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Brian Micklethwait wrote about this “Fast and Furious” scandal some time ago here, but the story – which has not really caught fire in the MSM and has barely registered over this side of the Pond – has now gone into another level, according to Michael Graham (H/T, Instapundit):
In December 2010, Brian Terry — a former Marine and police officer turned Border Patrol agent — was working in Arizona, 11 miles from the Mexican border. He was killed in a gunfight with Mexican drug runners, and two of the AK-47s found at the scene were linked to a then-unknown program of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms called “Operation Fast and Furious.”
The name is perfect, because the president wants you furious — and fast. He wants you focused on those mean ol’ House Republicans who, according to Department of Justice consultant Robert Raben, are just “doing the bidding of the National Rifle Association.” Obama wants you debating Bush-era gun programs vs. his own, the limits of presidential privilege — anything except the fact that yesterday brought us the highest four-week average of initial jobless claims for the year.
President Obama has invoked something called executive privilege to prevent certain documents emerging about this case and how it has been handled. This is pretty serious stuff, as the guys at The Volokh Conspiracy blog argue. In fact, it is unconstitutional. (Not that the POTUS seems overly bothered by such considerations). The irony is rich, of course, because it has been claimed that the administration has been more than willing to leak details of things such as the US moves to capture OBL, and other targets, to its friends in the media and even Hollywood.
Now, I am not going to pretend that the Republicans are much better, if at all. These are politicians we are talking about here. The point, though, needs to be made loud and clear to those still operating under the illusion that the White House is occupied by someone with any consideration for the limits of power. It also shows that he is not all that smart: he’s given the GOP a nice big scandal to raise hell about between now and November.
What the f**k do they teach at Harvard these days?
Update: Good comment by Mark Steyn. Very apt:
“And by the way, if you are a viewer of nightly network news, you do not know anything about this story. I think ABC did its first story on Fast & Furious just last week, or a few days ago, for about 20 seconds. You would never have known that in fact citizens, many dozens, hundreds of citizens of America’s neighboring nation, Mexico, have been killed with guns provided for them by the United States government. That ought to be a national scandal, but it’s not, because the media have declined to run with it. But what we do know is that, in part because the media declined to run with it, Eric Holder & Co. thought they could in essence just deny to Congress the plain reality of the situation. What’s interesting about the assertion of executive privilege is whether Obama’s participation in this sorry story is absolutely direct, whether it concerns the operation, the knowledge that the operation had gone screwy, or even whether it’s just a kind of philosophical signing off on the operation. But the point is that this very much does confirm the, I think, tends to confirm the worst case narrative, that in respect of this particular story, the government is rotten and is lying about it. Senior cabinet officials are lying about it, and there is now a question mark over whether the President is also lying about it.”
“If you want others to pay more tax, then you should be consistent and pay as much as you possibly can yourself – you should even consider paying more than you have to by making a donation to HMRC or to government-owned institutions, such as NHS trusts. Those who believe taxes are moral in of themselves – a commitment to the common good – should practice what they preach. Yet if the allegations of massive, albeit legal, avoidance involving Carr are right – he hasn’t denied them – a man who specialises in ridiculing others, often in the cruellest of ways, may now end up as the butt of others’ jokes.”
Allister Heath, talking about Jimmy Carr, a stand-up comedian with a flair for tax planning. Heath’s solution: a simple, low, flat-rate tax that everyone pays, should be embraced. The only people who will suffer are tax lawyers and accountants, who may find they have to do something rather more productive instead. (In case anyone objects, I am a minarchist, not an anarchist, so some way of financing the most minimally-necessary state functions needs to be found).
Update:
“The real joy is that these people are all Lefties of the worst sort. I don’t just mean they’re pompous, preachy and self-satisfied – God knows, the Right has a few of those as well. I mean they’re the most glaring kind of hypocrite, denouncing their enemies as not just wrong but evil, while committing the sins they rail against. It’s like those class crusaders – Polly Toynbee, Diane Abbott – who send their children to private schools: by their own behaviour, they forfeit any claim to be taken seriously. It may seem gratuitous to rejoice in their downfall, but the moralising morons have fashioned the rods for their own backs. It would be positively rude not to take a thwack or two.”
Robert Colville.
