Paul M. Jones

As to libertarians, certainly in a world with no deposit insurance or government guarantees I could argue against government interference in the structure of private banks. But banks are not private in this country. They are quasi-public institutions (and if you read Niall Ferguson you might conclude that large banks have always been quasi-public institutions). There is a synergy between big banks and big government. Jefferson and Jackson were right. So breaking up big banks fits in with breaking up big government. Which is why we won't see the Progressive elite breaking up big banks.

via The Harvard-Goldman Filter, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.

My theory--call it the “Oakley effect”--is that really smart people often don’t know how to accept and react constructively to criticism. (A neuroscientist might say they “have underdeveloped neurocircuitry for integrating negatively valenced stimuli.”) This is because smart people are whizzes at problems that only need one person to figure out. Indeed, people are evaluated from kindergarten through college prep SATs on the basis of such “single solver” problems. If you are often or nearly always right with these kinds of problems, your increased confidence in your own abilities would be accompanied by an inadvertent decrease in your capacity to deal with criticism. After all, your experience would have shown that your critics were usually wrong.

But most large-scale societal issues are not single solver problems. They are so richly complex that no single person can faultlessly teach him or herself all the key concepts, which are often both contradictory and important. Yes, smart people have an advantage in dealing with such problems, because they’ve got natural brain-power that allows them to hold many factors in mind at once, bringing formidable problem-solving skills to bear. But smart people have a natural disadvantage, too: they’re not used to changing their thinking in response to criticism when they get things wrong.

In fact, natural smarties--the intellectual elite--often don’t seem to learn the art of soliciting the criticism necessary to grasp the core issues of a complex problem, and then making vital adaptations as a result. Instead, they fall in naturally with people who admire, rather than are critical, of their thinking. This further strengthens their conviction they are right even as it distances them from people of very different backgrounds who grasp very different, but no less crucial aspects of complex problems. That’s why the intellectual elite is often branded by those from other groups as out of touch.

via Kiss my APA! | Psychology Today.

At the heart of the Left’s indulgence of political corruption lies the mistaken conviction that “public service” transforms politicians into exemplars of civic virtue, or that political office attracts a large percentage of such civic-minded individuals. In reality, the political class is even more greedy and selfish than wealthy businessmen… because they spend much of their time in the company of such wealthy men, and believe themselves entitled to riches and luxuries.

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The mythic ideal of Cincinnatus, the selfless citizen-legislator who reluctantly leaves his farm to serve the Republic, is incompatible with the combination of endless incumbency and gigantic amounts of government power. We are foolish to place our trust in a system that requires an impossible level of virtue from politicians to function as designed. A limited government can better protect the economic health of its citizens by policing corruption from the private sector, under the direction of term-limited representatives who will never become worth the risk of buying off. The larger government becomes, the more its arrogant ruling class believe themselves worthy of royal treatment… and the more justified they feel about lying to the public for their own good. That is why the climate change elite gathered in Copenhagen this week is outraged that anyone would dare question their right to save a foolish world from itself, by lying through its teeth in a bid to seize power.

via The Greenroom » Forum Archive » The First Sign Of Corruption.

A mistress is fundamentally riskier than a call girl because her idea of one-upmanship is getting the man in trouble with his wife or primary partner, to break up his main relationship. This wasn't as likely in the good old days, when mistresses and prostitutes had more in common--but Jamie and Jaimee are modern women. These are not your grandfather's mistresses. That's why, perhaps, they feel entitled to sell their stories to the tabloids.

A call girl's idea of one-upmanship--which is far more beneficial to the men she sees--is being more discreet than the next girl. If she does a better job of protecting her customer's marriage than anyone else, that's a point of professional pride.

via Call Girls Out-Class Mistresses - The Daily Beast.

* The consensus is not scientific as much as it is political.

What we find out from the emails is that Jones and a number of others were using underhanded manipulations to suppress scientific publications that disagreed with the CO2-caused AGW theory. There is no scientific consensus if all the science isn’t being considered.

* There’s a difference between “global warming,” “anthropogenic (caused by humans) global warming,” and “anthropogenic global warming caused by CO2.”

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* The Climategate files don’t call global warming into question, but they make some of the science of anthropogenic global warming more suspect, and they make it clear that “forcings” other than CO2 have not been fairly considered.

* There has clearly been significant warming in the last 400 years -- since the “Little Ice Age”. That’s how we know it was the Little Ice Age.

