WTF?

Rick Perry's latest ad:



There are a couple of things I find entertaining. One is the football player kneeling, Tebow-style, in pouring rain, backlit, with nothing else around. I just don't get that. Second, WTF is up with the Gadsden flag flying above the South Carolina flag in this ad? Is this some crazy South Carolina thing (Gadsden being from South Carolina)? Or is this what I thought it was, a ludicrous appeal to Tea Party loons, who love to self-identify by flying the Gadsden flag (which I appreciate, so that I know never to take anything someone flying the flag says seriously)?

My main takeaway from this ad is how absolutely moronic does a politician have to be to become irrelevant in the current GOP field when he is the governor of a state which has created at least 1/3 of all the jobs created in the entire country during the recession? The only logical Republican attack of the president was on jobs and the economy, and the candidate with the best record on that is too stupid for an anti-intellectual crowd of flat Earth loons is quite a statement.

The Establishment of American Motors

January 14, 1954:

The Hudson Motor Car Company merges with Nash-Kelvinator Corporation forming the American Motors Corporation.

I'm not exactly sure why I find this interesting/amusing.  Part of it is that I find the history of early U.S. corporations, and the old conglomerates, like Nash-Kelvinator interesting.  Part of it is that I am amused by the ugly '70s AMC vehicles such as the Gremlin, the Pacer and the four-wheel drive Eagle.  Part of it is that I am friends with a huge Jeep and International Harvester Scout fan who labelled AMC and IH as "ahead of their time" for their development of four-wheel drive vehicles.  Part of it is that I classify AMC, and then Chrysler, with their purchase of AMC, as the AGCO of automobile companies, collecting all of the failed companies in an attempt to piece together the brand loyalties of customers of each to maybe reach a survivable customer base.  Another reason for the interest is how Hudson, Nash, Studebaker, Willys and later AMC factories played such a significant part in the history of midwestern towns such as Kenosha, South Bend and Toledo.  Finally, part of it has to be that Mitt Romney's childhood and early life opportunities are directly connected to his dad's position as president of American Motors.

Why War Is A Bad Idea

Robert Wright:

If you had asked me a few days ago, before news broke that American soldiers have urinated on Taliban corpses, whether American soldiers have ever urinated on Taliban corpses, I would have said: Probably.
You send hordes of young people into combat, people whose job is to kill the enemy and who watch as their friends are killed and maimed by the enemy, and the chances are that signs of disrespect for the enemy will surface--and that every once in a while those signs will assume grotesque form.
War, presumably, has always been like that. But something has changed over the past couple of decades--two things, actually--and they amount to a powerful new argument against starting wars in the first place.
First, there's the new transparency of war. Infinitely more battlefield details get recorded, and everyone has the tools to broadcast these details. So it's just a matter of time before some outrageous image goes viral--pictures from Abu Ghraib, video from Afghanistan, whatever. These images will make you and your soldiers more hated by the enemy than ever--and hated by civilians who may identify with the enemy, whether because of national, ethnic, or religious kinship.
The second big change is that hatred is now a more dangerous thing. America faces no serious threat from any nation-state, but the more amorphous threat from radical Islam, if mishandled, could mushroom and, years from now, reach massively lethal proportions. And the lifeblood of radical Islam (like the lifeblood of many radical things) is hatred. The more Muslims there are who hate Americans, the easier life is for recruiters from al Qaeda or some other such terrorist group.

I have to admit, I wasn't surprised or, really, horrified at the news that there was a video of U.S. soldiers urinating on the body of a dead Afghani.  I hadn't really given the story much thought until last night.  After an exciting hour or so out on the town, I fell asleep at about 8:30 last night.  I woke up at about 12:30, and turned the channel on the TV to see what was on.  I came across the early part of Full Metal Jacket.  What struck me as odd was that while much of this movie is well represented in our culture (the only things from Texas are steers and queers, etc.), apparently, the basic perspective of the movie (link to scene with helicoptor gunner) as I see it, that war dehumanizes people, is lost to the culture.

