The key to the Afghani election...

is... A DONKEY. Nope, not me. But more a whole pack of rent-a-donkeys that are used to haul the ballots around in treacherous terrain.

But even in areas with roads, many villages can be reached only by footpaths. Those ballots will be delivered by brigades of donkeys, which election officials rent from local farmers. At the price of $60 per donkey — the monthly salary for a night watchman at a public school — there are many willing participants. Well, to be honest $60 a day won't quite entice this donkey... but you never know.

Long summer...

But a hell of a good one.

New job, sold a condo, bought a house, coached two great baseball teams...

Oh yeah, and having a baby girl! Well, my wife is HAVING her, but you know.

So, my lack of posting is a severe dereliction of duty to the ________ and I feel that the outcry from the ________ is justified. Well, I can't think of anything that actually goes into those two blanks, it isn't that big of a deal to miss a couple of months. However, don't be suprised if I take a few more months off... but I'll be back sometime, or so I can hope.

Yet one more czar...

or tsar, or csar... is to be created by Obama soon. I really wonder how many czars one country can have. Under my understanding of the primary and secondary definitions of czar, we would seemingly be limited to some extent. But hey, what's one more czar when we already have a border czar, homeland security czar, and health and family services czar... What? A health czar? Apparently so, and it isn't the Secretary of DHFS...

President Barack Obama filled out his health-care overhaul team Monday by naming Nancy-Ann DeParle, a veteran of the Clinton administration, as the White House health czar.

DeParle will join Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, the nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary

Now I'm confused. From any of the definitions linked above, it would seem unlikely that someone who is a czar would be a member of a team... Alas, another example of our cultural obsession with overusing a word because it sounds cool.

Also, for those three readers out there, I apologize for my long dry spell of posting. It has been a busy couple of months... coaching little league (2 teams), buying a house, selling a house... a lot going on. I guess I need a blogging czar to keep me on track.

O'Reilly, the pollmeister...

I really don't often pay much heed to Mr. O'Reilly, but in looking at some recent polling data, I took note that he seems much more interested in polls than he did a mere six to ten months ago. Here's Bill's talking points memo from March 16th, entitled "Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy fires up."

Writing in The Wall Street Journal Friday, Scott Rasmussen — perhaps the most accurate pollster in America — reported that President Obama's job approval rating has now slipped below that of President Bush back in March 2001.

Perhaps the most accurate pollster, well maybe, but maybe not? (Nice attempt to build credibility, Bill). Also note, that O'Reilly doesn't mention the actual approval rating, because you would think he would then have to admit that a 62% approval rating during an economic recession isn't half bad. Or, one would think. But yesterday's talking points memo proves me wrong. Bill fires out that Obama's approval rating has slipped to 58%. He then postulates with such wisdom as to why Obama is suffering such declining ratings. What could it be? Left-wing, Eurocratic socialism fears, of course...

Writing in Thursday's Wall Street Journal, the former prime minister of Denmark says:

"In Europe, we have been protected from the worst effects of the [economic] crisis thanks to welfare states built up over the past 60 years to cushion citizens from the threats posed by the free market. We can all count on state health care, social housing, education, unemployment support and other universal, tax-funded services. The simplistic dictum of more markets and less government championed by Reagan, Thatcher and their ideological heirs has failed on a momentous scale. I am hopeful that the G20 will make progress. We must keep up the pressure by demanding a globalization that works for everyone and forge new alliances and new lines of communication across national boundaries. We must develop new, progressive ways to achieve global justice."

Well, Karl Marx could not have said it better.

Well, Bill, I have to agree that Marx likely couldn't have said it better. However, I'm not sure Marx would make any of those statements, sans perhaps a tangential reference to justice. The equating of a modern democratic welfare state to something Marx would endorse is quite assinine, as the last I checked Denmark still has a pretty thriving private enterprise, with a quite happy populace.

Under any circumstance, you know O'Reilly is working with some weak sauce when he tries to lambast the President for having a plus minus of 26 in approval ratings... Given the number of Glen Beck's, Lou Dobbs, and O'Reilly's out there preaching and fear-mongering against global governance, I'm quite pleasantly suprised in the ability of the American populace, at large, to realize many of our current problems will require global solutions and/or cooperation.

