BrothersJudd Blog

Hamas has confiscated rockets and other types of weaponry belonging to Fatah's armed wing, Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Palestinian sources revealed Sunday.

The sources told the Fatah-affiliated Palestine Press News Agency that Hamas confiscated 100 rockets and 500 "combat units" when Fatah tried to move them from one location to another in the Gaza Strip.

THERE IS NO EUROPE:

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:32:21 -0500

Postcard: Love thy neighbor? Europeans say 'no' : A Pew Research Center study shows public support for the European project has fallen and distrust between countries is growing. And the most down on the EU are the French. (John Laurenson, 5/19/13, Deutsche Welle)

Pew talked to 7,646 people in eight EU countries in March this year. Their conclusion is that no-one believes in the European Union any more; except the Germans. And that the process of European integration that was supposed to bring down barriers between European countries has had the opposite effect.

Belief that European economic integration has strengthened the economy slipped right across Europe from 2012 to 2013. It decreased five points in Germany. Now only 54 percent of Germans think economic integration is making us richer. But that's the only place in the survey where most people think this. In Britain it's now 26 percent, in Greece and Italy 11 percent. France registered the biggest drop in confidence in the economic benefits of the EU, at 22 percent they are now more disillusioned than the British.

French approval of the EU as an institution has also plummeted; approval ratings are 19 percent down on last year. That is much more than any other country, again overtaking the British.

When the French have to look to Britain to be convinced that the European Union is a good idea, you know you're in trouble.

Nations don't have neighbors--they're ethnic entities.

WHICH ISN'T GOING TO HAPPEN...:

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:14:18 -0500

Jaron Lanier takes a hard look at the wired world : The Writer's Life: The smart, accessible 'Who Owns the Future?' peers critically at the online state of affairs and finds it out of balance. (Carolyn Kellogg, 5/16/13, Los Angeles Times)

He's not an economist, he's a futurist, so his ideas are rendered in abstractions. For example, he coined the term "Siren Servers" to describe the powerful, enriched operators that gather and trade upon information provided by others. You and I know them as Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and the automated trading algorithms that contributed to the 2008 recession. And the term, which comes from the sirens of Greek myth -- so alluring that they caused sailors to wreck their ships on their rocky shores -- alludes to what he sees as their danger.

"An amazing number of people offer an amazing amount of value over networks. But the lion's share of wealth now flows to those who aggregate and route those offerings, rather than those who provide the 'raw materials,'" he writes in "Who Owns the Future?" "A new kind of middle class, and a more genuine, growing information economy, could come about if we could break out of the 'free information' idea and into a universal micropayment system."

By stepping back and grouping them all together, Lanier is able to draw connections between invisible stock trades and MP3 downloads. "I'm not saying all finance is bad and all networking is bad and all sharing is bad," he says. "What I'm criticizing is very specifically the way we're doing it now."

Lanier would like to see musicians, writers, coders, data generators and all content creators get tiny payments for their inputs into our vast system. You'd get paid for that status update about delicious tacos, especially if it showed up in a Facebook advertisement.

His ideas for brokering those payments are a bit fuzzy and, because they'd require a two-way accounting of who does what where online, run counter to some of the underlying ideas of the Internet, both structurally and ideologically. He's able to layer his argument so that it makes sense to a Silicon Valley outsider, while communicating some of the insider's point of view.

In part, Lanier is arguing against "the Singularity," Raymond Kurzweil's idea that computers will become intelligent, more intelligent that humans, by 2050 and change our civilization forever. As farfetched as it may sound, it's a dominant trope in futurism discussions, based on the accelerating speed with which computers have advanced.

For Lanier, the difference between human intelligence and machine intelligence is key. Much of what we think of as the Internet's free information exchange is actually based on the real work of people -- online translation tools are based on millions of previous translations done by real humans.

Lanier wants to force the acknowledgment, financially, that humans are essential part of the picture. We might create a robot that could provide nursing support to aging baby boomers -- but its success would be built on observing human nurses, aggregating the data collected as they go about their work. The human nurses should get paid for their contribution -- otherwise, they're freely offering the data that will put them out of work.

