," and were beheading "the bird." After drawing a diagram for me on a blackboard of how the Spanish cell connected to Atta's and Binalshibh's recruiters in Germany, he said it was "supporting the operation at every level."

As with most of what the 9/11 Commission's work, their investigation into the planning behind the hijackings is turning out to be woefully inadequate. We may never know the whole picture, but it's naive to accept on faith that the 19 hijackers were acting in isolation from America's other enemies.

Here's a claim that America has a de facto flat tax. News to me, but perhaps Ben Bateman or others can comment.

In a study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Boston University economists Laurence J. Kotlikoff and David Rapson have found that our all-in marginal tax rate is 40%, give or take a bit. Yes, you read that right: 40%.

Most workers will pay about that much on each dollar of income when all taxes -- federal and state income taxes, sales taxes, taxes for benefit programs, etc. -- are considered.

As a consequence, a 30-year-old couple earning only $20,000 a year has a marginal tax rate of 42.5%, while a 45-year-old couple earning $500,000 pays at 43.2%. There are some exceptions: A 30-year-old couple earning $50,000 a year, for instance, pays 24.4%, and a 60-year-old couple making $150,000 a year faces a tax rate of 47.7%.

The average marginal tax rate on incomes between $20,000 and $500,000 is 40.3%, the median tax rate is 41.8%, and the standard deviation of all of those rates is 5.3 percentage points. Basically, most of us pay about 40%, plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.

There's a table with a bit more data at the bottom of the article.

The only thing surprising about Jason Whitlock's report from the All-Star Weekend in Las Vegas is that a major sports writer has the nerve to call out the NBA on the rapid degeneration of its fans.

NBA All-Star Weekend in Vegas was an unmitigated failure, and any thoughts of taking the extravaganza to New Orleans in 2008 are total lunacy. ...

All weekend, people, especially cab drivers, gossiped about brawls and shootings. You didn't know what to believe because the local newspaper was filled with stories about what a raging success All-Star Weekend was. The city is desperately trying to attract an NBA franchise, and, I guess, there was no reason to let a few bloody bodies get in the way of a cozy relationship with Stern.

Most journalists depend on maintaining good relations with their subjects in order to keep their access privileges, so the situation must be bad indeed for the truth to be leaking out everywhere.

I was there. Walking The Strip this weekend must be what it feels like to walk the yard at a maximum security prison. You couldn't relax. You avoided eye contact. The heavy police presence only reminded you of the danger. ...

David Stern seriously needs to consider moving the event out of the country for the next couple of years in hopes that young, hip-hop hoodlums would find another event to terrorize. Taking the game to Canada won't do it. The game needs to be moved overseas, someplace where the Bloods and Crips and hookers and hoes can't get to it without a passport and plane ticket. ...

All-Star Weekend Vegas screamed that the NBA is aligned too closely with thugs. Stern is going to have to take drastic measures to break that perception/reality. All-Star Weekend can no longer remain the Woodstock for parolees, wannabe rap artists and baby's mamas on tax-refund vacations.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure much of this behavior is under the NBA's control. Many of its players are thugs, so they naturally attract that sort of fan.

My respect for Apple's CEO shoots up a notch as Steve Jobs blasts American teachers unions and echoes many of my own positions.

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions Friday, claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers.

Jobs compared schools to businesses with principals serving as CEOs.

"What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good?" he asked to loud applause during an education reform conference.

"Not really great ones because if you're really smart you go, 'I can't win.'" ...

"I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way," Jobs said.

"This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."

At various pauses, the audience applauded enthusiastically.

Jobs is right: labor unions can be valuable institutions, but their power needs to be balanced by the private property rights of employers. The employers of public employee union members often have little power to reward or punish bad employees, and the result is widespread mediocrity.

Wired's Leander Kahney doesn't get it, and the examples he comes up with to counter Jobs' positions actually do just the opposite.

Jobs argues that vouchers will allow parents, the "customers," to decide where to send their kids to school, and the free market will sort it out. Competition will spur innovation, improve quality and drive bad schools (and bad teachers) out of business. The best schools will thrive.

It sounds great -- for the successful schools. But what about the failing ones?

Jobs thinks even the low end of the market will be hotly contested, like the market for inexpensive cars. Not everyone can drive a Mercedes, but there's lots of competition for cheap Toyotas, Kias and Saturns.

But Jobs is using the wrong analogy. It'd be more like the market for the low-end food dollar -- rich kids would have lots of choice, but for poor kids it'd be Burger King or McDonald's.

Or Jack-in-the-Box, or Subway, or KFC, or Quizno's, or Baja Fresh, or Taco Bell, or.... Many of which offer quite good and healthy menu items, in addition to being cheap. The fact of the matter is that free markets work in almost any industry other than so-called "natural monopolies", which the education industry certainly is not.

(HT: The Pirate.)

This International Herald Tribune article makes it sound like recent border control changes are actually reducing the flow of illegal immigrants.

"It's become much more difficult," Valenzuela said, echoing the comments of dozens of other migrants.

The only barometer to gauge whether migrants are being discouraged to attempt entering the United States is how many migrants are caught. In the past four months, the number has dropped 27 percent compared with the same period last year. In two sections around Yuma and near Del Rio, Texas, the numbers have fallen by nearly two- thirds, officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security say. ...

The U.S. government has also begun punishing migrants with prison time from the first time they enter illegally in some areas. For instance, along the 210 mile border covered by the Del Rio office of the Border Patrol, everyone caught crossing illegally is charged in federal court and sentenced to at least two weeks in prison.

Two weeks in jail before deportation sounds about right. Most of these people aren't dangerous criminals who deserve severe punishment; a couple weeks in jail should be enough of a deterrent to ensure that most of them don't keep trying.

One of the migrants was a 51-year-old plumber from Acámbaro, Guanajuato, who asked that his name not be used because he was ashamed of the criminal conviction. He said he was trying to get to San Antonio, Texas, where a friend had promised to get him a job at a water park, making $400 a week, far more than the $150 he earns at home.

"I had no idea until they grabbed us and told us we were going to court," he recalled. "They are using barbaric techniques." But he acknowledged the stint in jail had convinced him not to try again, even if he is unable to pay his son's college tuition.

"No way," he said, shaking his head.

Perhaps this plumber and others like him will now find the motivation to demand reform from Mexico's corrupt government. Remember: America is not the villain here, and we are not at fault for poverty south of our border -- that responsibility lies with the criminals that infest the Mexican government and the citizenry who don't demand better.