Monthly Archives: March 2014

All The World Is A Nail

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In a previous post on the economics profession, I singled out the profession’s weird belief that public policy is about efficiency. Posts like this one are a good example of the weird myopia. How is it possible that fully formed adults cannot know efficiency and efficacy are of no concern to the welfare state?

If anyone really gave a damn about helping the poor, they would stop welfare altogether. You would think people in a racket allegedly designed to study markets would know you get more of what you subsidize. Paying people to be in the underclass means you get a steady supply of people in the underclass.

Welfare is, in part, about buying grace. The over-class loves these cost-free (relative to them) ways to help the poor. Guys like John Forbes Kerry and Joe Biden don’t give real money to charity. Instead, they give other people’s money to these programs. The added bonus is they get to go around the country bragging about how good they are to poor people, despite the fact they are trying to create more of them.

Even better, their kids get to work in non-profits, funded by government, that allegedly help the poor. That way when they take over for dad in the political rackets, they too can brag about being generous with your money. The politicians in a democracy is like a fireman who runs around setting fires he can heroically battle. They create the conditions for an under-class, then claim to helping the under-class.

Another aspect of welfare is aimed at the middle-class. It is riot insurance. Let the Koreans open their cash businesses in the ghetto. Let the cops figure out how to keep the ghetto savages penned up. That’s where welfare comes in. Give them cash to buy a forty ounce, some weed and some bling. Let ’em sell drugs and shoot one another. If that’s what it take to keep them on the reservation, so be it.

The middle-class looks at welfare as a cheap way to deal with the ghetto. Instead of doing the hard work of enforcing social policy that rewards the fit and punishes the maladapted, they happily pay higher taxes to maintain urban reservations. They move to exurbs without public transport in order to avoid the problem. Welfare is not about helping the poor. It is about political piety and reality avoidance.

The Coming Collapse

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On the excitement scale, pension reform is down there with Swedish land reform and women’s basketball. Even for accountants, it is considered dull. It is the small boring things that tend to bring down society. The best example is the Yersinia pestis, which was carried by the fleas on mice. Christendom was nearly wiped out by a tiny pest carrying an even tinier pest. Anyway, this post about pension reform is an example of the small boring stuff that will turn out to be quite important.

The regular session of the Louisiana Legislature is right around the corner and one of the most depressing aspects of it is what won’t be discussed. Pension reform isn’t going to be a prominent topic.

In fact, what could happen is lawmakers will make things worse. That’s because bills to give retired state workers a 1.5 percent cost of living raise have not only been filed but, according to the early handicapping, are likely to pass.

It’s been eight years since the last raise, which is a long time in any context other than one in which the private sector is enduring stagnant wages and chronically high unemployment for years. That is to say, like now.

Under the bookkeeping formulas kept by the state, the money is there for the COLA boost. Now. It may be better to give than to receive, but a pension increase, like a raise, is a gift that keeps on giving for the recipients. This is no bonus forun a job well done, it’s something that stays on the books and has to be met going forward even if balances cause that accounting formula to change.

When economists talk about public debt, they seldom mention the mountain of promises to government employees. If I promise you a job and regular raises for the next 30 years, that’s a debt I owe you. It is no different than borrowing the money and handing it to you. Those promises by state and local government to pay people long into the future cannot be discharged in court in most states, either due to the state constitution or the fact states cannot declare bankruptcy.

Furthermore, it’s no secret that state and municipal governments face few if any looming financial crises greater than pensions. Some governments have taken piecemeal steps to address this, largely copying moves made by the private sector.

More specifically, defined contributions plans like 401ks are now recognized as far more sensible than the rich defined benefits schemes that were once the norm.

Nevertheless, whether the fiscal bombshells created by defined benefit plans — which guarantee a certain payment for life — can be defused remains an open question. By no means is this all the workers’ fault. Lawmakers in states across this great land have frequently underfunded pensions, and states have stuck to a very respectable and probably outdated “anticipated” rate of return of 8.5 percent.

I can provide the answer here. They cannot be defused. They will explode when the cash runs out in the next decade. No one should shed any tears for the workers. They knew, or at least they should have known, that these lavish benefit packages were out of line. They live in the same world as the rest of us. They also knew the money for those lavish pay and benefit plans comes out of their neighbors paycheck. To put it bluntly, they have been screwing the rest of us for decades so too bad for them..

Translated, that means not enough money has been poured into the pension systems and investment returns will have to be forever rosy.

But the relationship between unions – whose power is increasingly concentrated in the public sector – and lawmakers means handsome deals have been struck between decidedly non-adversarial parties. Besides, it all involves other people’s money, and the unions have always provided handsome returns to friendly politicians’ campaign war chests.

Taxpayers are now looking at the monstrous bill produced by such cozy extravagance.

Louisiana, fortunately, doesn’t have as gigantic a burden as states like Connecticut face. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a huge problem in the Pelican State – to the tune of somewhere between $20 billion or nearly $75 billion, depending on which alarming report you consider more accurate.