I think some of this is that most of us don't want to be personally involved in war, so we overcompensate by glorifying those who do participate in the wars.  Part of that is to ignore the fact that some of these people will do horrible things in the course of the war, and the realization of the dehumanizing effect of war undermines our ability to self-justify support of war while not participating ourselves.  We don't have the courage to stand up against our nation participating in wars, either because we are afraid of our so-called enemies, or we don't want to be portrayed as unpatriotic or as cowards.  I guess in my case, while I didn't see the benefits of going to Afghanistan, and I was explicitly opposed to Iraq, I didn't want to stand out by being more public in my opposition to the war. 

It has always seemed obvious to me that war is dehumanizing.  A person is put in the situation of kill or be killed, he or she is a part of one team, and is fighting another team.  Friends will be killed by the enemy, and a soldier will obviously want to retaliate against the enemy.  War crimes will happen. 

Back in 2007, I got into a big disagreement with a coworker of my sister over this subject, much to her consternation.  He was a graduate of West Point, and had served as a junior officer in Iraq.  I made the mistake of assuming that he would agree with me that war brought to the fore horrible actions in some (not all) participants.  I argued that this fact was a reason why we should generally avoid warfare.  I pointed to the recent disclosure of killings of civilians at Haditha.  Instead, he argued that no U.S. soldier ever committed a war atrocity in Iraq, and that he, unlike I, knew that because he was there. He alluded to the idea that such atrocities were the result of conscription, and that the all-voluteer force led to better soldiers who were immune to commiting war crimes.  I suggested that in spite of my lack of personal experience, history showed that some soldiers in every war, regardless of the rightness or justness of their cause, committed terrible crimes.  I made the mistake of arguing this for too long, but I believe that while the number of incidents which occur in war may be relatively small, they do occur, and the fact that they occur is a legitimate argument against war.  I think this is the case Wright is making here.

Update:  I guess the case Wright is making is not that we shouldn't fight wars because wars bring out the worst actions in people, it is that in our linked world, such atrocities will be seen by people who will be persuaded to become our enemies, locking us in a cycle of atrocities and retaliations for those atrocities.  I'll stick to my position that the atrocities themselves are reason enough to avoid war.

A Couple More Infrastructure Stories

Also from naked capitalism's links come two infrastructure stories.  One involves the dangers of privately-owned infrastructure.  I didn't realize that the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor and Detroit was privately owned:

The elderly billionaire owner of Detroit's Ambassador Bridge has been jailed today for failing to meet court-ordered deadlines on a multimillion dollar construction project.
Manuel 'Matty' Moroun, along with company president Dan Stamper, has been sent to jail until his company complies with a 2010 court order to get the work on the $230m Gateway project done.
It is not yet clear how long the men will stay behind bars, but the work could take up to a year.
Detroit International Bridge Co. was declared in contempt of court in November for failing to finish work on the state ordered project linking the U.S.-Canada span with two Detroit interstates.
The bridge, which handles 8,000 trucks a day and $100 billion in trade every year, accounts for the bulk of Mr Moroun's £1.5billion fortune.

Also:

The state of Michigan sued the company after it failed to meet a 2008 deadline to finish its part of a $230-million project to improve traffic at the bridge connecting Detroit to Windsor, Canada.
The privately-owned Ambassador Bridge is the busiest crossing between the United States and Canada, providing a continuous flow of auto parts and completed vehicles each way from Detroit to Windsor, Canada.
The project was intended to link the bridge with Interstate 75 and Interstate 96 in the United States directly, pulling the almost continuous flow of semitrailer trucks off surface streets.
Instead, the company has failed to correct variations from the plan and the other parts have not been completed.
Gregory Johnson, MDOT chief of operations, said it could take a year to get the work done. 
The project was intended to link the bridge with Interstate 75 and Interstate 96 in the United States directly, pulling the almost continuous flow of semitrailer trucks off surface streets.
Instead, the company has failed to correct variations from the plan and the other parts have not been completed.
Gregory Johnson, MDOT chief of operations, said it could take a year to get the work done.

