An Interesting Viewpoint on Biodiversity

I ran across this blog entry by Steven Dubner on the Freakonomics site. I find it fascinating since it runs contrary to "received opinion". I always enjoy it when the obvious truth of a politicized group ends up not being so obvious and not so truthful:

Biodiversity Is Always a Goal, Right?
By Stephen J. Dubner

Apparently not. Consider this interesting passage from The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity, by James Lovelock:

Stable unchanging climates lasting for several thousand years tend to reduce diversity, but when the climate changes to either hotter or colder by a small amount the first response is an increase in biodiversity. This is because the new conditions give rare species a chance to flourish while the established ones have not had time to decline … [I]t is important to keep in mind that biodiversity and environmental quality are not simply proportional … So rich biodiversity is not necessarily something highly desirable and to be preserved at all costs.

This is a very different view of biodiversity than one gleans from most sources, and keep in mind that this is not the view of some nature-hater. Lovelock is the renowned British climate scientist who refers to himself as “a planetary physician,” bent on stopping humans from killing the Earth.

The Long Arm of the Law

It is always nice for the police to give us a peek into how efficiently they execute their job. Here's a wonderful example of a policeman demonstrating take-down techniques and the vigorous action of the "long arm of the law" applied to the head of a young girl who apparantly needs some "applied reasoning" given to her. Notice how he helpfully lifts her up by the hair on her head once she is fully secure (shackled). Obviously he didn't want her to strain herself with any effort on her own part in getting up.

Without any commentary from the police, it appears that this lesson in "proper conduct" was applied by the police because this girl got huffy and removed her shoes improperly. As you can see she simply flicked her feet and allowed the shoes to fly into the hallway.

This is obviously a very aggressive act and the police were forced to defend themselves. So two burly guys came in and took her down and then applied a few blows to the head in order to "knock some sense into her". I'm always encouraged to see the police reasoning with a prostrate inmate. It shows that they are willing to take the time to ensure that the legal niceties are fully explained and that this young girl doesn't get any wrong ideas about the exact behaviour desired by the police.



Now, apparantly the prosecutor's office in Seattle didn't see it this way, at least according to this account in the Seattle Post Intelligencer newspaper. But everybody knows the liberal bias in the news media. And everybody knows that prosecutors are bleeding heart liberals that want to coddle criminals. Right?

Why bother with codes of conduct or waste time on laws when we can simply dress some goons up in uniforms and give them guns and let them "police" the streets. In fact, I'm pretty sure some drug gangs are more than willing to volunteer their "staff" to take over these functions. The nice thing is that this could lower taxes because the gangs are already armed so your precious tax dollars won't be needed to arm them. And, given all the gang violence already displayed on our streets, we obviously would not have to waste taxpayer money training the new force in techniques to take down recalcitrant citizens.

In fact, the gangs won't even waste time like these lame police officers who seem obsessed with beating sense into somebody. I guarantee you, the gangs won't bother knocking you down and shackling you. The gangs have taken efficiency to a new level. They just shoot anybody that crosses their path. Hey... that solves the problem of "law enforcement" and "overpopulation" all in one fell swoop. Sounds like a winning to me!

Now... seriously... according to the Seattle PI report, the "crime" was:

The girl was arrested after she was caught in her parents' car, which had been reported stolen from her parents' Tukwila home. Deputy Travis Brunner spotted the car driving without headlights about 3:45 a.m. on 32nd Avenue South in SeaTac and pulled it over.

For this you beat a 15 year old girl?

Wait a second, the Seattle PI gives some details of why the police lunged at her, took her down, and beat on her:

The video shows Schene and Brunner as they escorted the girl into the holding cell. Schene had asked her to remove her basketball shoes, and, as she slipped out of her left shoe, she appeared to kick it at Schene.

Schene then lunged through the door and kicked her, striking either her stomach or upper thigh area, court documents say. He pushed her against a corner wall before flinging her to the floor by her hair. He then squatted down on her and made "two overhead strikes," although it's unclear where the blows landed.

The detective who reviewed the video said it appeared Schene and Brunner had the girl under control when Schene struck her. Schene, who is 6 feet 2 and weighs 195 pounds, did not explain his action to investigators, court documents say.

He and the girl exchanged words. Brunner said she was "real lippy" after being informed she was under arrest and called them "fat pigs."