Louisiana hasn’t adopted sensible reforms like raising the retirement age and moving to defined contribution plans. Louisiana taxpayers are still stuck with an antiquated and expensive arrangement where the defined benefit plan rules supreme.

In 2012 the Legislature did pass a law requiring future state hires to enroll in defined contribution plans, but led by the teachers’ unions and other interested parties – staffers, boards, lobbyists, investment salespeople, accountants, lawyers and the rest who ride like remoras on this bloated whale – the law was repealed.

Of course. Letting public employees unionize was never about the state employees. It was about the democrat politicians hoovering off billions in tax dollars through the unions. The hacks running the unions funnel money to the politicians, who play ball with the unions. The union leaders also keep a nice share for themselves.

It’s hard to predict how deeply we must dip the gourd into the magic fountain of other people’s money to make good on the state’s current obligations. What is clear is regardless of whether one goes with the rosy estimates floated by those in the pension business or the much scarier numbers arguably more objective analysts reach, it would take tens of thousands out of Louisiana wallets just to plug the existing gap.

In other words, what Louisiana and practically every other state across this great land faces is a system that is — all together now — unsustainable.

It is beyond belief everyone doesn’t see this, which means everyone does. The state workers drawing these handsome pensions want them. They fight like cornered tigers over having to contribute another dollar to what they regard not as some extraordinarily generous entitlement paid for by folks who have no such protected eggs themselves, but as some kind of right, confined to them, as sacred as free speech.

There is no magic solution. Detroit is the example states may follow. Over the next decades services will be reduced and budgets cut in areas like public recreation and road maintenance. As the crisis grinds on, bond holders will be hit with demand from states to forgive some debt to avoid defaults. Eventually they will come back to pension plans and force cuts on them. The unions will sue, like they are in Illinois, but you can’t get blood from a stone. When the money runs out, the party is over.

The Spread of Stupid

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Part of getting older is losing patience for stupid people. That means losing interest in mass media, particularly the commentariat. These are people who spend all of their time opining about things, but never take the time to fact check themselves. They have the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips, yet they can never be bothered to look up basic facts about their topics. Instead they just repeat the same nonsense the other chattering skulls have been saying.

Here’s a good example from John Fund over on National Review. How hard would it be to call someone who knows something about natural gas? They could quickly tell him that it is really hard to ship overseas. They would also tell him we lack the facilities to do it in any sort of volume. It will take decades for us to built out those systems. We have not built a refinery in thirty years. The environmental lobbies will never go along with a large scale LNG facilities near a major port. It’s probably easier to start a nuclear plant than to build a new natural gas facility.

Let’s look at the building of alternative pipelines into Europe. What do you think Russia is doing in Syria and Iran?  They want to build a pipeline through Iran, over northern Iraq into Syria. Tartus would be a very convenient place to build LNG facilities as it already has port facilities capable of handling big sea-going vessels. The GCC and Saudi Arabia would like to build one too, except their pipeline would run through Saudi Arabia into Jordan to the Suez Canal. Neither of these plans will be done anytime soon. Given the problems in the region, both projects are on permanent hold.

Again, all of this stuff can be looked up on-line. Five minutes of time and you quickly see we are not going to be able to do anything about Gazprom. Even if he is unable to work the internet, he works for the Wall Street Journal. he can call people who know about these things. instead, he repeats nonsense. Most likely, the nonsense comes from the neocons who obsess of Russia. They feed these lunkheads in the medial their talking points, knowing that people like Fund will never fact check them.

Bad Science

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Even the most disconnected people know the gag about science announcing something and then the next day announcing the opposite. This is most common with food and diet, where everyday brings a new scare. If you follow the soft-sciences, then you know that most of what passes for academic research in some fields is complete nonsense that is easily refuted. This story in the New York Times goes into detail about the origin of what we have come to call junk science.

My first Raw Data column, published in January, was about the controversy over irreproducibility — experiments whose outcomes cannot be verified independently by another lab. Featured in the piece was a study by Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis that has been a source of contention since it appeared in 2005. It was called “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”

All scientific results are, of course, subject to revision and refutation by later experiments. The problem comes when these replications don’t occur and the information keeps spreading unchecked.

Dr. Ioannidis’s analysis took into account several factors — things like noisy data, a small sample size or relatively lenient standards for deciding if a finding is statistically significant. His model could be applied to any area of science that met his criteria. But most attention to the reproducibility problem has been in the life sciences, particularly in medical laboratory research and epidemiology. Based on the number of papers in major journals, Dr. Ioannidis estimates that the field accounts for some 50 percent of published research.

The small sample size is a favorite of the health rackets. I wish I had saved it, but my all time favorite was a study on milk using eight Norwegian dairy farmers. I forget the details, but it had something to do with heart disease and dairy consumption. The executive summary made the claim that dairy causes heart disease. They assumed the nitwit reporters would not bother to read the study.

