Don't bother about genius.
Don't worry about being clever.
Trust to hard work, perseverance and determination.
Sir Frederick Treves
Sikh Massacre in Wisconsin: Some Comments
I first came across a Sikh when I was lead DBA on a contract for a city of Chicago database project in 2002 (the year after 9/11). I don't think I had ever previously met someone whom wore a turban; I have known a few American Muslims (e.g., the Booz Allen internal project manager I worked for as a subcontractor on an internal data warehousing project was observing Ramadan, and I had met a few Muslim academics living in Ohio and Michigan). I was curious, so I asked another Indian colleague, whom mentioned, among other things, that Sikhs have a custom of not cutting their hair and the turban serves to contain their hair. My Sikh DBA colleague was a very nice, professional, soft-spoken man.
I would hope that Americans don't think all people in the Middle East, Gulf Region, and south Asia (India/Pakistan) look alike. Yes, a number of people in the region wear turbans, e.g., including Iran's religious leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei, but the turbans look different to me.
Let me quote from a Wikipedia article on Sikhism (my edits):
Sikhism is a religion of India. Sikhs are neither Muslims nor from the Middle East. Sikhism, as an organized grouping, has a religious history of around 400 years. Numbering approximately 27 million worldwide, The roots of Sikhism lie in Punjab (India). Sikhs make up 60% to 70% of the total population of Punjab, which is the only region in the world where Sikhs are in the majority.
As Sikhs wear turbans (although different from Middle Eastern turbans) and due to the relatively small number of Sikhs, there have been incidents of Sikhs in Western countries being mistaken for Middle Eastern Muslim men. After the 11 September 2001 attacks, some people associated Sikhs with terrorists or members of the Taliban. This has led to mistaken attitudes and acts against Sikhs living in the West. A few days after the attack, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh man, was gunned down by Frank Roque, who thought that the victim had ties to al-Qaeda. CNN suggested that there has been an increase in hate crimes against Sikh men in the United States and the UK following the 9/11 attack.The tragic massacre of 6 Sikhs, including 4 Indian nationals, over the weekend at a Sikh temple in the Milwaukee suburbs by a military veteran and former member of a white supremacist group has resulted in Indian protests and a rebuke of the Obama Administration for not doing enough (including gun control policies).
I have been a critic of the Obama Administration, but I think the protests are misguided. It's difficult to explain this: the mass murderer deliberately sought out a Sikh temple, not a mosque, so we're not dealing with a case of ethnic confusion. Information about Sikhs, their religious tolerance and humanitarian ideals, is readily available on the Internet. Was it some sort of xenophobic atrocity? A publicity-seeking event? A random act of violence by a mentally unstable individual? I don't know.
Right now there're the usual post-audit investigations, and some alleged evidence that the mass murderer was on law enforcement radar screens before the event. I don't think that there has been an established pattern of behavior against Sikhs or Sikh temples.
Gun control is counterproductive; Sikhs certainly are entitled to the right of self-defense. Motivated mass murderers will simply work around existing regulations or obtain weapons through a black market.
I agree what happened to the victims of the massacre is wrong, and I'm not excusing what happened. The fact is that religious tolerance is better observed in the US than any other country; we have dozens of different religions or congregations. I suspect that it's more likely that the temple was more incidental in nature; why did he seek out Sikhs? I can only speculate: perhaps the choice of a temple was arbitrary or seen as a convenient, lightly defended target; the tragedy remains. My thoughts and prayers for the victims of the tragedy and their surviving family members.
Sunday Talk Soup: MTP Nancy Pelosi (7/1/12)
Part 2
Moderator David Gregory reminds Pelosi that the GOP is united in making the repeal/replace of ObamaCare a top post-election priority.
NANCY PELOSI: I think that that part of it is over. Do we always want to fight for more and better? We want to continue to lower costs, and we built that into the health care, Affordable Care Act. Because one of the reasons to do the bill was because the cost of health care to individuals, or families, to businesses -- no matter what their size -- to local, state and federal budgets, and to our economy. The costs were unsustainable. It's a competitiveness issue for business and for our economy. So we had to take, come to a place where we lowered costs to all concerned, and that we again take it down a path where we continue to lower costs.Have you ever heard anything more clueless or an absolute departure from reality? It's not unlike an arsonist arguing that we need more firefighters...
This hubris occurs all across empire-building, self-righteous government meddlers: take, for instance, banks. For much of American history, banks weren't able to set up operations in different states, thus denying them of a way of diversifying risk across different state economies. It is absolutely incredible how naive progressives are: they suggest, as in the case here as clearly implied by Pelosi, that we have had a "market failure". In the case of banking, no one suggests that the comparable stability, say, of Canadian banks during the Depression, reflects a similar "market failure": how can the free market be the cause of failure in a regulated environment? The free market is responsible for regulatory failure?
That's the kind of muddled progressive thinking we saw during and after the 2008 economic tsunami. Notice how brilliant the Democrats were: financial reform has nothing to do with the GSE's, AIG, or the auto companies accounting for most of TARP expenditures; it had nothing to do with the Fed and the government arbitrarily deciding which companies would go bankrupt or the government changing its initial strategy from buying out troubled mortgage securities. Yes, the real lessons from 2008 had to do with debit card fees, no consumer protection bureaucracy, a missing "too-big-to-fail" implementation, and inadequate Federal Reserve authority!