...not least because administering the payment system is too complex. But, what will happen is that we'll redistribute the wealth we all contributed to creating.

JUSTIFIED:

Sun, 19 May 2013 10:57:39 -0500

CORMAC McCARTHY'S BLEAK ROAD: Landscapes of the Mind: in a new series, Robert Macfarlane roams fictional worlds, starting with "The Road" (Robert Macfarlane, May/June 2013, INTELLIGENT LIFE)

I have read "The Road" more, probably, than any other book. A tale so fiercely bleak, so cauterised in its vision, is still a page-turner. It has entered my soul as a black version of a possible future, its effects felt bodily first: the steady creep of chill, an urge to hold my children tight. Man and boy plod on, page after page, and I read on, page after page, puzzled at my own persistence.

Hope lurks in both activities. It survives in McCarthy's language: austerely beautiful, and proving the paradox of apocalyptic art, that to annihilate the world one must also summon it into being. Hope is there, too, in the boy, whom the father strives so hard to protect, and whose presence brings the possibility, however faint, of life after ruin.

It's not faint.

HAIL TO THE CHIEF:

Sun, 19 May 2013 10:50:40 -0500

'We Can Be Great Again' (Jeb Bush, Newsmax Magazine)

We also must address the spending side, particularly entitlements. This is an area of great opportunity. The other party has shown no willingness to bring much needed reforms to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Despite ample evidence that such reforms could be done gradually and effectively, the entitlement programs remain as expensive as ever. The American people know this, and are looking for answers.

We have to be willing to accept that these programs are part of America's social safety net. And for millions, these programs are essential, providing a valued source of stability. But a nation that looks to the future does not treat such programs as beyond reform and improvement.

We devote far more resources to today's seniors than we do today's young; often those resources come at the expense of the young.

If nothing else, we can't address deficits -- projected as far as the eye can see -- without having an honest conversation about the growth rates in entitlement programs. These programs, designed and promised to be self-sustaining, will completely overwhelm the rest of the government's budget responsibilities by the time today's youngest workers retire. Wherever possible, conservatives should propose, through waivers from federal law and through state law, alternatives to the steady march to government control of healthcare.

Elements of a conservative plan would include lower premiums, consumer-directed care, catastrophic coverage, rewards for healthy lifestyle behaviors, and paying for quality.

This is a test of policy maturity. Today, the Republican Party has an opportunity to embrace gradual and productive reforms to these programs. We have the ability to present, by our own policies, a thoughtful approach to something all Americans correctly fear.

The other party has the power to do the work, but is unwilling to take it on. In such a context, we have the ability to prove ourselves worthy to govern. If we fail on that score, we can scarcely hope to be given the political power to do other great things. And think of what we could do: shrink the size of the government and its debt, refocus American energy on the growth of the economy, adopt much needed reforms to our education and immigration systems, and inspire hope and confidence in American households everywhere.

NO FORCE REQUIRED:

Sun, 19 May 2013 10:43:59 -0500

Nudging Conservatives to Harness Behavioral Science (Rich Thau and Celeste Gregory, May 3, 2013, American)

In 1982, social scientist James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling published their "Broken Windows" article in The Atlantic, an idea that launched a savvy assault on crime. One unrepaired broken window, they posited, signals a community's indifference and leads to many broken windows. "Vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers -- the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility -- are lowered by actions that seem to signal that 'no one cares.'"

Fighting crime became a Republican wedge issue, and the psychology of broken windows served as the weapon of choice. Rudy Giuliani wielded it most famously as mayor of New York City by vigorously policing minor crimes. In 1998, Giuliani said, "Obviously, murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes. But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other."

It seemed to work. Thirty years after "Broken Windows," some of New York City's citizens aren't even aware of its crime-ridden past.

The anecdotal evidence of New York's success has been buttressed by research published in the journals Science and Criminology: a disorderly environment leads to more -- and more serious -- disorderly behavior. It's an example of what behavioral scientists call the "priming effect" -- exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a later stimulus. Broken windows, and other repeated signs of societal deterioration, prime people to believe disorderly behavior is acceptable, and they act accordingly.