Okay, another update, from Jamie Whyte, writing in the Wall Street Journal:
“For those Brits who complain that Mr. Carr is not paying enough towards their state-provided services are not really motivated by moral principles. They simply want Mr. Carr’s money. And Mr. Cameron wants their votes. Their outcries are not the sound of moral indignation. They are the howls of frustrated predators.”
Greg Beato at Reason magazine (the July edition) has this nice item, “The Internet vs the NEA”, about how innovative ways to fund creative projects in the arts have become such a hit that they are annoying the advocates for the publicly subsidised (ie, from taxes) sector. He is talking about a crowd-funding project in the US known as Kickstarter:
Current NEA funding amounts to about $1 per U.S. taxpayer each year. Yet the program is controversial and likely will remain so because those who contribute to it have no say in how their dollar is applied. Kickstarter, by contrast, gives people that control. It turns arts patronage from an abstract, opaque, disconnected, possibly involuntary act into one of dynamic engagement, where creators get to pitch supporters instead of faceless institutions and supporters feel as if they have a personal stake in helping creators realize their visions.
Kickstarter increases the pool and variety of funding sources for creators and allows people who are not wealthy to act as patrons. Artists can seek levels of financing that the NEA isn’t designed to accommodate on either end of the spectrum, from a few hundred dollars to a few million. And the chances of success are greater for Kickstarter applicants: In Fiscal Year 2011, 5,574 individuals and organizations applied for NEA grants across six program categories, and 2,350, or 42 percent, obtained them.
It is certainly too early to say that Kickstarter has made the NEA superfluous. At the same time, it may also turn out that Yancey Strickler’s reservations about rivaling the U.S. government are far too modest. Last year Kickstarter funded more than three times as many projects as the YEA did, in a wider range of disciplines. So far, at least, Kickstarter works just as well for hot dog cart entrepreneurs and 3D printer manufacturers as it does for documentary filmmakers and oddball literary magazines. Perhaps Strickler should start preparing himself for the burden of making, say, the Department of Agriculture’s Market Access Program (MAP) unnecessary too.
Such a business model for funding artists and so forth might also demonstrate how people can get certain creative ideas off the ground without the largesse of a single patron, be it a state or person. And because contributions to ventures such as Kickstarter are voluntary, it also means that the donors – many thousands of them – are far more likely to be engaged and interested in what gets created. By contrast, if you were to ask a person on the street about what they thought their tax pounds were used for in funding the arts, some might have a general idea, but many would not have a clue, and certainly not down the level of fine detail. For example, how many of any readers of this blog could quickly come up with ideas on what new sculptors got funding this year?
Pleasure is a brain wave right now. Happiness is a good story of your life. The Greek word for happiness is “eudaimonia,” which means literally “having a good guiding angel,” like Clarence the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life. The schoolbook summary of the Greek idea in Aristotle says that such happiness is “the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope. But nowadays there is a new science of happiness, and some of the psychologists and almost all the economists involved want you to think that happiness is just pleasure. Further, they propose to calculate your happiness, by asking you where you fall on a three-point scale, 1-2-3: “not too happy,” “pretty happy,” “very happy.” They then want to move to technical manipulations of the numbers, showing that you, too, can be “happy,” if you will but let the psychologists and the economists show you (and the government) how.
– Deirdre N McCloskey, writing about the whole, rather dubious realm of “happiness studies”. The fact that the UK’s paternalistic prime minister, David Cameron, is a fan of this sort of thing does not fill me with confidence.
“Frustrated that his (and fellow Googler Peter Norvig’s) Stanford artificial intelligence class only reached 200 students, they put up a website offering an online version. They got few takers. Then he mentioned the online course at a conference with 80 attendees and 80 people signed up. On a Friday, he sent an offer to the mailing list of a top AI association. On Saturday morning he had 3,000 sign-ups—by Monday morning, 14,000. In the midst of this, there was a slight hitch, Mr. Thrun says. “I had forgotten to tell Stanford about it. There was my authority problem. Stanford said ‘If you give the same exams and the same certificate of completion [as Stanford does], then you are really messing with what certificates really are. People are going to go out with the certificates and ask for admission [at the university] and how do we even know who they really are?’ And I said: I. Don’t. Care.”
Via Instapundit. He was quoting from an article by the Wall Street Journal.
