A journal of political, social, and other important, possibly even somewhat related affairs, including but not limited to: Central European Society, The European Union, HC Kometa Brno, American Politics, Film, and Beer.

29 August 2011

You know you've lost it....

when even Iran is telling you it's time to reform.

27 August 2011

Cops and Firemen

When I was young, my dad had a friend who was a sheriff's deputy in my hometown. He was one of those guys who loved being a deputy, and was thoroughly law enforcement, and thoroughly Colorado. But I remember my dad and him talking about being a volunteer fireman (as my dad was) and being a cop -- which job was scarier, or more dangerous, or more you-gotta-be-nuts-to-do-that.

For my dad, the answer was obvious. Being a fireman was a far safer gig. Fire had rules that it had to obey. It was terrifying, sure, and its power over buildings and landscapes was enormous, but it really could only do one thing: burn. There was a logic to stopping it, and a clear, rational method to containing fire, and later putting it out. It required courage to face down burn when people were trapped in burning buildings, but again, there were steps to take, and precautions and insulations to reduce the danger. Fire never changes its mind about what it does. What scared my dad far more than a burning building or a burning hillside was "some junkie in his skivvies high on PCP on the roof of a building waving a gun around."

My dad's friend the sheriff's deputy could hardly disagree more. For him, fire -- the sheer vastness of it, with its awesome potential, its capacity for almost exponential growth -- was the most frightening circumstance imaginable. The aforementioned scantily-clad guy with the alternative lifestyle -- that guy, well, one really shouldn't say that the police could "reason" with someone like that, but there were ways of perhaps dealing with him in a way that minimized the dangers to himself and the immediate community. Again, for my dad's deputy friend, such situations could be dangerous, but they were ultimately all about dealing with relationships between people. Understand that, my dad's friend would say, and you can minimize, if not eliminate the danger. But while there may be a few basic recommendations, every situation is different, and intuition serves a much greater role.

I thought of this story while trying to work out some problems with social science, and its relationship to harder sciences. Firefighting, in many important respects, is a science. No one ever talks about the philosophy of firefighting. Occasional disagreements surface about priorities, techniques, and materials, but it is largely a practice of applied physics, and just as there are debates in the scientific community about solving a physical problem, we should not be surprised. It has hard and fast rules. If things get too cold, or the oxygen is removed, the fire will go out. And it won't tap you on the shoulder 15 years later asking why you put it in prison.

The role of a deputy is significantly different. Policing is a far, far, more controversial topic, and for good reason. Techniques are subject to a double test both of their morality as well as their effectiveness. When riots and looting take place, we can certainly imagine more efficacious methods of policing than we saw in London. And indeed, many people were calling for these methods. However, these calls were not opposed for their potential for success (everyone seemed to recognize that rubber bullets would go a long way toward decreasing the rioting), but on moral grounds -- it would be wrong to do so, even if it was effective.

The other difficulty in techniques concerns the n=1 problem. Every junkie on a rooftop is different, and there's no guidebook with a handy chapter on "junkies on rooftops" sitting on a shelf at the sheriff's office. Methodology is possible, but it frequently needs to be massaged, and is often completely counterproductive. There may be some techniques, some theories, such as the Broken Windows theory, or concepts of community policing, that can offer a certain framework of probabilistic order, but individual, on-the-spot cases do not always fit into a nice pat theory. The individual art of the deputy, and his often intuitive "feel" of the situation is often a critical component of a successful resolution to the problem. This leads to qualifying remarks and probability problems that would never be tolerated by the fireman, whose "feel" of a situation is based on a far different mental process.

When we look at the problems of society, we suffer from the same limitations as the sheriff's deputy. We can map out a few ideas, but insofar as we cannot always even agree on whether something is a problem or a solution, (high gun ownership rates; immigration, legal and illegal; embryonic stem-cell research) we certainly will develop different opinions about what to do about the topic. This means that we are almost immediately forced into a metaphysical debate first. From there, only if we have agreed on the desired solution can we even begin to examine the best possible way to deal with the problem, and even then, every case will be different. This means that our toolkit will be necessarily basic compared to the sophisticated instruments the hard sciences can use. We have no access to retardants and chemicals to control the blazes of human hearts. Maybe that's scary, maybe that's wonderful.