Another area of concern has been the social sciences, including psychology, which make up about 25 percent of publications. Together that constitutes most of scientific research. The remaining slice is physical science — everything from geology and climatology to cosmology and particle physics. These fields have not received the same kind of scrutiny as the others. Is that because they are less prone to the problems Dr. Ioannides described?

Faye Flam, a science writer with a degree in geophysics, made that argument in a critique of my column in Knight Journalism Tracker, and I responded on my own blog, Fire in the Mind. Since then I’ve been thinking more about the matter, and I asked Dr. Ioannidis for his view.

“Physical sciences have a stronger tradition of some solid practices that improve reproducibility,” he replied in an email. Collaborative research, for example, is customary in physics, including large consortiums of experimenters like the teams that announced the discovery of the Higgs particle. “This certainly increases the transparency, reliability and cross-checking of proposed research findings,” he wrote.

He also mentioned more stringent statistical standards in particle physics — like the five sigma measure I mentioned in my second column — as well as sociological factors: “There seems to be a higher community standard for ‘shaming’ reputations if people step out and make claims that are subsequently refuted.” Cold fusion was a notorious example. He also saw less of an aversion to publishing negative experimental results — that is, failed replications.

Another factor, as Ms. Flam suggests, is how constrained a field is in generating plausible hypotheses to test. Almost anything might be suspected of causing cancer, but physicists are unlikely to propose conjectures that violate quantum mechanics or general relativity. But I’m not sure the difference is always that stark. Here is how I put it my blog post:

“What about the delicate and exquisitely controlled experiments that occur in laboratories? Are hypotheses involving intracellular enzyme pathways and the effects of microRNA on protein regulation so much less constrained than, say, solid-state physics and materials science?

Everyone is being polite here. The difference is social science is not science. Physics and chemistry are science. Science relies on math to validate itself. Long before humans walked the earth, arithmetic was true. Two plus two was true at the dawn of time and will be true into the future. Social sciences rely on statistics, which they use to calculate probabilities. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is not science.

You can calculate the probability of you getting black jack on the next deal. You cannot prove you will get black jack. When you get into areas with loads of hard to quantify variables, statistics loses much of it value. The response to that is the creation of simplified models and studies that have no connection to reality. The result provides statistically useful results, but the difference between statistically useful and practically useful is often so large as to make them mutually exclusive.

Dr. Ioannidis said he was struck by an “arrogant dismissal” by some physical scientists of the suggestion that their field might be anything less than pristine. We won’t really know, he said, unless there are empirical studies like the recent ones in medical science.

“I have no doubt that false positives occur in all of these fields,” he concluded, “and occasionally they may be a major problem.”

I’ll be looking further into this matter for a future column and would welcome comments from scientists about the situation in their own domain.

Science is not immune from mischief. This story from last week shows how broken the peer review system is these days. Peer review is intended to weed out the junk science from the legitimate science. Experts in the field review your work, critique your methods, challenge your assumptions and look at your data. If computer generated gibberish is passing through the system it means no one is looking at this stuff. Peer review is useless if there are no peers and no review.

The Sex Rackets

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A popular way for campus degenerates to get attention to host a workshop of festival celebrating a depraved sexual act. Sometimes these are part of a whole week of degenerates performing from the public. On the one hand, the left-wing media loves pushing this stuff in the face of white people. On the other the left gets to pretend they are edgy outsiders challenging orthodoxy. This story posted on National Review is about a recent one of these events at Rutgers University.

University of Michigan had a BDSM class. University of Arizona had the Condom Olympics. Many more have Sex Weeks, or some variant of that sort. Now Rutgers, a public university, has jumped into the fray.

On Tuesday, Rutgers hosted a female orgasm workshop as part of a week-long event called “Sexapalooza.” Sex educators Marshall Miller and Maggie Keenan-Bolger conducted the Tuesday night event for “orgasm aficionados and beginners of all genders.” Participants came to “learn about everything from multiple orgasm to that mysterious G-spot.”

The event was particularly marketed to struggling boyfriends who want to help their girlfriends to orgasm.

Other events at Sexapalooza, which ends on March 12, include a Sex Toy Workshop, complete with a sex-toy raffle,  a lecture called “Having Great Sex,” and a Sex Fair with “condom races, condom lollipops, and education tables.”

Sex Discuss Here!, the organization that ran the event, describes the female orgasm workshop as “our most popular program.”

It’s always fun to look up the bios of the people involved in these things.

Kate Weinberg
Kate graduated from DePaul University in Chicago. She describes a “lightbulb moment” she had while taking an intensive HIV/AIDS course in college, when she realized how sexuality “is a thing so intimately connected to politics, religion, guilt, expectation, the ways in which we live and are allowed to live. It’s one of those things that seems to explain the world around it.” Little did she know at that moment, but she had begun her journey toward becoming a sex educator.

