A Brief History of Gnash Equilibrium

I am hoping to revive this blog in the near future, so for any new readers, here is a selection of old posts. Let's start with politics; after all, it's the dust out of which blogosphere was created. I haven't written much since the last presidential election, so the political posts are mostly from 2008:

I told you so, back when the crisis started. (Be sure to follow the link in the post, too. And all links in all blog posts. Blog posts are often meaningless out of context.) Unfortunately, Obama has broken the wrong promises.

I was a big Obama fan in 2008 and most of my posts reflected that. But my loyalty is to principles and truth, not to any candidate. So I occasionally defended McCain and attacked Obama. Ironically, the latter was one of the most visited posts on this blog.

Nobody has ever won an election by attracting only smart voters. Politicians need stupid people.

Tell me if you think I am a closeted Republican. :)

I still hope this was a correct assessment, but I am not so sure anymore. :(

And how would you expect a numbers and trivia guy to cover a presidential election?

After the election: sadly, still true, 3 years later.

It is often hard to tell the difference between real-life politics and satire. So a selection of my satirical posts should come right after politics:

Election Jeopardy!

Fun with Republican candidates... in 2008 (and they weren't any better this time around).

Barack Obama stole my puppy. Or worse.

My comment on Al Gore's Nobel Prize.

Remember the "Celeb" ad? I translated it to plain English.

I am an economist and actuary, so I often write about economics:

A brief history of income tax rates.

Why I am not a Mankiwite.

I also write about math, numbers, and numeracy:

The forgotten Eleventh Commandment (more useful than the first ten).

How risky is it to swim outside when a storm is approaching? Not that I'd recommend it, but I still don't know.

I like facts to be true:

One of my pet peeves: historical revisionism. In any context.

And I value freedom of religion, and freedom from religion:

The most bipartisan fun in America: bashing atheists.

Challenging the lazy conventional ethics of abortion.

When the Right doesn't like public prayer.

Update: Some links were messed up. I think I fixed them all.

Don't mess with Texas!

“If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.”
—Ma Ferguson, 29th Governor of Texas (possibly apocryphal)

“Being able to own things that are your own is one of the things that makes America unique.”
—Rick Perry, 47th Governor of Texas (for real)

Where do they find these people?

Gallup asks a stupid question

If they asked me, how the hell would I know what they mean by "spending cuts" and "tax increases"? They don't specify the baseline (status quo). Is letting the Bush tax cuts expire a "tax increase"? Is not doing another "doc fix" (or doing a partial one) a "spending cut"? Asking such a vague question almost guarantees that everyone who understands it will refuse to answer, and hence only those who don't know what they are talking about will participate in the survey. Maybe that explains the scary answers given.

A lot more people say they prefer spending cuts than tax increases. That's crazy by any interpretation, but it is even worse if people tend to understand those terms the way I think they do, which is that anything that causes taxes to go up from where they are today is a tax increase (i.e., it doesn't matter that the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire; when they go up, it's a tax increase). In that case, even equal shares of tax increases and spending cuts would require radically shrinking the government.

And only 11% of respondents prefer mostly or exclusively tax increases. Heck, only 20% of Democrats prefer mostly or exclusively tax increases. We have found the enemy, and it is us.

Why did liberals give the Second Amendment away?

Unfortunately, most liberals are wusses. They let conservatives interpret and own the Second Amendment. So when Scalia made up the individual right to own firearms for the purpose of self-defense (an outstanding example of true judicial activism), liberals had only milquetoast counter-arguments. When Elena Kagan faces the Senate Judiciary Committee, she will make a generic statement that she supports the Second Amendment, without challenging Scalia's interpretation. Democratic politicians do it all the time, even if they really do not believe in any of the reasoning in Heller.

That makes liberals look like an unprincipled bunch, cherry-picking the Constitution. In fact, they are stupidly squandering the opportunity to take the high ground in every respect.

Scalia's interpretation makes no sense. There can't be a right to own all weapons - I bet Scalia would not support Heller's right to keep nuclear bombs in his home - so where do you draw the line? If handguns must be allowed, can bazookas be banned? Probably, but that is just as arbitrary as saying that swords must be allowed, but guns can be banned. There is no principled way to determine the limits of this "right".

By contrast, the interpretation that makes complete sense is that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to serve in the military. That is what "to bear arms" means. People don't "bear arms" when they go hunting; that is not, and never has been, the idiomatic use of that phrase. This interpretation fits well in the context. It makes the "well-regulated militia" reference relevant, and the right recognized by the amendment meaningfully curbs a practice that was common in the 18th century, to limit military service (or officer ranks) to upper classes.

This interpretation was politically meaningful in the 18th century, and it is politically meaningful now. It makes it unconstitutional to deny the right of military service to homosexuals. (That it is currently denied only to those homosexuals who do not hide their sexual orientation does not change anything. A whole class of citizens is excluded, it's just that the government is limited in the ways it can ascertain membership in that class.)