Of course, such “remote learning” is not quite as new as it might appear: even the Open University system in the UK has been going for more than 40 years. But the internet and related technologies are accelerating developments in this vein. Given all the issues surrounding the need to cut the cost of the public sector and improve standards and teaching, anything that can drive change in a better direction is a good thing. I wish this “education entrepreneur” well. If the best minds in Silicon Valley – and elsewhere – get involved, then this is one of those developments that will be arguably more significant than any amount of public service tinkering that usually makes more noise in the news.
Of course, his supreme blog highness, Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, has been pushing the whole theme of there being a higher education “bubble” for some time, but being the kind of person he is, does not just complain. He likes to pounce on examples of how to move education in a saner direction.
“Historically, remember, Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish immigrant; John Roebling, a German one; Nikola Tesla, a Serb who emigrated from Croatia; Albert Einstein was a German immigrant who became a U.S. citizen in 1940; the great economist, Ludwig von Mises, was an Austrian immigrant; and Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged, a Russian one. The list could be indefinitely extended. In our day, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, emigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union. Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, emigrated to America from Taiwan. Vinod Khosla, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, is an Indian immigrant; Andreas Bechtolsheim, another of Sun’s founders, a German one. This list, too, could be greatly extended.”
– Andrew Bernstein.
I usually agree with Roger Simon, but I have some points to pick with this attempt to compare Nixon with Obama:
“Now I realize the comparison is unfair to Nixon who, other than Watergate of course, was a pretty decent president. He and his cohort Henry Kissinger opened Red China and effectively changed history by triangulating the Soviet Union. What those two men did helped lead to the diminution of Maoism as well and probably saved a huge number of lives. Tricky Dick also ratified the first, and ultimately most significant, U. S. environmental legislation, the kind that actually had a positive effect on the air and water, as opposed to the destructive self-regarding nonsense we have today.”
Well, I suppose it is true that some of the regulation of pollution and so on did some good, and yes, the China issue was played fairly well. But this article commits a sin of ommission: there is no mention whatever of the abandonment of the gold link to the dollar (admittedly, the link was a mere formality by the early 70s anyway, but still) and the institution of price controls, a pure example of King Canute Economics.
Nixon was not as evil as he is portrayed, maybe, and it is true that he pissed off a lot of the right people, but he also pissed off a lot of the wrong ones as well. I think that is possibly where Obama has a common bond. Not only has The One done things guaranteed to annoy conservatives, he hasn’t exactly been a great liberal president in the best use of that word, either.
This article has nothing really to do with politics or so forth, but it caught my eye as an excellent piece of analysis of a man’s reputation, not least a reputation that had been assiduously cultivated by the man himself, Pablo Picasso:
“They say that I can draw better than Raphael”, Gertrude Stein recorded Picasso as saying. “And they’re probably right. Perhaps I even draw better.” Picasso made this boast in claiming his right to creative freedom. The truth, however, is that Picasso not only did not draw better than Raphael, he may well have had a very limited understanding of how Raphael drew.
So writes someone called Catesby Leigh, in Standpoint magazine.
The author of the piece looks at an actual attempt by Picasso to draw a human form – a man called Vollard – in the manner of the Old Masters, such as Ingres. The commentary reminds of me of when one of my early efforts at school was given a fairly dusty appraisal by my arts teacher:
For starters, Vollard just isn’t put together quite right. Most problematically, he appears to be missing a goodly portion of his jawbone. His face reads like a rather shallow, U-shaped mask. As a result the structure of the side of his head and its engagement with the neck is badly resolved. Apart from the head, Picasso lavished the most care on the other unclothed portion of Vollard’s anatomy: the hands. Surely he recalled Ingres’s countless masterful hand studies from his Montauban visit. Vollard’s fingers in particular are modeled with excruciating care — a far cry from the familiar Picasso bravura. Even so the back of the outer hand, like the wrist of the partly covered hand, is a lumpen mass and not the articulated anatomical form it should be.
Picasso also failed to draw Vollard’s rump properly. He treated it, along with the better part of his upper left leg, as one big, flat receding plane, with the delineated folds in the trousers of his suit contributing nothing to its modelling. Shading lines continue straight back from the rump’s outline into the space between it and the back of the chair. This is a violation of one of the most elementary canons of classical draftsmanship: that lines should “follow the form” and in doing so indicate its depth. In this case those shading lines should have curved at the rump’s end so as to communicate its three-dimensionality. But Picasso followed the shade and not the form.