The conflicts between private interests and the public interests when it comes to infrastructure make privately-financed infrastructure a bad deal in general.

There is also this story on the potential of water access to negatively impact corporations:

Jonas Kron is worried about water. The investment adviser at Trillium Asset Management, a $900 million fund manager that focuses on environmentally sustainable investment, fears the world’s dwindling supply of fresh water is hurting the companies he has invested in. For most of the year, Kron has led a shareholder challenge to J. M. Smucker, the strawberry jam maker that also owns Folgers coffee. Kron says the company hasn't demonstrated it's prepared for the market changes that are sure to come as climate change reduces the size of the world’s coffee growing area. The conversation has been difficult in part because corporate leaders still seem unaware they need to factor water risk into their financial projections, says Kron. "We're not talking about charity here," says Kron. "These are investors seeking to have the company address the risks in its supply chain."
Smucker’s says it’s hedging against potential increases in raw material prices, but Mother Nature, Kron points out, can defeat any hedge. “At a certain point, you need to deal with the fundamental, underlying fact that these are crops grown with soil, sunlight, and water, and you can’t escape the laws of nature.”
Most companies act as if the water they have today will be there tomorrow, says Brooke Barton, who runs water programs at Ceres, an environmental group in Boston that worked with Trillium and others to create an online checklist aimed at helping investors and companies assess efforts to manage water risk. With the world’s population expected to grow to 10 billion by the end of the century from 7 billion today, and the need for fresh water increasing twice as fast as a larger middle class emerges in the developing world, the competition for scarce water resources is unprecedented. "Water is something that should be keeping CEOs up at night," says Barton.

If anything, this should be good news for folks in the Great Lakes region, and more locally for Dayton, which sits on a giant, easily recharged buried valley aquifer.

Relearning What We Knew

BillyBlog on the costs of unemployment and the benefits of government work programs (via nc links):

One of the strong empirical results that emerge from the Great Depression is that the job relief programs that the various governments implemented to try to attenuate the massive rise in unemployment were very beneficial. At that time, it was realised that having workers locked out of the production process because there were not enough private jobs being generated was not only irrational in terms of lost income but also caused society additional problems, such as rising crime rates.
Direct job creation was a very effective way of attenuating these costs while the private sector regained its optimism. In fact, it took about 50 years or so for governments to abandon this way of thinking. Now we tolerate high levels of unemployment without a clear understanding of the magnitude of costs that that policy position imposes on specific individuals and society in general.
The single most rational thing a government could do was to ensure that there were enough jobs to match the available labour force.
In the growth period before the current crisis few countries had returned to the full employment states that they achieved in the Post World War 2 period up until the mid-1970s when the OPEC oil shocks led to a paradigm change in macroeconomic policy setting. The neo-liberal approach emphasised fiscal austerity to support an increasing reliance on monetary policy for counter-stabilisation.

He goes on to explain the reasons we have ignored what we've learned:

Neo-liberalism has also changed the way we think about unemployment. In the past we understood clearly that it arose as a result of a shortage of jobs.
However, in recent decades, we have been conditioned by a relentless (lying) press and government statements to perceive unemployment as an individual problem. So the unemployed are type-cast as being lazy; having poor work attitudes; refusing to invest in appropriate skills; and subject to disincentives arising from misguided government welfare support, and all the rest of the arguments that mainstream uses to obfuscate the social problem.
The focus in the public debate is to “blame the victim” and suggest that most are unemployable and prefer to live on welfare, where that support is available.
The overwhelming evidence from the informed research literature is that almost all the unemployed (when surveyed) prefer to work and are willing to take work if offered.
The overwhelming evidence from studies in most countries suggests that the unemployed are highly motivated to find work and are victims of a shortage of jobs rather than personal/individual deficiencies.
The dominance of the neo-liberal ideology led governments in most countries to have eschew the adoption of policies of direct job creation to reduce the rate of unemployment and to minimise these massive costs. Fiscal policy has became geared to the achievement of budget surpluses as some sort of token of prudent financial management.
After the release of the OECD Jobs Study, employment policy shifted from a demand-side emphasis (ensuring there were enough jobs) to a supply-side focus (active labour market policy) which targetted individuals with futile training programs divorced from a paid-work context and pernicious welfare-to-work rules.
While the governments were pursuing labour market deregulation and attempting to retrench the Welfare State in the face of persistent unemployment they were also deregulating financial markets. The lack of oversight of the latter is the fundamental reason we are now enduring the worst crisis in more than 80 years.

I'm not even going to go to the trouble of reviewing his assessment of the costs of unemployment because I think those are obvious.  To me, it is patently obvious that this is the perfect time for government investment in infrastructure.  The housing bubble burst destroyed the demand for construction jobs, putting large numbers of construction workers out of work, these workers could be reemployed, along with a large number of other jobless workers, and the work would be productive.  Our infrastructure is crumbling, so any investment will be net beneficial.  The ironic part is that we still have some infrastructure projects from the WPA in use, and these need repair and replacement.  How can we be ignoring this when so many people are out of work?  The idea that people who were previously employed don't want to work is cruel and insulting.  They have been out applying for jobs, and haven't been getting them.  Let's not let them sit, let's find them something to do.

Hume, Causation, Science and the Big Lie

Ritholtz has an interesting post.  Here's the beginning:

Interesting article in Wired this month, ostensibly about the tribulations of the modern scientific method, big pharma drug development, etc. But within the article is an excellent digression about the complexities of causation:

“Causes are a strange kind of knowledge. This was first pointed out by David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher. Hume realized that, although people talk about causes as if they are real facts—tangible things that can be discovered—they’re actually not at all factual. Instead, Hume said, every cause is just a slippery story, a catchy conjecture, a “lively conception produced by habit.” When an apple falls from a tree, the cause is obvious: gravity. Hume’s skeptical insight was that we don’t see gravity—we see only an object tugged toward the earth. We look at X and then at Y, and invent a story about what happened in between. We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact—it’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts.”

Thus, we humans love a grossly over-simplified narrative. This is simply a function of using effective shortcuts to make snap decisions in the wild:

“The truth is, our stories about causation are shadowed by all sorts of mental shortcuts. Most of the time, these shortcuts work well enough. They allow us to hit fastballs, discover the law of gravity, and design wondrous technologies. However, when it comes to reasoning about complex systems—say, the human body—these shortcuts go from being slickly efficient to outright misleading.

The whole post is worth reading.  He goes on to deal with modern effects of the phenomenon, showing how our simplified narrative can be straight-up misleading, especially when it comes to complicated systems.  Here's where I have a problem:

This has come up repeatedly over the years — especially with regard to the financial crisis and the Big Lie. Its not that these folks are evil, they merely carry the vestiges of evolution — a flawed analytical engine of which they seem wholly unaware of.
For the rest of us, if we develop some awareness of these analytical errors, we can at least stand a fighting chance to go beyond erroneous perceptions towards true understanding:

“The good news is that, in the centuries since Hume, scientists have mostly managed to work around this mismatch as they’ve continued to discover new cause-and-effect relationships at a blistering pace. This success is largely a tribute to the power of statistical correlation, which has allowed researchers to pirouette around the problem of causation. Though scientists constantly remind themselves that mere correlation is not causation, if a correlation is clear and consistent, then they typically assume a cause has been found—that there really is some invisible association between the measurements.”

In other words, we can figure out actual causation. But to do so, we need to avoid the over simplifications, the correlation errors, and recognize the complexity of causation in the world of finance.