Qatar

An excellent, informative, and interesting piece from Lee Smith writing for the Weekly Standard. Not particularly neo-connish, or left, or anything like that. Just a really good piece of analysis.


22 August 2011

Ron Paul 2012

As Jonah Goldberg noted four years ago around this time, "there's something weird going on when Paul, the small-government constitutionalist, is considered the extremist in the Republican Party..."

This blog is not a Paulnut blog, but your correspondent admits certain sympathies with the good doctor; Goldberg's column from four years ago holds up terrifyingly well. And it certainly seems outrageous that Congressman Paul is treated in the press the way he is -- this video of Jon Stewart from Mediaite hits the nail on the head.

17 August 2011

Obama has a plan! What would Lord Keynes say?

According to this Politico report from America's Heartland, President Obama will unveil a new plan to increase jobs and reduce the deficit that is "not a rehash of plans he has pitched for many weeks." Of course, he'll need a couple weeks to work out the kinks, so he's decided to announce it at the beginning of September.

Let's set aside the fact that most people have been wondering where this plan has been for the last two and a half years, and see what's really in it. We already know a little bit about it, as this Weekly Standard article notes. It includes the development of a private-public infrastructure bank (Keynesianism), tax hikes on the wealthy (is there ANY economist that thinks this is a good idea?), and patent reform (what?).

So we've got some warmed-over Keynes, a small-ball patent reform, and tax hikes on the wealthy. First off, let's give Keynes just a little bit of credit (intellectually). One reason the first stimulus didn't work was that it was always a handout to government unions and privileged groups who the President wanted to thank for his successful election. Not even Lord Keynes would have said it was a very effective economic (or political) strategy. He also would have bristled at the notion of tax hikes on corporations and wealthy individuals, at least with the economy in this state. Nevertheless, this new bank is straight out of any Keynesian textbook. It may be new, but innovative it is most definitely not.

The other problem is that Keynes never anticipated, and would indeed have been horrified by, the shocking levels of structural, long-term debt the the US has amassed in the form of entitlement programs. Keynes, for all that can be said against him, honestly believed that he was writing with an eye to saving capitalism. However, if we are to save capitalism these days, we need to know what the markets "feel." It may be that there are animal spirits, and the turn to a more psychological focus on how people react to market developments may be very helpful. But if Americans know the plan, but don't believe it, any multiplier will be gone. Moreover, the US still must focus on the long-term problems; Keynes never anticipated the idea of entitlement debt being almost 100%. He had seen the destruction of Europe, but never conceived that nations could run such debts for so long.

One of the biggest problems with Keynesian economics, therefore, is that Americans have moved beyond it both in theory, but also psychologically. If no one knows (or cares) that the government is running a deficit, deficit spending in a time of recession may work. The problem is that too many of the people who will end up paying for that spending tomorrow are nowadays saying to themselves, "well, we won't get fooled again!" If there was ever a multiplier, it evaporates with the knowledge that confiscatory tax policy will emerge in the future to compensate for deficit spending today. As a result, the animal spirits have crouched into survival-hibernation, rather than taking advantage of the sugar buzz.

15 August 2011

News you can use

It seems impossible that your correspondent could have overlooked this intriguing development, which undoubtedly will have a profound impact on yields and quality of barley. And if the barley becomes stronger, well, there's no telling what you could do with that!

Technological progress in the service of human wants and needs: it's beautiful!

05 August 2011

Blogging from Zeeland....

It's been beautiful here in Hoofdplaat, Netherlands. Your correspondent and his entourage have spent the last week here, enjoying the sights, drinking terrific Belgian beer, and eating lots of fish. But the world seems to keep moving. So briefly:
Required Reading:
This piece, from Andrew Stuttaford, is excellent.
Also from the Weekly Standard, this post is interesting. Some in the German media, such as ARD and Spiegel, are really working the "fundamentalist Christian" angle of the story -- bending over backwards to say "See? It's not just Islam! Christians are crazy too!"

Finally, in the Noah Webster department, here's a great feature on the Institute for the Czech Language, and its efforts to determine what's "really" Czech as the language increasingly imports English words, especially words dealing with technology and finance.

Mental activity should start to resume Tuesday or Wednesday, after Our Man in Brno is Actually in Brno.