Dorian Solot
Dorian co-founded Sex Discussed Here!, co-created all its programs, and trains and supervises our fantastic team of sex educators. She has presented over 500 programs around the country at colleges and universities, businesses, churches, regional and national conferences, and adult education centers, and continues to present a small number of programs each year. However, these days you’re more likely to work with Dorian during the planning process for your event: she is the person who answers our phone and emails, guiding hundreds of students and staff people through the process of making each event a success.

As a breast cancer survivor who discovered a lump in her own breast at age 26, Dorian knows that being comfortable with her own body may have saved her life. As a result, she is passionate about increasing people’s knowledge and comfort with their own bodies. Trained as a sexuality educator at Brown University, Dorian has authored several articles about the scientific study of female orgasm. In addition, she is a certified birth doula, providing professional labor support to women and their partners during childbirth. (As she jokes, “If I’m gonna teach how babies get in there, the least I can do is help women get them out of there, too.”)

One of the fascinating things about this age is that the Jews seem to be trying very hard to prove the anti-Semites are correct. Every single time one of these degeneracy festivals turns up, the people behind it are Jewish. The counter is that it is just a coincidence that two percent of the population is so wildly over-represented in anti-Western and anti-white activity. Maybe, but string together enough coincidences and you have what experts call a pattern.

These women put a lot of importance of “being passionate” about stuff. Hitler was passionate too. At least that’s the claim from the professional anti-fascists, but that is not something they ever consider. For them, passion is always good, while things they don’t like are extremists. Now, the “doula” is a new one. This is not something that comes up in these stories. Wiki provides an interesting story.

A doula also known as a labour coachand originating from the Ancient Greek word δούλη meaning female slave),is a nonmedical person who assists a woman before, during, or after childbirth, as well as her partner and/or family, by providing physical assistance, and emotional support.  The provision of continuous support during labour by doulas (as well as nurses, family, or friends) is associated with improved maternal and fetal health and a variety of other benefits.

Dana Raphael is credited with inventing the term.

Dr. Dana Raphael is a medical anthropologist, writer and lecturer. Her interest in breastfeeding inspired her to found The Human Lactation Center in 1975 with Margaret Mead, an institute devoted to researching patterns of lactation worldwide. The Center is now a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that has consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. She is also the Executive Director of the Eleventh Commandment Foundation, a NGO that researches the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse on women’s experience of pregnancy, labor, childbirth and lactation.

She is credited with initiating the role of the modern doula, a supportive person who pairs up with women during their labor and delivery and helps the new mother to assure her success with breastfeeding.

Dr. Raphael has served as an adjunct professor at Yale University, School of Medicine, and as an invited lecturer in the United States, China, India and Japan. She has received two Fulbright awards, chaired or participated in more than fifty conferences and symposiums, written or edited five books and over 50 articles.

She is not obviously a lesbian, but no mention of children is usually a tell. Even feminist women include the names of their children on the resumes and official bios. It is their signature accomplishment. When you get into the earth goddess type feminism, the children are an even more important totem. Despite the oogily-boogily from feminists about “gender roles” they cannot escape the gravitational pull of biology.

There’s been a theory kicking around for years that the expansion of the state has been about putting people to work in nonsense jobs to keep them busy.  The collapse of the manufacturing base meant millions of idle people looking for work. Putting them into government jobs, where they have something to so was the answer. Walk into any government office and you see lots of people siting around looking busy. Maybe that’s true, but the permission state does result in a high number of grifters.

These people in the sex education rackets are entirely dependent on government and it appears their primary target is the public schools. They are flush with tax dollars to spend on this stuff. They most likely ride the grant rackets too. Billions are funneled to semi-employed social science majors through the grant system. Without it, many of these people are stocking shelves at Target. Instead, they get to fill your kid’s head minds with agit-prop intended to make them hate themselves and their ancestors.

The Left Versus The CIA

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This is a curious story about the security state and the political class. Following World War II, a permanent professional spy agency was created with the National Security Act of 1947. After some fits and starts, it has been a permanent feature in Washington for five decades. Presidents come and go, senators come and go, but the CIA is always there. That’s not a small thing. These semi-independent agencies that sort of report to the executive tend to take on a life of their own.

Congressional aides involved in preparing the Senate Intelligence Committee’s unreleased study of the CIA’s secret interrogation and detention program walked out of the spy agency’s fortress-like headquarters with classified documents that the CIA contended they weren’t authorized to have, McClatchy has learned.

After the CIA confronted the panel in January about the removal of the material last fall, panel staff concluded that the agency had monitored computers they’d been given to use in a high-security research room at the CIA campus in Langley, Va., a McClatchy investigation found.

It remained unclear Wednesday if the monitoring, the unauthorized removal of classified material or another matter were the subject of a recent CIA request to the Justice Department for an investigation into alleged malfeasance in connection with the committee’s top-secret study.