This is not the first time this police officer has apparantly used "excessive" force:

Schene had previously been in the news in 2006 after he fatally shot Pedro Jo, a mentally ill man, during a struggle after a traffic stop on Interstate 5. It was the second officer-involved shooting of his career.

You have to read the Seattle PI news article to fully appreciate this case of police misconduct.

Krugman Grows Ever More Pessimistic

And I join him in...

Here is his latest blog entry on the NY Times website with gloom from all sides:

It’s a depressing spectacle: on both sides of the Atlantic, policy-makers just keep falling short — and the odds that this slump really will turn into Great Depression II keep rising.


In Europe, leaders rejected pleas for a comprehensive rescue plan for troubled East European economies, promising instead to provide “case-by-case” support. That means a slow dribble of funds, with no chance of reversing the downward spiral.

Oh, and Jean-Claude Trichet says that there is no deflation threat in Europe. What’s the weather like on his planet?

On this side of the Atlantic, Tim Geithner seems committed to the view that banks should stay private even if they’re bankrupt, because — well, just because.

...

The sickening feeling of drift — the sense that policymakers are refusing to face hard facts, and are dithering while the world economy burns — just keeps getting stronger.

Yet More Analysis by Krugman of the Cause of the Crisis

Here is yet another excellent op-ed piece by Paul Krugman in the NY Times. This is the key bit where he identifies the source of the financial crisis.

How did this global debt crisis happen? Why is it so widespread? The answer, I’d suggest, can be found in a speech Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave four years ago. At the time, Mr. Bernanke was trying to be reassuring. But what he said then nonetheless foreshadowed the bust to come.

The speech, titled “The Global Saving Glut and the U.S. Current Account Deficit,” offered a novel explanation for the rapid rise of the U.S. trade deficit in the early 21st century. The causes, argued Mr. Bernanke, lay not in America but in Asia.

In the mid-1990s, he pointed out, the emerging economies of Asia had been major importers of capital, borrowing abroad to finance their development. But after the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 (which seemed like a big deal at the time but looks trivial compared with what’s happening now), these countries began protecting themselves by amassing huge war chests of foreign assets, in effect exporting capital to the rest of the world.

The result was a world awash in cheap money, looking for somewhere to go.

Most of that money went to the United States — hence our giant trade deficit, because a trade deficit is the flip side of capital inflows. But as Mr. Bernanke correctly pointed out, money surged into other nations as well. In particular, a number of smaller European economies experienced capital inflows that, while much smaller in dollar terms than the flows into the United States, were much larger compared with the size of their economies.

Still, much of the global saving glut did end up in America. Why?

Mr. Bernanke cited “the depth and sophistication of the country’s financial markets (which, among other things, have allowed households easy access to housing wealth).” Depth, yes. But sophistication? Well, you could say that American bankers, empowered by a quarter-century of deregulatory zeal, led the world in finding sophisticated ways to enrich themselves by hiding risk and fooling investors.

And wide-open, loosely regulated financial systems characterized many of the other recipients of large capital inflows. This may explain the almost eerie correlation between conservative praise two or three years ago and economic disaster today. “Reforms have made Iceland a Nordic tiger,” declared a paper from the Cato Institute. “How Ireland Became the Celtic Tiger” was the title of one Heritage Foundation article; “The Estonian Economic Miracle” was the title of another. All three nations are in deep crisis now.

Go read the whole article. It has much to teach us about this crisis. Sadly he brings no good news. He knows we will eventually find out way out of the mess, but he offers no near term hope.

An Antidote of Optimism

This is very good. This is the pick-me-up that people need this day: optimism.

Here is an article by Daniel Gross in Slate that gives us the needed jolt of positive attitude:

The dumb, willfully blind optimists who dominated the late boom have slunk into exile. They've been replaced by the ardent declinists, the bears, and the prophetic historians, armed with copies of Gibbon and Malthus and wielding reams of data. There are economists predicting double-digit unemployment through 2011, with the housing and stock markets reeling through 2010. Historians, meanwhile, warn that the United States may be losing some of its capitalistic essence as the government increases its involvement in the financial sector. At Davos, Niall Ferguson, a brilliant, young, Oxford-educated, Ivy League-employed historian (Harvard), said the United States isn't in another Great Depression but rather a "Great Repression," in deep denial of its problems. The go-go Age of Leverage is over, and a go-slow Age of Big Government has begun. High levels of debt, imperial overreach, and heightened government influence in the economy mean the United States is in for a Japan-style lost decade, in which it could struggle to chart growth of 1 percent.