Why is no politician using this argument? Where are the liberal jurists or law professors arguing for this view? I googled gay military "second amendment" and the top hit that combined the terms in this sense (and the sixth hit overall - the top five were not relevant) was a comment on a blog. Kudos to ober from albany ny for comment #9 here:

The second amendment of the US Constitution says "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." If this is true, that we have a right to bear arms, then how can the government stop its citizens from joining the military? It seems to me that gays have a right to join the club. And the second amendment guarantees a person's right to join the military. If the military is not open to all of the country's people, then that might allow factions to gain control of it. A country whose military is dominated by one group may turn on the others: Can tyranny be far behind?

That's right. Notice the inanity of the reply by one Capt, USMCR:

There is no right to join the military. There's a duty to serve, but not a right to serve. If you can't see well enough to shoot - is it a civil rights issue? Should we tell the Marine Corps that the policy/slogan "every Marine is a rifleman" is a civil-rights violation? The right to bear arms, n the other hand, belongs to all citizens, whether members of the military or not. The 2nd amendment's militia isn't the military - it's a hypothetical draft of every able-bodied man - assumed to have acquired competence with a rifle on his own in the woods. I just hope that my legally blind neighbor sticks to knives and baseball bats.

That's just silly. Freedom of expression does not mean that an illiterate person is entitled to have an op-ed published in New York Times. Marriage and reproductive rights do not mean that the most repulsive guy in the world can force some woman to marry him and bear his children. And equality of rights in education does not mean that those who cannot pass first grade are entitled to finish college. Of course competence is required, but exclusion of a whole class unrelated to ability is clearly forbidden in all analogous situations.

O. J. Simpson got his book title all wrong

He should have taken a lesson from Tom Ridge and called it I Considered Not Doing It.

Bill Maher at his best

...golf, hamburgers, and religion are all things that are incredibly bad for the environment.

You said the T-word! Tee-hee-hee-hee!

On any normal day, Brendan Nyhan is worth reading. But this was silly. Yes, Pearlstein's word choice was sloppy, for reasons explained by Yglesias, but Nyhan is making a mountain out of a molehill. He is actually counter-productive, as he accuses a bunch of people of joining in the smear based on their endorsement of Pearlstein's article. But Pearlstein's article is indeed very good, with the exception of those two words. One shouldn't get so stuck on those two words to discard the rest of the article. And I wonder what Nyhan would have said if Pearlstein had characterized the Republicans correctly.

Preview of future Investors' Business Daily editorials

Stephen Hawking is a tough act to follow, but they may try some of the following:

Mikhail Gorbachev wouldn't have had a chance in the USSR; if he had tried his reforms there, he would have been sent to the Gulag.

If LBJ had ever been elected President in his own right, maybe he would have had some credibility for the policies he pushed.

The Beatles would never had become famous if they had tried to compose their own songs; they probably had no creative talent at all.

If New Yorkers ever experienced a terrorist attack, they wouldn't be such unpatriotic latte-sipping liberals.

If Mark Twain had ever traveled to the Mississippi river, he wouldn't have written such unrealistic nonsense about it and the people living around it.

If Martin Luther King, Jr. had grown up in the South, he'd never had gotten the education to become a minister.

If Charles Darwin had seen the Galapagos islands, he would have realized that only the Almighty God could have designed the beaks of all those finches.

(P.S. IBD has now "corrected" the editorial. That's futile; such idiocy is incorrigible and eternal.)

Why is the press like a sheep behind a wheel?

When a traffic lane is closed, there is always some asshole who doesn't merge in an orderly way, but keeps driving in the emptied lane until it really ends, and then butts in. When that happens, I am not mad at the asshole, but at the sheep that lets him in. Looks like Dean Baker shares my sentiment, with a slight modification: the assholes are politicians and the sheep are the journalists.

PolitiFact is full of shit (Krugman-bashing edition)

It looks like in this country you can't tell the truth without being called a liar by the so-called fact-checkers. Here PolitiFact blasts Paul Krugman. The quote they put in the title is

During the 2005 fight over Social Security, "there were noisy demonstrations — but they were outside the events,” and opponents were “not disruptive — crowds booed lines they didn’t like, but that was about it."

Paul Krugman on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 in a blog posting.

This is already a bit of a straw man. It would appear, from that quote alone, that Krugman denied that Social Security reform protesters ever behaved in a disorderly manner. When they expand the quote in the main text of the article, it becomes considerably more nuanced:

In an Aug. 5 blog posting, liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote:

“Indeed, activists made trouble in 2005 by asking congressmen tough questions about policy. Activists are making trouble now by shouting congressmen down so they can’t be heard. It’s exactly the same thing, right?”