The documents removed from the agency included a draft of an internal CIA review that at least one lawmaker has publicly said showed that agency leaders misled the Intelligence Committee in disputing some of the committee report’s findings, according to a knowledgeable person who requested anonymity because of the matter’s extraordinary sensitivity.

In a combative statement issued Wednesday evening, CIA Director John Brennan chastised unidentified senators for making “spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts.”

“I am very confident that the appropriate authorities reviewing this matter will determine where wrongdoing, if any, occurred in either the executive branch or legislative branch,” he said in an apparent reference to the request for a Justice Department investigation. “Until then, I would encourage others to refrain from outbursts that do a disservice to the important relationship that needs to be maintained between intelligence officials and congressional overseers.”

The removal of the documents is the focus of an intense legal dispute between the CIA and its congressional overseers, said several people who also cited the matter’s sensitivity in asking to remain anonymous.

Some committee members regard the monitoring as a possible violation of the law and contend that their oversight powers give them the right to the documents that were removed. On the other hand, the CIA considers the removal as a massive security breach because the agency doesn’t believe that the committee had a right to those particular materials.

Most people probably think Congress can get whatever they want from any government agency, but that’s not true. In fact, some agencies routinely ignore Congress. People also think the CIA would not be spying on Congress, but that they do.

“Even if the agency is technically correct on the legalities, it’s a real asinine thing to pick a fight with your oversight committee like this,” said a U.S. official who was among those who spoke to McClatchy. “You’ve got to be asking yourself why the agency would be willing to take such a risk. The documents must be so damned loaded.”

White House officials have held at least one closed-door meeting with committee members about the monitoring and the removal of the documents, said the first knowledgeable person.

White House officials were trying to determine how the materials that were taken from CIA headquarters found their way into a database into which millions of pages of top-secret reports, emails and other documents were made available to panel staff after being vetted by CIA officials and contractors, said the knowledgeable person.

The extraordinary battle has created an unprecedented breakdown in relations between the spy agency and its congressional overseers and raises significant implications for the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches of the government. It also has fueled uncertainty over how much of the committee’s report will ever be made public.

“The CIA has gone to just about any lengths you can imagine to make sure that the detention and interrogation report won’t be released,” said Sen. Mark Heinrich, D-N.M., a Senate Intelligence Committee member who has pushed hard for the release of the report.

“As furious as I am about these allegations, I want to keep focused on getting that report out to the people so that they can read the truth and make up their own minds as to who made those decisions and why,” he said.

One of the fascinating aspects of the Left is they never forget a slight – ever. Here we are years after the Bush people were chasing jihadis around the desert and liberals are still pressing claims about alleged abuses. It was only after most of the principles were dead that the Left forgot about Nixon. Even death is not enough sometimes. Obama’s Russia policy was largely a rebuke of Reagan’s policies. The whole “reset” nonsense  and the decision to kill missile defense was the long delayed answer to Reaganism.

The War On Brown People

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It is always fun telling liberal white hipsters that gentrification is just a nice word for ethnic cleansing. In reality, it is nothing more than old rich white people throwing out poor brown people, so young white people can live in the city. This is very upsetting to white liberals, as they have no defense against it. It points to the fact that Progressives talk like MLK, but they live like the KKK.

It’s a nice gag and it gets the desired reaction, because it has the advantage of being the truth. This old NYTimes article tried to paint a pretty picture, but the fact is rich white people are flooding into cities like New York, pushing out the brown people. These sincere, wholesome bourgeois bohemians will chew your ear off about how diversity is our strength, except where they live of course.

It is not just NYC, DC is getting whiter. Boston gentrified long ago. Even Oakland is going for a lighter shade of pale. These cities voted for Obama 81% (NYC), 90% (DC), 80% (Boston) and 84% (Oakland). As these cities get whiter, they get more Progressive and they get more aggressive in their proselytizing. At some level, they know the truth, but their coping strategy is to become even more hysterical on race.

That’s why this story in the NYTimes is interesting.

Cities that have worked for years to attract young professionals who might have once moved to the suburbs are now experimenting with ways to protect a group long deemed expendable — working- and lower-middle class homeowners threatened by gentrification.

The initiatives, planned or underway in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh and other cities, are centered on reducing or freezing property taxes for such homeowners in an effort to promote neighborhood stability, preserve character and provide a dividend of sorts to those who have stayed through years of high crime, population loss and declining property values, officials say.

Newcomers, whose vitality is critical to cities, are hardly being turned away. But officials say a balance is needed, given the attention and government funding being spent to draw young professionals — from tax breaks for luxury condominium buildings to new bike lanes, dog parks and athletic fields.

“We feel the people who toughed it out should be rewarded,” said Darrell L. Clarke, president of the Philadelphia City Council, which last year approved legislation to limit property tax increases for longtime residents. “And we feel it is incumbent upon us to protect them.”