* There is good reason to believe that humans may be accounting for some warming -- and some cooling, for that matter. But we don’t know how much.

* The case for all or most of the warming being due to CO2 was not as unquestionable as it was presented to be, and from the Climategate files we know that even that case was being slanted significantly.

* There is more than one “smoking gun” email (see here, here, here, here, here, and more)

* … but the program codes are much more significant than the emails

* … and the program codes will be yielding new surprises for a while to come.

via Pajamas Media » Fast Facts About Climategate.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) is upset that Adidas will shift its manufacturing of National Basketball Association jerseys from New York to Thailand, and he menacingly calls upon the N.B.A. to terminate its contract with Adidas (”Sen. Schumer rips Adidas for outsourcing of NBA jerseys,” Dec. 2).

I wonder where Mr. Schumer’s business suits are made. All in the U.S.? What about his shoes? His neckties? His underwear? The watch on his wrist? How about the coffee he drinks? The flowers he buys for his wife in January? Are these all made in America?

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I don’t know Mr. Schumer personally, but I’ll bet my pension that his everyday consumption consists of countless products containing such large quantities of non-American inputs and labor that, were Mr. Schumer to rid his existence of these foreign contributions to his living standard, he would soon find himself dark-ages ignorant and appallingly impoverished.

via Personal Foul.

Health care policy is suboptimal, but there is no “crisis.” Talk of a “crisis” is just a PR effort to get us to accept a different set of suboptimal policies that are more to the liking of certain interest groups.

via Instapundit » Blog Archive » NICK KRISTOF’S OBAMACARE SOB-STORY COLUMN: Busted. “Brodniak is a patient at OHSU -- and has been….

My article for PHP Advent 2009, the first in this year's offerings, has been published: http://phpadvent.org/2009/comprehensible-code-by-paul-jones. Summary: "Reading code is hard work. Here are some reasons why, along with some tips on how to make it easier for other developers to understand your code." If you would like to comment on it, please do so here. Thanks!

YOU’RE A sensible, principled conservative. You want America to be a land of boundless opportunity and freedom, where people are treated as individuals and judged on their merits. You reject the divisive identity politics of the left - what matters most about any of us, you would insist, is not race or class or ethnic origins: it is personal character and achievement. There are few things about contemporary politics you deplore more than the demonizing or scapegoating of entire groups (“white males," “the rich," “the Christian right," “gun owners"), as though every member of the group is interchangeable and indistinguishable, wholly defined by a single disparaging label.

But let someone mention “illegal immigrants," and your principles fly out the window.

via Where conservatives have it wrong - The Boston Globe.

I have noted in conversation elsewhere, and I will say it here: it is immigration law that is wrong, not the illegal immigrants.

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4. Make an all-out attempt to limit deaths by hospital infection and the simple failure of doctors to wash their hands and perform other medically obvious procedures.

5. Make an all-out attempt, working with state and local governments (recall, since the Feds are picking up the Medicaid tab they have temporary leverage here), to ease the spread of low-cost, walk-in health care clinics, run on a WalMart sort of basis. Stepping into the realm of the less feasible, weaken medical licensing and greatly expand the roles of nurses, paramedics, and pharmacists.

6. Make an all-out attempt, comparable to the moon landing effort if need be, to introduce price transparency for medical services. This can be done.

7. Preserve current HSAs. The Obama plan will tank them, yet HSAs, while sometimes overrated, do boost pending discipline. They also keep open some path of getting to the Singapore system in the future.

8. Invest more in pandemic preparation. By now it should be obvious how critical this is. It's fine to say "Obama is already working on this issue" but the fiscal constraint apparently binds and at the margin this should get more attention than jerry rigging all the subsidies and mandates and the like.

9. Establish the principle that future extensions of coverage, as done through government, will be for catastrophic care only.

10. Enforce current laws against fraudulent rescission. If these cases are so clear cut and so obviously in the wrong, let's act on it. We can strengthen the legal penalties if need be.

11. Realize that you cannot tack "universal coverage" (which by the way it isn't) onto the current sprawling mess of a system, so look for all other means of saving lives in other, more cost-effective ways. If you wish, as a kind of default position, opt for universal coverage if the elderly agree to give up Medicare, moving us to a version of the Swiss system and a truly unified method of coverage. But don't bet on that ever happening.

(As an aside, I *hate* the term "health care." It's not health care. It's *medical* care.) Via Marginal Revolution: What should we do instead of the Obama health reform bill?.