Now, I'm not a profesional pollster, but I believe when a President's polling data looks like this:


and the public's view of the economy looks like this:



Somebody must believe that we are heading in the right direction... Oh wait, here are some polls showing that's the case. I know that polls are everything, but by jesus, I get tired of someone using polling data as a weapon, when in fact, the polls are fundamentally juxtaposed against their ideological predispositions.

A political tweet...

Give the site tweetcongress.org a look see when you have some time. You know, if it can be said in a less than 140 characters, without puncuation or capitalization, with little thought before shooting off with some rhetorical bullshit -- politicians are bound to get in the game.

Get a laugh...

and you'll get the number. That's an old partially chauvinistic adage I heard from a quite chauvinistic (and depending on your viewpoint, mildly successful or completely reprehensible) self-professed professional bachelor. I haven't seen the full details of this study, but from what appears on CNN, it may be more true than I ever believed. Of course, it's important to remember that some women's sense of humor isn't exactly on a parallel plane with the everyday guy's view of funny. So, as a general rule fellas, stay away from the "dead baby" and/or "poop" jokes... For one, they won't impress the ladies, and secondly, they really aren't funny to anyone with much of a brain. Most of the laughs generated are at you and the fact that someone would say something so stupid.

If ladies like guys who can make them laugh, is the converse true? Well...

Do men also think funny women are more intelligent and honest? Time constraints prevented McCarty from exploring this question, but he said research suggests that men don't care much about women's sense of humor.

"A man wants a woman who laughs at his jokes and...

Well, the study doesn't complete the thought I had, but I think any man being truthful with themselves can figure that one out.

London calling...

The G-20 is set to meet this week in London. Amid all the protests, world leaders will be, in theory, working towards a plan to address the global recession. One of the primary areas of concern should be the decline in global demand, ergo a rise in protectionism and decline in trade.

Trade is contracting again, at a rate unmatched in the post-war period. This week the World Trade Organisation (WTO) predicted that the volume of global merchandise trade would shrink by 9% this year. This will be the first fall in trade flows since 1982.

Not only is this the first drop in trade since 1982, it is percentage wise, the biggest drop since WWII. So, what's a politico or bureaucrat to do? Stimulus, I dare say. Leonhardt points out that of all the economic lessons we've learned, and often had to unlearn or relearn, one that seems to hold water is:

Does stimulus work? Fortunately, this is one economic question that’s been answered pretty clearly in the last century.

Yes, stimulus works.

When governments have taken aggressive steps to soften an economic decline, they have succeeded. The Germans did it in the 1930s. Franklin D. Roosevelt did so more haltingly, and had more halting results. Even the limp Japanese recovery plan of the 1990s makes the case. Although dithering over a bank rescue kept Japan in a slump, government spending on roads and bridges made things better than they otherwise would have been.

The primary impediments to additional stimuli likely has less to do with the costs or benefits, but with politics and nationalism. The politics portion of the argument against a bigger, more coordinated worldwide stimulus can be noted by looking at the Republicans in Congress being dead set against the stimulus. Finding little pieces of pork here and there, they parade around the media circus as if they were saving all America's future babies from sure fire death by debt. So, is this stance predicated on a truly ideological purity against bigger government spending, or more likely is it a political game? I'm going with the latter, because if it were a truly a conviction of such deep GOP significance, I would expect to see more GOP governor's joining in with Mr. Sanford in turning down cash. (I duly note that there are rumblings that some other GOP guvs will follow suit, at least in part.)

The second, and perhaps more problematic, antagonistic force is that of economic nationalism, or protectionism. From the earlier linked Economist article:

Some countries (notably Western European ones) have been reluctant to work the budgetary pump for fear that their extra demand will leak abroad to the benefit of foreigners. To stop the seepage, some governments have inserted discriminatory conditions into their fiscal programmes, the prime example being the “Buy American” procurement rules.

It seems highly irrational (which, may be more real in economics that we like to admit) for a nation to not pursue what is in its best interest, based upon a fear that action may have positive effects on other nations. I thought this was the basis for the entire argument for globalization. The G20 leaders need to realize that even if some "leakage" occurs, the preponderance of the benefits will remain in the country that activates the stimulus. With this confluence of short-sighted partisanship and chauvinistic politics from the so called friends of globalization, I'm not sure free trade needs the anti-capitalists protesters to bring it down. Just let the people running it keep making decisions defunct of logical coherence.

Soliciting brainpower...