...

Things have been going downhill in America since the very beginning: Imagine the economic forecasts made in Plymouth in the bitter winter of 1619. In the early 1990s, a recession lengthened, executives took huge paychecks while firing thousands of workers, and Americans began to lose faith in the capitalist systems. No economist or historian stood up and predicted that globalization, intelligent fiscal and monetary policy, and this thing called the Internet would launch the United States into an unprecedented era of growth, prosperity, and rising asset prices.

Marching to a Different Beat

I'm all for self expression and finding your own way, but the Republicans have gone off the charts in their goal of setting new standards for idiosyncrasy and slimeball politics.

Luckily I'm not alone in that belief. Here are key paragraphs out of an article in Slate by Daniel Gross. I had to include the headlines for this piece because they nail the message:

Economic Know-Nothingism
The GOP's nutso claim that government spending doesn't create jobs.

There are three options government can pursue when the economy goes south. First, the Fed can cut interest rates, buy up assets, and extend credit, all of which the central bank has already done. Second, Congress can cut taxes on businesses and consumers in the hope they will spend more. The first effort—last year's tax rebates—didn't have the intended effect since consumers used much of the windfall to pay down debt or save. The substantial tax cuts that will be part of the Obama stimulus package would likely have a similarly muted effect. Businesses and consumers, facing a tough credit environment and needing to repair their balance sheets, will likely use proceeds from the tax cuts to tide themselves over. The third option is for the government to directly purchase goods and services, to substitute the demand that consumers and businesses aren't providing.

The Washington remnant of the Republican Party—40 senators and 178 representatives—is all for Options 1 and 2, cheap money and tax cuts. But they're having great difficulty with Option 3. They have forgotten Richard Nixon's famous line that "we're all Keynesians now." To them, spending government funds to goose the economy is unacceptable, not just because of the possibility of poor execution —i.e., pork. No, many are rejecting it as a matter of principle. Even though several Republican governors are pleading for assistance in the form of federal spending, Washington Republicans are saying no.

...

There's plenty of legitimate argument over the stimulus—too much, too little, not fast enough, too fast, the proper mix of tax cuts and spending. Alan Blinder's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal is an excellent guide to some of the debates. But the Republicans in Washington aren't reading Blinder. And it's almost impossible for the Obama team, or anybody else, to engage them in serious discussions. Virtually all the prominent Republican economists who were associated with the Bush administration in any way have fled Washington for the private sector or academia. Today, the congressional Republicans are taking their advice from Joe the Plumber.

Taking Responsibility

I find it exceedingly funny to see "leaders" going through the kabuki dance of "taking responsibility" when they fail. When a corner store robber flubs it, he is arrested and thrown in jail. When a Wall Street banker flubs it and looses hundreds of billions of other people's money, he is carefully shepherded by his minions to a public venue and encouraged to say the golden words "I take responsibility for this" then they are carefully stage managed off the stage and that's it. Yes, that's it! The "take responsibility" thing is nothing more than an empty ritual. Apparantly when you are at the top, the mere words "I take responsibility" is sufficient to heal the wounds and restore the losses. But... they don't.

Here are key bits from a nice article from Slate by Daniel Gross about this phenomenon:

For centuries, historians have debated whether history is propelled by Great Men (and Women), human forces of nature who bend events and systems to their will, or by vast impersonal forces (communism, capitalism, globalization) that render even the most powerful of us a mere reed basket floating in a massive river. There's no session on the subject at the World Economic Forum in Davos. But at least with regard to finance and business, the consensus seems to be clear: Success is the work of Great Men and Great Women, while failure can be pinned on the system.

Ordinarily, Davos is a Great Men kind of place, as the motto of this year's gathering implies: "Shaping the post-crisis world." The people who show up here—political leaders, scientists, entrepreneurs, musicians, and, above all, businesspeople—have all shown an ability to impose themselves on history. Otherwise, they wouldn't be invited. And yet in the many discussions held here about the recent global financial debacle, the question of human agency is shunted to the side.

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The dismissal of human agency is ironic, but also predictable. Just as financial markets in the United States privatize profits and socialize losses, Davos and other conferences like this privatize success (by chalking it up to individuals) and socialize failure (by blaming it on large systemic problems).