The broken windows story is a true conservative success rooted in social science. Yet since then, especially in recent years, conservatives have not followed up with similar public policy formulation and implementation. Meanwhile, the Left is deploying knowledge from emerging fields, such as applied behavioral science, with stunning success. [...]

Conservatives should be thinking now about building at least a small corps of social psychologists and behavioral scientists who could help the next conservative president govern as effectively as possible.
A growing body of compelling research shows that sometimes we follow the "Homer Simpson" in our minds, as Ariely likes to say. In fact, we very often behave irrationally, but in predictable ways. According to Ariely, if we recognize where we fall short and make mistakes in our rational thinking, then we can improve the world.

The 2002 Nobel Prize winner in economics, Daniel Kahneman, a patriarch of applied behavioral science, posits this premise: we each possess two systems of thought, called (unsurprisingly) System 1 and System 2. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional. System 2 is analytical, deliberative, and logical. Too often we make decisions based on the biases of System 1 -- even when we think we're using System 2.

To illustrate his point, Kahneman cites myriad questions such as this one: a ball and a bat together cost $1.10. The bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Very predictably, the initial System 1 response is typically "10 cents." It's fast, intuitive -- and wrong. Only when System 2 is engaged, and acts as a check on System 1, would a person determine the correct answer is "five cents."

In addition to System 1 and System 2, behavioral scientists have discerned and labeled numerous patterns in people's intuitive decision-making -- such as "priming effects," "loss aversion," and "what you see is all there is." By recognizing these seemingly irrational phenomena, humans potentially can understand their errors in judgment and avoid them in the future.

The understanding of these tendencies can also be deployed to "nudge" people toward certain behaviors and away from others. "People have a strong tendency to go along with the status quo or default option," write Sunstein and Thaler in the introduction to Nudge. "Research shows that whatever the default choices are, many people stick with them.... Two important lessons can be drawn from this research. First, never underestimate the power of inertia. Second, that power can be harnessed."

So, if conservatives could harness that same power, what would they do with it?

Perhaps conservatives would nudge people to stay in school and get married. Maybe they'd nudge them to save more for retirement and take more personal responsibility for their health care spending. But first they'd need to come to terms with the uncomfortable idea of government using these tools.

Indeed, while conservatives rightfully are wary of government nudging (which might appear to some as shoving), there are several policy initiatives where conservatives should pull the behavioral science tool kit off the shelf and start using it, because it brings them closer to the policy objectives they want to see realized, which would benefit society. And by continuing to not use these tools, they're ceding more to the Left than they need to.

Below are a handful of policy examples that outline how applied behavioral science could advance conservative principles on far-ranging policies related to marriage, education, retirement savings, and Medicare.

...AND CHEAPER...:

Sun, 19 May 2013 09:32:03 -0500

Landfill sites find reuse as locations for solar electricity plants (Miranda Green, May 19, 2013, Daily Beast)

Many states and cities have long been turning trash into treasure by burning garbage to create heat and electricity, or by harvesting the methane gas that is released as junk decomposes. But in a new twist on this theme, several cities and municipalities are transforming capped landfills - the ultimate waste of space - into solar power plants.

"When you get done with a landfill that property's primary function can no longer be used anymore, it's a great pyramid of waste," said Mark Roberts, vice president of HDR, an engineering company that constructs solar voltaic landfills. "So the question is what do you do with these facilities when you've filled it up. What you can do is cap the landfill in such a way that it meets the EPA requirements but gives you an opportunity to still get benefits from its use."

Those benefits come in the form of renewable electricity. Instead of letting landfills sit for years as the land settles and compacts, towns can place solar panels on the wide-open space and continue to make money from the energy collected. "In order to make old systems work properly you have to maintain the grass, fertilize and mow and maintain them for perpetuity, about 20 plus years," said Roberts. "We do these exposed solar caps and the maintenance goes down significantly and there's an economic incentive there."