 Ritholtz is allowing here (normally this isn't the case for him) that perpetrators of The Big Lie are doing so under a mistaken simplification of a complex system.  I call shenanigans on that.  That may be somewhat true of the mass followers of the reactionary movement which sees government as the root of all problems, but I don't even think that holds there.  For the followers, this is another case of ignoring uncomfortable facts which conflict with their belief system.  They do the same with science and evolution, and their belief system now encompasses capitalism and politics.  They believe that all the things they hold dear are right, just and infallible.  Any fact to the contrary is ignored.

As for the perpetrators of The Big Lie, they know better, and their incantation of The Big Lie is evil.  They are directly manipulating their followers for their own personal gain and undermining the only other system which has the power to stop their looting, the government.  They know exactly what happened in the financial system, and they want to allow such abuses to continue.  There is no earthly way that Peter Wallison is so ignorant as to not know that mortgage brokers, large commercial banks and investment banks were at the heart of the financial crisis.  He is manipulating the rubes to continue the grift.  That is evil.

On a side not note, Hume has been on my To Read list for far too long.  His is a case of a man way too far ahead of his time.

Fewer Posts

I've had fewer posts this week, as I've moved toward full-time work.  Another factor has been some exhaustion at recent news.  One can only point out the follies of the so-called conservative base so often.  Anyway, I hope to get on top of things and focus on a few new things to write about.

Was Ryan Madsen A Steal?

Jonah Keri thinks so:

But that doesn't mean Jocketty didn't get a steal by waiting on Madson, then grabbing him for one year at $8.5 million — without surrendering a first-round compensation pick, the way the Phillies did with Papelbon. The 31-year-old Madson enjoyed a huge 2011 season, posting a sparkling 2.25 FIP via a near-4-to-1 strikeout-to-walk rate and his usual worm-burning ways. Heath Bell got three years and $27 million. Diminished, post-surgery Joe Nathan signed for two years, $15 million. Matt Freaking Capps got nearly $5 million to pitch in 2012. None of these or any other non-Papelbon closers pulled off the market project to be better this season than Madson.
Adding Madson and Sean Marshall, the very good, very underrated lefty setup man acquired from the Cubs for Travis Wood, suddenly gives the Reds multiple solid options out of the pen, with righty Nick Masset, lefty Bill Bray, and Aroldis Chapman. If Chapman gets a clean shot at starting, that could lengthen a rotation that's already very strong at the top, headed by Latos and Johnny Cueto (2.31 ERA, 3.45 FIP in 2011). The Reds' improved pitching staff makes them a strong contender in a weakened NL Central, without the salary pyrotechnics deployed by the Angels and Marlins.

Again, time will tell.  It is encouraging that the Reds are trying to win next year.

Chart of the Day

From Jared Bernstein:

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney asserted that federal low-income programs are administered so inefficiently that “very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them,” my colleagues at the CBPP got to work on this graph.

If the goal is to hand out money, you don't need much in the way of administrative costs.

Copying Nature

Scientists look to sunflowers to design more efficient concentrated solar power plants:

Mitsos and colleague Corey Noone used numerical optimization to fiddle with the placement of the heliostats. They brought the fanned-out layout closer together, building a spiral-like pattern that reduces land by ten percent without affecting efficiency.
Next they looked to nature to improve the design further. The florets of a sunflower — small flowers at the center of the petals, which mature into seeds — are arranged in a stunning spiral fashion that’s impressed mathematicians for years.
The arrangement — a form of Fermat spiral — has each floret turned at a “golden angle” – about 137 degrees – with respect to its neighbor.
The researchers twisted each mirror to be 137 degrees relative to its neighbor and it made a huge difference. The optimized layout takes up 20 percent less space than the current layout of the PS10 in Spain, and even increased total efficiency.

There's a lot of valuable information in nature.  We probably ought to pay more attention than we do.