I love how they were not terribly concerned about “neighborhood stability” when the neighborhoods were black and brown. Once the white people took over, they suddenly start sounding like Rotary Club Republicans from the suburbs. The even funnier part is the city council president just about says they owe these urban pioneers for driving the bad element out of the city.

In doing so, cities are turning urban redevelopment policy on its head and shunning millions in property tax revenue that could be used to restore municipal services that were trimmed during the recession because of budget cuts, including rehiring police officers.

A decision to reduce property taxes can be risky because such levies account for at least 50 percent of operating budgets in most American cities and sometimes provide as much as 80 percent of a city’s revenue.

But even Detroit, where a declining tax base has been at the core of the bankrupt city’s troubles, recently announced plans to cut property tax rates.

Last month, Mike Duggan, Detroit’s new mayor, said property taxes would be cut by up to 20 percent to levels that more accurately represent the value of homes in the city. The reduction could cost Detroit as much as $15 million annually in revenue.

The tax adjustments are part of a broader strategy by cities to aid homeowners — who continue to struggle financially since the home mortgage crisis. In Richmond, Calif., lawmakers are attempting to use eminent domain to seize underwater mortgages to try to help homeowners keep their houses.

Housing experts say the arrival of newcomers to formerly working-class areas — from the Mission District in San Francisco to the Shaw neighborhood in Washington — is distinct from previous influxes over the past 30 years because new residents are now far more likely to choose to move into new condominiums or lofts instead of into existing housing, making the changes more disruptive.

“This latest wave of gentrification has happened very quickly, and cities are cognizant to keep from turning over entirely,” said Lisa Sturtevant, executive director of the Center for Housing Policy, a nonprofit research group. “And cities where property values are up and budgets are generally more stable have the wherewithal to provide tax breaks.”

Ms. Sturtevant said that given that many of the younger, newer arrivals do not necessarily plan to stay for long, cities are making a sensible economic choice.

“There’s less personal investment and less incentive to stay, so cities are saying, ‘Let’s invest in the stayers,’ ” she said.

It makes perfect sense for cities to try and lure middle-class white people. There are a million arguments about crime and race and poverty and education and drugs and blah, blah, blah. There’s no argument about the crime rate among middle-class white people, as it is the lowest in the world. Fill a city with them and you don’t have a crime problem. The other fact no one disputes is low crime means higher property values, high civic participation, better schools and more stable tax receipts.

This should be something everyone knows and accepts. If you really want to help black people, demand they act white, instead of indulging their bad behavior from behind the walls of your gated community. There’s nothing to be gained from lecturing whites about diversity, while the people doing the lecturing ethnically cleanse their own neighborhoods. All it is doing is creating a lot of angry white people.

The Great Game

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The general view of Ukraine is that it is a part of some great power game with Russia on one side and the US on the other. Where China and Europe fit into this does not seem to be that important to the experts. The American media is not stuffed with worldly, thoughtful people, so they tend to the simple-minded when explaining these issues. In fairness, most American don’t care, so keeping it simple is probably the only way to get the attention of the public.

The more likely issue is a German – Russian one than a replay of the Cold War. The Russians want to maintain energy dominance and their best customer is Germany. The Germans would like to have other options, but there’s not much they can do about it. Ukraine sits in between the two and a whole lot of history. I know, there are a bunch of countries wedged in there now. I’m speaking historically. To steal a line from Joyce, history is a nightmare from which Europe can never awake.

David Goldman is a reliable source on these things. His latest is no exception.

Western governments are jubilant over the fall of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, a Russian ally. They may be underestimating Vladimir Putin: Russia has the option to hasten Ukraine’s slide into chaos and wait until the hapless European Union acquiesces to – if not begs for – Russian intervention.

That leaves the West with a limited number of choices. The first is to do nothing and watch the country spiral into chaos, with Russia as the eventual beneficiary. The second is to dig deep into its pockets and find US$20 billion or more to buy near-term popularity for a pro-Western government – an unlikely outcome. The third, and the most realistic, is to steer Ukraine towards a constitutional referendum including the option of partition.

Moscow has no need of allies with weak stomachs. But it will withdraw the offer of $15 billion worth of Ukrainian debt purchases and subsidies for natural gas exports to Ukraine and leave the nearly bankrupt country to the ministrations of the West. Careful what you wish for, Russia is telling the West.

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that Ukraine should get money from the International Monetary Fund: “We consider that such a situation would meet the interests of Ukraine, would put the country on the path toward major structural reforms. We wish them success in this undertaking and in the rapid stabilization of the political and social situation.”

Siluanov is being mischievous. Twice in the past six years, the IMF suspended promised loans to Ukraine after the country refused to cut salaries and pensions and raise energy prices. Russia had offered a loan without conditions; any money the West offers will require austerity measures that no Ukrainian government is capable of enforcing.