Walmart announces completion of 8 solar arrays at Mass. stores (Chris Reidy, MAY 16, 2013, Boston Globe)

Eight of the 50 Walmarts in Massachusetts now have such systems, a company spokesman said. The other local Walmarts with solar arrays are in Springfield, Ware, Lunenberg, Northbridge, Halifax, Abington, and Tewksbury, he said.

Collectively, the installations at those eight Walmarts are projected to provide 2.8 million kilowatt hours of energy annually, saving about 1,484 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually - roughly the equivalent of taking 309 cars off the road, Walmart said.

THERE'S ONLY ONE SAFE HAVEN:

Sun, 19 May 2013 09:25:38 -0500

Maligned dollar flourishes in Venezuela (Juan Forero, May 17, 2013, NY Times)

Because the bolivar is artificially overvalued and practically worthless outside of Venezuela, everyone here is desperate for dollars, from auto-part importers to supermarkets to ordinary Venezuelans planning to travel abroad. Even government officials and the politically connected businessmen who have made fortunes off the free-spending state search out and trade in dollars.

The dollar may fluctuate in other markets, or even make a spirited comeback against some currencies, as it has this year. But here in Venezuela people know that the greenback skyrockets in just one direction -- up, to be bought and sold on an illegal and shadowy parallel market the government has been unable to control.

"We depend completely on the dollar," said one black-market dollar dealer, who asked that he only be identified by his first name, Fernando, for fear of winding up in jail. "Buying dollars is practically the national sport."

IN A THIRD WAY EPOCH, THE LEFT IS NECESSARILY THE REACTIONARY PARTY:

Sun, 19 May 2013 09:19:43 -0500

Reactionaries in New York (Joe Klein, May 18, 2013, TIME)

The Democratic candidates for mayor in New York are campaigning to win the support of the teachers union. They threaten to return the city to the horrors of the David Dinkins era.

Back at the turn of the 1990s, New York City was a mess. Crime was rampant. The schools were dreadful. Children in foster care were brutalized because-as the head of the Child Welfare Agency said-"oversight is racist." The mayor was an incompetent. And, above all, the city was run for the benefit of its employees rather than its citizens.

What followed was 20 years of governance by moderate Republicans, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.

A WHITER SHADE OF W:

Sun, 19 May 2013 09:12:46 -0500

This is not the President Obama we voted for : Candidate Obama promised a different kind of culture in Washington, but it's looking similar to the Bush era (Heather Long, 5/17/13, guardian.co.uk)

I was in Washington DC the night that Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. As usual, people were hopping from bar to bar to watch the returns come in and high five friends (or boo, in some cases). When it became clear that Obama had won and he gave his victory speech, something happened that I have rarely witnessed in America: spontaneous demonstrations broke out. People started marching down some of the main streets, many shaking keys or banging on pots and pans. Others carried American flags. Cars honked (more than usual) in solidarity.

It was mostly young people marching - from varied backgrounds. Many of these parades ended up in front of the White House where chants of "goodbye Bush" (or some variation thereof) began. It was the same slogan heard as Barack Obama was sworn in as president in January 2009 and Bush flew away in a helicopter.

There was a belief, especially among voters in their 20s and 30s, that Obama was going to be different. That his promises to "change the culture in Washington" were real. That his administration wouldn't be beholden to lobbyists and conduct executive power grabs. That any wars would be justified.

This was, after all, the candidate who put statements on his website like:

"The Bush administration has ignored public disclosure rules and has invoked a legal tool known as the 'state secrets' privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court."

Don't get me wrong, we've seen cracks in Obama's idealism since he was sworn in as president. It is typified in the fact that prisoners - 166 of them - are still detained at Guantanamo Bay despite Obama's promises to close the prison swiftly after he took office.

But this week was one head-shaking moment too many for me, and it appears from the president's sinking approval rating that others - including some who gave Obama a real chance - are with me. As a registered Republican, I thought long and hard about whether to vote for Obama, but I crossed party lines, as did many of my young peers. I wanted a more transparent and accountable government. I wanted America to make a very different statement after the Bush years.