This past week's Economist featured an interesting article on immigration policy in America. Recently passed legislation (i.e. the bailout) included an amendment from Senators Grassley and Sanders, whereby firms receiving bailout funds would be greatly constrained in using the H-1B visa program to hire foreign workers. This type of legislation, though rooted in a desire to help American workers, is just not sensible. I could understand a desire to require anyone receiving bailout funds to show that indeed there isn't American labor to do the job, but to start down the path of impeding the best and brightest from around the world from coming to America, well... that's going to end poorly for America. It is non-sensical and illiberal to create a protectionist environment at the high end of our labor market, when in actuality Americans aren't entering select fields (e.g. Engineering, Physics, etc) at nearly the rate that our advanced economy requires for continued innovation. Let alone the fact that you may end up with noone doing the job, or an unqualified person doing the job, the real nonsense in this change is that innovation and ideas are not exhaustive, but instead are exponentially collaborative. We should be opening our borders to a great many more educated folks, welcoming them to our lovely melting pot, in which they can add to the ideas of the educated Americans and spawn more innovation.

What of the criticism that these workers are displacing native scientists who would have been just as inventive? To address this, Mr Kerr and William Lincoln, an economist at the University of Michigan, used data on how patents responded to periodic changes in the number of H-1B entrants. If immigrants were merely displacing natives, increases in the H-1B quota should not have led to increases in innovation. But Messrs Kerr and Lincoln found* that when the federal government increased the number of people allowed in under the programme by 10%, total patenting increased by around 2% in the short run. This was driven mainly by more patenting by immigrant scientists. But even patenting by native scientists increased slightly, rather than decreasing as proponents of crowding out would have predicted. If anything, immigrants seemed to “crowd in” native innovation, perhaps because ideas feed off each other. Economists think of knowledge, unlike physical goods, as “non-rival”: use by one person does not necessarily preclude use by others.

Lazy blogger...

That's me! But at least I have something to try and get me out of my slump...

I'm collaborating with some friends at Political Liability.

I hope to be able to get back in the swing of things as the weather turns, which I know makes no sense, because all winter I've pretty well just sat around doing nothing. For some reason, however, blogging comes much easier during the warmer months...

Smoke'em if you got'em...

Instead of pie in the sky budget fixes... why not try high as a kite fixes?

Estimates value the state's crop of marijuana at $13.8 billion, double that of the vegetable and grape markets combined. Nationwide, it may be the fourth largest cash crop, behind corn, soy and hay but ahead of wheat.

The newest marketing slogan from potheads:

Pot! Bigger than wheat!

I hear the clockwork in your core...

So, I'm in love with Noble Beast. It is a little scary actually, I'm having 2PM trysts with the record at work... dreaming to the melodies...

I use a live show for "Not a Robot, But a Ghost," because Bird* live is something to experience...



* Being from within a short drive of French Lick, Indiana, I never would have thought that I would refer to anyone else in the world as "Bird." Makes me wonder now, whether the two are related... Two naturals, infused with hard work, yields impressive performances. Who knows? Cousins?

our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea...

Someone once said, "Blogger's blog," which makes me something else entirely. I'll not delve into what that may be, but you know -- live (and shit) happens. So, while I keep the pause button on my e-stream of consciousness, please enjoy the music*.



*Neutral Milk Hotel has been very much in my head this winter... Hard to believe it has been ten years since this album. The video montage to Anne Frank is, I think, an interesting touch, especially when thinking of the unwritten novels and unborn ideas of the eighty year old (in June) Ms. Frank.

Fighting for the last chicken thigh...

If you need another reason to stay away from Old Country Buffett,this story may assist you in realizing that not only is the food often slop, but you may get ridiculed or stabbed for rocking the boat (or bumping a lady).

It all started when a young man and young woman, who police described as being friends, were approaching buffet tables when they bumped into one another.

"The victim said he had his eye on his next entree when his right arm connected the left arm of the young woman," police spokesman Joel DeSpain said.

"He says the woman responded by commenting on his girth indicating he did not need any more nourishment," DeSpain said.

A fifty year farm bill...

Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry offer a serving of interesting opinion in today's NYT, with a piece on sustainable agriculture. I don't know the solution to all of the issues raised here, and in other articles, but it seems exceedingly obvious that we really must reconsider our agricultural policy and move towards a more secure, safe, and sustainable situation.