The fall of Yanukovich is an embarrassment to Russia, and a well-deserved one, but that does not leave Russia entirely without options. Russia most likely will adopt the same stance towards pro-European Union politicians that the Egyptian military and its Saudi backers took toward Egypt’s the Muslim Brotherhood: let the opposition take the blame for economic and social chaos, and then move in when the country is on its knees. The Brotherhood ruled Egypt for a year, and then the food and fuel ran out, 30 million Egyptians, more than half the country’s adult population, demonstrated to oust it. The military obliged in August 2013 and immediately obtained emergency loans from the Saudis.

The rest goes into some detail on the financial realities facing Ukraine. This part is particularly interesting.

The country also is a demographic deader. At its present fertility rate (1.3 children per female), its 47 million people will shrink to only 15 million by the end of the century. There are at present 11 million Ukrainian women aged 15 to 49 (although a very large number are working abroad); by the end of the century this will fall to just 2.8 million. There were 52 million Ukrainian citizens when Communism fell in 1989. Its GDP at about $157 billion is a fifth of Turkey’s and half of Switzerland’s.

Ukraine is barely a country, rather an amalgam of provinces left over from failed empires – Russian, Austrian, Lithuanian, Ottoman – cobbled together into a Soviet “republic” and cast adrift after the collapse of Communism. Lviv (Lemberg) was a German-speaking city, part of Austrian Silesia; before World War II a quarter of its people were Jews. Jews were two-fifths of the population of Odessa. A fifth of the population, mainly in the east, are ethnic Russians; a tenth, mainly in the west, are Uniate Catholics, who have a special place in Catholic policy since the papacy of John Paul II.

Ukrainian nationality is as dubious as Byelorussian nationality: neither of them had a dictionary of their language until 1918.

At a great distance, it is not hard to cheer for the flag waving irregulars on the streets we see on television. Up close they are not so inspiring. The Germans and Russians are up close. Every German and every Russian has an ancestor who died in the lands we now call Ukraine. Add in the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and the dog’s breakfast of minor peoples who have been run over by one army or another and you can appreciate the difference in perspective. Consequently, they see all of this through different eyes. This is a game community organizers are wholly unequipped to play.

That’s not an argument for or against one side of the ruling class. America is an island nation, as a practical matter. Like the Brits, we will naturally have a different take on world affairs. We should appreciate that by staying the heck out of European politics as much as possible. We will never be as good at the Great Game as the Continentals. There’s no shame in it. They will never be as good at sea power and a host of other things that come naturally to people insulated from other tribes by oceans. We can win the Great Game by staying out of it.

Eurasiansim

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There is a specter haunting the neocons. it is the specter of Russia, which has been the same specter haunting their ancestors settled in America. The new term of art to sell this paranoia is “Eurasianism.” Maybe it will be “Duginism,” after the Russian political scientist Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin. The later is easier for pundits on TV and radio to pronounce so that’s the one that probably sticks, but you never know. Maybe they come up with some new way to personalize the old tribal fear.

Steve Sailer has written about the subject, but only superficially. Most of the paleocons, which make up the bulk of his audience, are not all that interested in how younger dissidents have responded to Dugin’s writing. The paleo-crowd simply does not care beyond demanding the US stay the hell out of the problems of Eurasia. Steve’s information and comments will therefore be received without too much fanfare. I may be reading it wrong, but that’s not a crowd looking for dragons to slay.

National Review is another matter. Given that they are wholly owned by the neocons at this point, they have to obsess over this new thing. Not only are they looking for a reason to restart the Cold War, they need to find a way to justify their embrace of multiculturalism. They had some guy named Robert Zubrin write a piece on Eurasianism. His biography suggests he is a very bright guy, but the tone of the article suggests he lies awake at night, straining to hear the hoof beats.

The roots of Eurasianism go back to czarist émigrés interacting with fascist thinkers in between-the-wars France and Germany. But in recent years, its primary exponent has been the very prominent and prolific political theorist Aleksandr Dugin.

Born in 1962, Dugin was admitted to the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1979, but then was expelled because of his involvement with mystic neo-Nazi groups. He then spent the Eighties hanging around monarchist and ultra-right-wing circles, before joining for a while​ Gennady Ziuganov’s Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF, a neo-Stalinist group partially descended from, but not to be confused with, the previously ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union, CPSU), after which he became a founder and chief ideologue of the Eurasianist National Bolshevik Party (NBP) in 1994.

Nazism, it will be recalled, was an abbreviation for National Socialism. National Bolshevism, therefore, put itself forth as an ideology that relates to National Socialism in much the same way as Bolshevism relates to Socialism. This open self-identification with Nazism is also shown clearly in the NBP flag, which looks exactly like a Nazi flag, with a red background surrounding a white circle, except that the black swastika at the center is replaced by a black hammer and sickle.

The open devotion to Nazism is Dugin’s thought is remarkable. In his writings he celebrates the Waffen SS, murderers of millions of Russians during the war, as an ideal organization. He also approves of the most extreme crimes of Communism, going so far as to endorse the horrific 1937 purges that killed, among numerous other talented and loyal Soviet citizens, nearly the entire leadership of the Red Army — something that Stalin himself later had second thoughts about.