He continued, “Seriously, I’ve been searching through news reports on the Social Security town halls, and I can’t find any examples of the kind of behavior we’re seeing now. Yes, there were noisy demonstrations — but they were outside the events. That was even true during the first month or two, when Republicans actually tried having open town halls. Congressmen were very upset by the reception they received, but not, at least according to any of the reports I can find, because opponents were disruptive — crowds booed lines they didn’t like, but that was about it.

“After that, the events were open only to demonstrated loyalists; you may recall the people arrested at a Bush Social Security event in Denver for the crime of … not being Bush supporters.

“So please, no false equivalences. The campaign against Social Security privatization was energetic and no doubt rude, but did not involve intimidation and disruption.”

(Emphasis mine.) So Krugman readily acknowledges that the 2005 campaign was "rude". His main point, though, is comparison between the 2005 and 2009 protests, and he claims they are not similar. He says he couldn't find, in 2005, "any examples of the kind of behavior we’re seeing now." And what kind of behavior is that? "Intimidation and disruption", Krugman says. For the examples of such behavior now, see here and here and here and here and here. (All of those are events that happened, and were reported, before Krugman wrote his blog post.)

Well, PolitiFact's verdict is that Krugman's statements are FALSE:

We conclude that while some of the recent conservative protests — such as ones at town halls in Tampa, Little Rock, Ark., Houston, Philadelphia, and Green Bay, Wis.— may have been angrier and more widespread than the ones in 2005, it would be incorrect to suggest, as Krugman does, that the noisy demonstrations against Bush's policies were only taking place outside the events or that disruptions were limited to the occasional boo.

Is this even arguably grounds for the "False" verdict? PolitiFact's "Truth-O-Meter" has a total of six readings: True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True, False, and Pants On Fire. The last one is reserved for stuff like this, but even some quite nutty claims are merely deemed False. So "False" is supposed to mean really, you know, false.

For Krugman's post to be False by those same standards, it would seem necessary to find that the protesters' behavior in 2005 was indeed similar to what we see now - that the Social Security protesters also intimidated speakers and disrupted meetings. But look what PolitiFact says:

It is true that there’s nothing in the clips from 2005 about burning members of Congress in effigy or the use of devils’ horns. But Woodhouse’s group employed 28-foot gorillas, duck suits, plates of hot waffles and sheet cakes as props, according to an Aug. 13, 2005, report in the Albuquerque Tribune.

They "forgot" to mention Nazi symbols, but they appear to agree with Krugman about intimidation - unless duck suits are considered equivalent to imagery of lynching and Nazis.

And let's see what evidence PolitiFact cites in support of the verdict. Among their examples, I could find only one journalistic report that amounts to out-of-control unruly behavior and disruption of a meeting, and it is not clear that it was solely the protesters' responsibility:

— A session sponsored by Rep. Chris Chocola, R-Ind., in South Bend, at the downtown branch of the St. Joseph County Public Library “was a raucous affair, with many of the 100 or so people who attended shouting questions and insults, talking over each other and still bubbling with questions when it was all over.

“One gentleman was so angry when Chocola indicated the hour-long session was coming to an end and wouldn't be extended that he walked out.”

(South Bend Tribune , Feb. 27, 2005)

But even here, the disruption was far from complete. People were "bubbling with questions" and the gentleman was angry because he didn't get his turn to ask a question. That indicates that, while the meeting was raucous, there was active conversation to the end. It's quite a stretch to compare that report with current demonstrations.

Other examples border on ridiculous. Someone was being smartalecky to Rick Santorum:

“Santorum asked the audience what would happen in 2008. The response he wanted was that the oldest baby boomers would turn 62 and be eligible for early retirement.

“What he got instead, shouted out by an unfriendly voice, was: ‘George Bush will leave office!’

Well, that surely made Baby Jesus cry. In other examples, John Shadegg "encountered scattered heckling, boos and hisses" (emphasis mine; I assume the folks at PolitiFact know the meaning of "scattered"), some guy wrote a letter to Enterprise-Record of Chico, Calif., complaining that he witnessed "rude, disrespectful behavior" (Wait! Isn't that what Krugman acknowledged anyway?), and, in PolitiFact's words, "some stories noted the meetings were civil." Wow. After reading all that, I'll have nightmares of people in duck suits chasing me down and killing me with waffles.

But, of course, in case you aren't convinced that Krugman is a liar,

in all likelihood, there were many, many events that did not result in news coverage we could find. So we can't say whether there were protests or shouting matches.

And, since we can't say, Krugman should shut up, too. Even if what he says is true, how dare he hurt the feelings of those frail little Republican politicians?

Still, the protests inside and outside town halls, even if they were not universal, clearly rattled Republican leaders. On March 17, 2005, USA Today reported:

“Shaken by raucous protests at open ‘town hall’-style meetings last month, House Republican Conference Chairwoman Deborah Pryce of Ohio and other GOP leaders are urging lawmakers to hold lower-profile events this time.

Poor, unfortunate souls. And bad, bad Paul Krugman!