The familiar “subversion of academic conventions” apologia for Picasso’s idiosyncracies will not wash in the Vollard portrait’s case. Though working from a photograph, Picasso was doing this one straight, eager to convince himself and others that he could draw like an Old Master. Impressive as the results undeniably are, he couldn’t match Ingres’s draughtsmanship no matter how hard he tried. For economy of artistic means combined with flawless technique, his rival’s Guillon-Lethière leaves Picasso’s Vollard in the dust.
The article’s mood is very measured and polite, but that doesn’t mean we need to be so reticent. Picasso has always left me cold, and assuming the analysis here is correct, could it be said that one reason for Picasso’s move away from traditional forms of art is not just because of a genuine desire to take art in what he saw in a new direction, but because, in terms of the skills of the Old Masters, he just could not quite hack it in every rigorous aspect, and therefore chose forms more in tune with his undoubted talents?
For those interested, this book on the skills of the Old Masters, by Charles Lock Eastlake, looks interesting. Drawing and painting is a skill of mine that I have, to my shame, let go a bit. It is something I intend to put right.
“By the way, George Soros also warned that the new, creditor-dominated Europe would become “a German empire with the periphery as the hinterland”. Didn’t a certain female politician warn of something along these lines nearly 25 years ago, and wasn’t she branded xenophobic for her pains? An entire generation is being made to pay for our continent’s slow learners.”
Charles Moore.
“The late economist Mancur Olson has argued that economies tend to grow more slowly as rent-seeking coalitions become pervasive and ubiquitous, since they divert resources from wealth-creating to wealth-consuming uses. This is one reason, he argues, why the United States grew so rapidly in the nineteenth century, and why West Germany and Japan grew so rapidly in the two or three decades after World War II. At such times, these economies were open to investment and entrepreneurship, and, as a consequence, they enjoyed historically high rates of growth. With the passage of time, all of these systems were gradually encumbered by coalitions seeking benefits through the state. Political paralysis and slow growth, Olson argues, are by-products of political systems captured by rent-seeking coalitions. These groups, operating collectively, can block any overall effort to cut spending or to address the problems of deficits and debt.”
– James Piereson
This is delicious about Professor Paul Krugman.
The president of Estonia chewed out Paul Krugman on Wednesday, using Twitter to call the Nobel Prize-winning economist “smug, overbearing & patronizing,” in response to a short post on Estonia’s economic recovery. Krugman’s 67-word entry, entitled “Estonian Rhapsody,” questioned the merits of using Estonia as a “poster child for austerity defenders.” He included a chart that, in his words, showed “significant but still incomplete recovery” after a deep economic slump.
This paragraph packs its own, statistically-deadly punch in the direction of the New York Times columnist:
Estonia, which in 2011 became the latest country to join the eurozone, has been heralded by some as an austerity success story. That year, it clocked a faster economic growth pace than any other country in the European Union, at 7.6 percent. Estonia is also the only EU member with a budget surplus, and had the lowest public debt in 2011 — 6 percent of GDP. Fitch affirmed its A+ credit rating last week.
Update: Dan Mitchell weighs in with some damning data of his own against Krugman.
“The great irony of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations is that the most overt snobbery emanated, not from the House of Windsor or its posh cheerleaders in political and media circles, but from so-called republicans. It was them, these embarrassments to Tom Paine, who looked with horror and derision upon the great hordes of modern Britain. They pronounced themselves “aghast” at all the little people “happily buying Union Jack cups and bunting”. They mocked the masses for obediently heeding the “message from on high” telling them “not to worry about increasing inequality and its accompanying social problems, but to clap your hands, smile and applaud”, like good little children.”
– Brendan O’Neill.
He’s hit the nail on the head. I think – as a libertarian and minarchist, that we if we are going to have a state at all, then I see little that is objectionable from a freedom point of view in having a constitutional monarchy instead of an elected president, although I suppose the glitz factor would be reduced. Republicans who are serious should ask this question: would a single piece of Nanny State legislation, the Database State, our membership of the EU, our massive taxes and regulatory burdens, be improved in any way if we said goodbye to the monarchy? Really?
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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