What Russia needs, says Dugin, is a “genuine, true, radically revolutionary and consistent, fascist fascism.” On the other hand, “Liberalism, is an absolute evil. . . . Only a global crusade against the U.S., the West, globalization, and their political-ideological expression, liberalism, is capable of becoming an adequate response. . . . The American empire should be destroyed.”

This is the ideology behind the Putin regime’s “Eurasian Union” project. It is to this dark program, which threatens not only the prospects for freedom in Ukraine and Russia, but the peace of the world, that former Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych tried to sell “his” country. It is against this program that the courageous protesters in the Maidan took their stand and — with scandalously little help from the West — somehow miraculously prevailed. But now the chips are really down. The Ukrainians are being faced not with riot police, but with Russian divisions, subversion, and economic warfare. The country needs to be stabilized, and defended. The Ukrainians deserve our full support — and not just for reasons of sympathy for those resisting tyranny or respect for the brave. It is in the vital interest of America that freedom triumphs in Ukraine.

Without Ukraine, Dugin’s fascist Eurasian Union project is impossible, and sooner or later Russia itself will have to join the West and become free, leaving only a few despised and doomed islands of tyranny around the globe. But with Ukraine underfoot, the Eurasianists’ program can and will proceed, and a new Iron Curtain will fall into place imprisoning a large fraction of humanity in the grip of a monstrous totalitarian power that will become the arsenal of evil around the world for decades to come. That means another Cold War, trillions of dollars wasted on arms, accelerated growth of the national-security state at home, repeated proxy conflicts costing millions of lives abroad, and civilization itself placed at risk should a single misstep in the endless insane great-power game precipitate the locked and loaded confrontation into a thermonuclear exchange.

The 20th century saw three great-power confrontations. Two of them turned into total war. We lucked out on the third. Do we really want to roll those dice again? We will have to, unless the Eurasianist program is stopped.

The stakes in Ukraine could not be higher.

It is not hard to see where this goes. The usual suspects in Conservative Inc. will be chanting about the shadow of Eurasianism over Europe. or, it could be the specter of Duganism haunting the West. Mix in some Cold War nostalgia and the usual suspects will be wearing American flag lapel pins again. We are ruled by people who are defined by ancient hatreds and nostalgia for a time when being anti-Russian was enough to be on the side of angels. They will never leave Russia alone.

Buckley’s Folly

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I still subscribe to National Review and I still visit the site daily. It is more habit than interest these days. The magazine goes unread until they pile up and I thumb through them in one sitting. Charles Cooke is interesting from time to time. Andrew Stuttaford is often good when he writes about Europe. Kevin Williamson is the best writer they have left, which speaks to how bad it is now. They have run off most anyone with talent and something interesting to say.

Anyway, I was trying to read this from Jonah Goldberg and I kept thinking about how dreary National Review is these days. Part of it is me. My views have changed as I have grown older. It is just a part of getting older. But, the world has changed too. In the 1980’s, Bill Buckley was a rock star, of sorts. The main reason is a new generation was ready to push back against the Baby Boomer liberals. To be a young right-winger in the 1980’s was a lot of fun, even if the ideology did not always make sense.

Today that brand of conservatism feels about as exciting as disco. Reading Jonah’s column, I was thinking about how many times I’ve heard the same argument from the Conventional Right. There’s nothing wrong with it, other than the fact it was a reasonable response to the Left in 1950. Given where we are as a culture, the value of gentling tapping the brakes on the Progressive drive to the abyss is lost on me. I mean, what’s the point?  The time for debating this stuff is long ago in a foreign country.

For some reason I was reminded of when John O. Sullivan was shown the door by Bill Buckley. I had vague recollections of it being another case where Buckley canned the guy most thought was set to take over for him. I went looking and this is the best I could find, which is a column with lots of quotes from the article I must be recalling. Buckley could never figure out how to close the show that was his life. Like all men, he struggled to turn control of his project over to someone competent.

Given the shabby state of the conservative movement Buckley built and the sorry state of his signature achievement, he was foolish to try and leave a legacy. It is ironic in a way as he saw what happened to Henry Luce and his magazine empire after his demise. He was friends with John M. Olin, who bankrolled a lot of early conservative enterprises. Buckley surely knew that the best course was to shut it all down and let the next man build his own thing, outside the shadow of Buckley and his project.

Maybe it will not matter much. There does seem to be a gathering storm of dissident writers and publications out there on the Internet. Taki Mag has become a must read among anti-liberals. Bloggers like Steve Sailer promote dissident ideas. Still, it would be better if there was not this hollowed out entity claiming to represent the opposition to the Progressive orthodoxy. In the end, Buckley’s vanity may end up causing more harm to the causes he championed than the good he did as a leader of the Right.