Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom,
must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.
Thomas Paine
Brennan Confirmed As CIA Director: Thumbs DOWN!
According to a CNN email alert (cf here for a related discussion)
In a brief letter responding to Paul’s question, “Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” Holder responded, “The answer to that question is no."Rand Paul, as promised, released his hold on the Brennan nomination with Holder's response; Holder had earlier speculated to the contrary.
The final vote was 63-34. Three Democrats, unhappy with Brennan's prior support of enhanced interrogation techniques, joined a majority of GOP senators in voting against Brennan. Of the 13 GOP votes for Brennan, many viewed the nomination as a proxy vote supporting drone policies (see next segment). I am opposed to the drone program as unauthorized acts of war and because of morally unacceptable collateral damage. This vote I see as a symbolic vote against interventionist foreign policy.
Introducing My New "Bad Elephant of the Year"
Several weeks back, I wrote a one-off post distancing myself from McCain, whom I named my 2008 Man of the Year. I used to view McCain as a maverick whom sharply criticized the Pentagon brass over boondoggle projects run amok and their post-Hussein staffing and military strategy in Iraq. What's become clear is McCain is a knee-jerk military interventionist whom has no qualms over Obama's escalation of the drone program overseas, played Chicken Little over sequestration cuts to defense, and has been reluctant in seeing us leave Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Dynamic NeoCon Duo, including McCain sidekick SC senior senator Lindsey Graham, did not like the drone filibuster by Rand Paul (see above), McCain mumbling some incoherent nonsense about the indignity of accusing a President of possibly having innocent American citizens murdered. Obama personally approves kill lists overseas and at least 2 American citizens died in a drone attack without judicial oversight. This is not whether I've trusted Obama or Bush. It has to do with due process, the rule of law and the balance of powers.
Graham further irritated me by saying he initially intended to vote against Brennan, but decided to vote for him to show moral support for the drone program.
Rand Paul has a response to the McCain/Graham criticism which appears at the bottom of this post for post format reasons.
I've been having an annual mock award of Dems having badly since 2009 (JOTY). I can't think of a similar pejorative term for elephants so I'll simply say "bad elephants". For McCain and Graham's clueless attack on Rand Paul, I nominate them for my 2013 mock award. I've been critical of several Republicans (including President Bush) over the life of the blog, but I hope this blunts any criticism I'm a partisan shill.
Another Criticism of 'Perky Economics'
I have occasionally criticized Dr. Perry's perky reads of economic statistics--his graph of the S&P stock index versus inverted jobless claims is more of the same. Even Ben Bernanke is concerned about sticky high unemployment and has explicitly tied monetary policy to official unemployment statistics. First, note that jobless claims are based on the nature and extent of recent employment. Slowing jobless claims might reflect concerns about finding another job in a jobless recovery. We are unlikely to see improvement in the labor force participation rate until we achieve and sustain mean 3% GDP growth; we are barely treading water with population growth.. The jobless recovery is discussed in a limited fashion in the Russ Roberts segment below.
Russ Roberts, The Numbers Game, and Comparative Recessions
Russ Roberts partners with Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek and hosts the weekly podcast EconTalk. At the beginning of the academic year, Roberts announced that he was leaving his faculty position at George Mason University to focus on projects as part of Stanford's Hoover Institution. One of those projects is the Numbers Game, which I might characterize as a more focused, statistics-oriented, virtual interactive blackboard variation of EconTalk.
The following videos involve the differing perspectives of UCLA's Ed Learner and Stanford's John Taylor. (Faithful readers may recall my embedding the adorable clip when Dr. Taylor brought in his beautiful, charming baby granddaughter as a "guest lecturer"; she was speechless as he showed her the escalating national debt under Obama. The poor sweetheart probably doesn't comprehend how she's expected to pay off this President's huge spendthrift legacy.)
Learner is more of a skeptic of the long-term effectiveness of fiscal or monetary stimuli and seems to consider this as more of an inevitable result of technological advances outstripping the need for structured human labor. Let me interrupt with an example as an MIS professor teaching undergraduates. Our students were not computer science students whom might do a dozen or more programs from scratch. I never handed out an assignment that I couldn't do myself in less than half an hour; I might give out 4 programs (that, granted, did more than "hello, world"). I was surprised by how many students had never done a program from scratch. A lot of them went through a learning curve. To be honest, I didn't really care about the students learning a particular programming language or even a particular type of program (e.g., control break); I was more interested in their developing and exercising higher-order cognitive skills and abilities. One of the complaints I often got was that I expected more of students than colleagues, many of whom were tenured: they would often hand out pseudocode solutions. Basically pseudocode only required students to adapt the outlined solution to actual programming language syntax. I would tell the kids, "Look, do you honestly think employers are going to pay you $35-50K a year to do typing exercises?"