Yet even setting aside Benghazi and the IRS conservative targeting ordeal, which is a big set aside considering reports now suggest that officials in Washington were very much involved, there's still plenty that makes Obama's presidency eerily reminiscent of the Bush administration, especially when it comes to these "trust us, this is in the name of national security" kind of statements.

WHEN YOU'VE LOST POWERLINE... (via Bart):

Sun, 19 May 2013 08:34:37 -0500

THREE CHEERS FOR TESLA (John Hindraker, 5/18/13, Powerline)

I have always been skeptical of electric vehicles, mostly because of my perception that electric car makers are more interested in subsisting on government subsidies than in competing on a level playing field for my business. So I was intrigued when I got an email this morning from Jeff Evanson, Tesla Motors' Vice-President of investor relations. Evanson, a long-time Power Line reader, pointed out that the company raised over $1 billion last week, and will use a portion of those proceeds to pay off its loan with the Department of Energy ahead of schedule. This will make Tesla the only US-based auto maker with no government debt. [...]

The Model S starts at $58,570 and costs a mere 6 cents per mile to run-and that's at California electricity prices.

All of this may be old hat to you, but it was news to me. Tesla's success, financial as well as technical, suggests that the long-awaited era of electric vehicles may be closer at hand than we thought.

JOBS THE rIGHT ISN'T COMPLAINING ABOUT LOSING:

Sat, 18 May 2013 08:31:12 -0500

Massive, open, online disruption (Zachary Karabell, MAY 17, 2013, Reuters)

The United States has a problem: rapidly rising student debt. It also has a solution: online education. The primary reason for spiraling student debt is the soaring costs of a college education at a physical college. Online education strips away all of those expenses except for the cost of the professor's time and experience. It sounds perfect, an alignment of technology, social need and limited resources. So why do so many people believe that it is a deeply flawed solution?

Because it means massive swaths of higher education is about to change. Technology has disrupted many industries; now it's about to do the same to higher ed.

Efficiency is the enemy of employment in all fields.

THE QUESTION REMAINS...:

Sat, 18 May 2013 07:54:11 -0500

The real scandal: IRS gives tax exemptions to political partisans (David Horsey, May 15, 2013, LA Times)

The reality is that numerous high-powered political operatives for both Republicans and Democrats have formed 501(c)(4) organizations. The GOP's most prominent political guru, Karl Rove, has Crossroads GPS, a 501(c)(4) entity that spent $70 million during the 2012 campaign encouraging voters to cast their ballots for Republican candidates. Under the guidance of former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina, the president's reelection apparatus has been reorganized as a 501(c)(4) group that no doubt will "educate" the public about the need for more Democrats in Congress. [...]

The fact is that none of the right-wing applicants were turned down, even though they are probably as engaged in partisan campaigning as Karl Rove or Jim Messina. A 501(c)(4) group is, by law, supposed to be a social welfare organization whose primary activity is not politics. Can anyone honestly say that about Rove or Messina or any of the many tea party organizations?

...whether it is appropriate to tax political speech at all? As Robert Bork argued, the only speech protected by the First Amendment is political speech.

DUTY CALLS:

Sat, 18 May 2013 07:39:49 -0500

Ignatieff: 'We have a duty to intervene in Syria' (Deutsche-Welle, 5/17/13)

Political scientist and public intellectual Michael Ignatieff says the international community has a duty to intervene in Syria. He told DW that he sees signs of the emergence of new global security architecture.

DW: Mr. Ignatieff, some time ago you and other political scientists developed the concept of "responsibility to protect," which states that in the case of particularly grave human rights the international community is obliged to intervene in a country's internal affairs. How does that apply to the situation in Syria?

Michael Ignatieff: Syria is a case where we're now into the third year of a bloody conflict in which the Syrian regime is using artillery and aircraft to attack civilian populations. Their security forces and their militias are staging obvious and horrifying massacres. So from a "responsibility to protect" point of view this is a case where a state has forfeited its right to be left alone and betrayed its responsibilities.

Thus is sovereignty redefined.