No, the "market failure" hypothesis is as stupid and predictable as Barack Obama plagiarizing from FDR's playbook from the Depression, ludicrously arguing that Hoover's alleged "laissez faire" policies were responsible for the Great Depression! (Yes, the same Herbert Hoover who implemented tax increases (personal, corporate, estate) in a weak economy, started trade wars with tariffs, expanded the civil service, started major public works projects, promoted alcohol prohibition, jawboned business into not cutting jobs or wages, and instituted a bank check tax, :...: "In his addresses, Hoover attacked Roosevelt as a capitalist president who would only make the Depression worse by decreasing taxes, reducing government intervention in the economy, promoting "trade [with] the world", and cutting "Government—Federal and State and local") A person similarly has to be mentally challenged to assert that the Bush Administration was laissez-faire: Bush radically expanded domestic spending (especially education), added almost $5T to the national debt, created a vast new superbureaucracy (DHS), added an unpaid for prescription drug entitlement, and oversaw unprecedented federal intervention in the economy in the form of TARP.
No serious scholar believes such nonsense! Somehow we never had anything comparable to the Great Depression resulting from banking clearinghouses, the functions of which were effectively nationalized by the Fed. Yet somehow there were no waves of bank failures occurring north of the border: no, somehow the Canadians must have unearthed a "more equal" form of bank regulation, hidden from those gurus running the Federal Reserve. If, indeed, Canada had somehow stumbled across the Holy Grail of bank regulation, where was the attempt to emulate and improve upon the same? Why reinvent the wheel?
And so now we have a health care sector where one of every two dollars is spent through the government; we spend more than many nations whom have nationalized health care. (Granted, comparing systems is to some extent apples and oranges, because we are paying for higher-quality health care.) Part of the problem is the correlation of health care costs with an aging population (where, for instance, older workers can use 6 times the health care as young workers, although progressive government by policy forces younger workers to subsidize older worker (see "minimized youth discount" in yesterday's Heritage citation)). I have pointed out that the only reason for pursuing an mandate of the uninsured is because the industry sees them as healthier, more profitable risks as captive customers offsetting the costs of older or sicker policyholders. (Progressive talking points vacillate between arguing that the uninsured can't afford insurance to arguing that they are freeloaders.) The same cited article points out that the private sector subsidizes the costs of below-cost government reimbursements for Medicaid and Medicare: freeloading on steroids.
The idea that government can manage the health care sector's costs and quality is megalomaniac delusion. Progressives are responsible for pushing demand for services by subsidizing business-supplied health care (i.e., through tax-free treatment of employee total compensation and allowing ordinary health care expenses to be included in a tax dodge, where policyholders are not vested in health care cost decisions), upholding medical professional barriers to entry (licensing), engaging in smoke and mirrors accounting by hyping "free" or other discounted services and hence increasing related demand (and hidden costs which are eventually added back into premiums), adding special interest benefit mandates, and other factors. Regulations in general tend to promote sector consolidation, an inadequate substitute for market competition.
Yes, Nancy, there are unsustainable costs in health care. But government is a big reason for that by implementing high cost policies like guaranteed issue and community rating and by government programs reimbursing providers and doctors below market price. Does government PAY for the costs of its dysfunctional policies? No--the costs of this cost shifting are implicit taxes on parties purchasing health care policies. Yes, the Democrats will say, "Look how wonderful we are: because of us, people with preexisting conditions get to "spread their health care costs around" to other policyholders. Is it our fault that healthier people find themselves paying more than their fair share and opt out of insurance? Of course not! Why, these people are freeloaders!"
Oh, I guarantee no Democrat will ever admit to what I just wrote. Failure of the private sector? Hardly. Government is part of the problem, not the solution. As long as health care purchase decisions are distorted by price-fixing, regulated premiums, subsidies, unpaid-for mandates, and other restrictions on economic liberty (e.g., against writing policies across state lines), stop using the free market as a whipping boy because this sector stopped being a free market decades ago.
Yes, Nancy, there is a solution: get the government out of the health care business. Let insurance be insurance. Repeal relevant dysfunctional government policies, regulations, and programs; privatize Medicare or Medicare (or at least shift those to the state/local level).
Friedman and I, among other libertarians/conservatives, see a plausible exception for needs-based subsidies and related policies addressing high risk individuals/households (i.e., certain preexisting/catastrophic health conditions). (An example of a related policy would be explicitly bundled portable insurance for high risk medical conditions correlated with the aging process (e.g., buildup of arterial plaque) or not diagnosed under earlier coverage).) There are ways for the government to focus its attention and resources to those circumstances resulting in health-related household bankruptcies instead of trying to control the entire health care sector--but the Democrats deliberately decided to ignore the well-known history of the failures of centralized government.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, "Dawn (Go Away)". I'm probably overanalyzing songs, but is it just me? Consider the distinctive parallel line arrangement and emphasis on a key word in consecutive lines in this song and a later BeeGees hit:
Think (think) what a big man he'll be
Think (think) of the places you'll see
Now think what the future would be with a poor boy like me
Now consider these lyrics from the BeeGees' later hit "World" (which I also love):
Living tomorrow, where in the world will I be
tomorrow? How far am I able to see?
If I remember all of the things I have done,
I'd remember all of the times I've gone wrong.
Note: the songs are completely different, and there are no doubt lots of songs which emphasize a word (e.g., "STOP! In the Name of Love": the Hollies in their version use a pregnant pause after "STOP" late in the performance). But as soon as I heard "Dawn"--maybe it's because I've probably played "World" many times over the past 6 months--I just had this feeling of déjà vu.