I had a good friend and colleague Will whom worked with me at a private company later acquired by Equifax. He used to fashion tools like DCU, which went beyond Oracle's SQL LOADER, able for instance to parse records from traditional mainframe variable-length records into separate "flat files" which could be directly loaded into an Oracle database. Another, less successful tool was VIEW GEN. A view reflects a user-accessible construct of the database (for example, ordinary users may not be able to see compensation data). Users are able to join information through SQL, a lingua franca of relational databases like Oracle, IBM's DB2 or MS/Sybase SQL Server. Users often have problems writing SQL code, and there are a number of tools to facilitate the task. Will's tool-generated SQL scripts, although logically valid, took a lot of wall time to run; I could write much more efficient SQL off the top of my head.
Speaking as a very creative person, I have often found that creativity often results from a lot of work (in my case as an academic I did a lot of interdisciplinary research, including education, applied psychology, and professional communication). I looked at field constructs, research methods, statistical tests, etc. I had a number of Eureka moments which resulted in publications.
I find Learner's reliance on statist education to match up with a changing job picture, where the demand for college-educated applicants is exceeded by supply, is dubious at best. I have found myself filtered out of opportunities for trivial nice-to-have skills that can easily be picked up in my spare time. A lot of companies are just window-shopping, seeing who's in the market; if they see someone whom knocks their socks off, they might make an offer. I've been looking for a way to return to Texas for a while, and I haven't gotten to an end client interview. In a number of cases, you are not considered unless you are local (they probably feel they have enough local candidates). I have personally lived through multiple recessions since earning my first Master's. I've never seen this level of arrogance before.
What would I do? Simple. There are easy no-brainer policy fixes: first, waive federal employment policy mandates for new hires, including the minimum wage and ObamaCare tax. Second, eliminate, reform or suspend statutory barriers to entry (occupational licenses), etc. Third, take away some of the drag on business budgets by tax and regulatory reform. Fourth, open up federal lands and offshore areas to 100% -in oil & gas exploration; streamline approval of pipelines. Fifth, stop shooting-yourself-in-the-foot with energy-high cost environmental policies where developing countries more than offset any US improvements. Finally, streamline government, limit the eligibility, tenure and transfer payments of programs, end price controls in healthcare, sell assets, privatize programs, and reform entitlements to be sustainable; eliminate business income tax and replace it with a VAT, with proceeds dedicated to paying off US debt.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Glenn McCoy and Townhall |
Political Humor
Former president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, died yesterday. Sean Penn actually went down to Venezuela and met Chavez a few times. He's a polarizing figure that a lot of Americans really don't like. Chavez was, too. - Craig Ferguson
[Chavez needed personal acting lessons, like any other self-serving demagogue pretending to care about the interests of other people.]
Today Chavez is being mourned all over South America. If he were here today, I'm sure he'd say, "Don't cry for me, Argentina." - Craig Ferguson
[Madonna might have sung it, but Sean Penn is her ex-husband...]
A major snowstorm has hit the East Coast. In Washington, D.C., everything ground to a halt — and then the snowstorm hit. - Conan O'Brien
[Obama suggested that Republican legislators had better watch their step--because of sequester cuts, local groundskeepers hadn't been out with ice melt spreaders.]
Actually [Hawaii's Steven Tyler Act is] designed to protect celebrities from paparazzi by making it illegal to take unwanted pictures or video of them in private to sell for profit. No offense, but isn't every photo of Steven Tyler an unwanted photo? - Jimmy Kimmel
[Unconstitutional nonsense. What about this classic Nick Nolte mugshot, his wearing an Hawaiian shirt? And my fellow high school students thought I had some bad "Einstein" hair days...
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| Courtesy of AP and CHIPS |
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Journey, "Open Arms". One of the greatest (if not the greatest) love ballads in the 80's.
Rand Paul's Response to McCain/Graham's Critique of Filibuster: Thumbs UP!
