Brownstein Sees Hard Times

National Journal's Ronald Brownstein, looking at various 10 year periods in U.S. history, finds we're now in very hard times. He writes:

The median income is now lower than in 2001 and the number of Americans in poverty nearly one-third higher. Most incredibly, fewer Americans are working today than in September 2001—a decadelong record of decline matched since 1900 only during the 1930s.

Right Question, Wrong Answer

People complain about the economic and employment disparities between whites and Asians versus African-Americans and Hispanics. This New York Times article is an example.

What this article does, blame the disparities on racism, is typical. A much more sensible answer would be the blame the disparities on education levels.

Today people with baccalaureate degrees, or higher, have unemployment levels half those of people with less education. African-Americans and Hispanics get less education than whites and Asians.

Why do they get less education? The reasons are largely cultural, not the fault of racism.

Those cultural reasons are not the same for Hispanics and African-Americans. Each group has its own unique reasons for not pursuing education.

A people evolve their group's culture. Not all cultures are equally functional in terms of producing economic wealth and employability. Culturally driven unequal outcomes are not a sign of racism.

Quotes of the Day

Paul Gigot, editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, writing a book review of Dick Cheney's memoir In My Time:

• Mr. Obama may not want to admit it, but his success against al Qaeda owes more to Dick Cheney than it does to his own campaign agenda.
• Americans are safer because Dick Cheney was willing to be hated by all the right people.

Let's remember the hated Guantanamo still holds prisoners two and a half years after the Bush administration ended.

Tough Talk

James Poulos, writing in The Daily Caller, about our President's future:

As a president, Barack Obama is doomed. He is doomed now, doomed on Election Day and doomed even if he wins, until the day he leaves the White House.

His solution for Dems: nominate another candidate in 2012; a solution that cannot work.

President Zero

The new jobs report is out and the economy created zero net new jobs in August. In other words, yes, some firms hired but others fired and the net is no change - in current slang "zero, zip, nada.".

A Reuters column by Felix Salmon (a name meaning catfish) makes some trenchant comments about this employment disaster, let me share two with you:

It’s increasingly looking as though the government is utterly incapable of creating jobs, but is actually pretty effective at destroying them.

You can call this a double dip, if you like, or you can view it as a kind of aftershock of the financial crisis. Either way, the economy is clearly now below its stall speed, and we don’t have access to the mechanisms necessary to get it moving again.

President Obama has no expectation that Congress will pass the proposals in his upcoming jobs speech. He proposes them in order to be able to run against what he will call "the do-nothing Congressional Republicans" a year from now. Everybody knows this.

Another Step

According to this BBC News article, Turkey has expelled the Israeli ambassador and suspended all military agreements between the two countries. This is a further step in the deteriorating relations between the two Middle Eastern countries.

Although they do not share a border, Israel and Turkey are neighbors in the Middle East. Both share borders with Syria, which is experiencing so-called "Arab spring" unrest at the moment.

The Erdogan government in Turkey has been moving the country in an Islamic direction, away from the pro-European posture it held for many years. Some of this change may be the result of European countries being unwilling to admit Turkey, an Islamic but formerly largely secular country, into the European Union.

If history repeats, as it has a tendency to do, Turkey will find that Israel is not an enemy a country wants to have. As we noted on Sunday, Israel will find other allies in the region, notably Greece and perhaps the Kurds - both long-standing enemies of the Turks.

Perry Injudicious

In his recent book Fed Up: Our Fight to Save America from Washington, Texas Gov. Rick Perry said some off-the-wall things that will come back to haunt him.

The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus has rounded up a few of these views with which to frighten the voters, particularly seniors. Her haunted house favorites appear in an article for RealClearPolitics.

Perry says when he wrote the book he had no intent of running for president; I believe him. He apparently has espoused some ideas that are out of the mainstream, even for the Tea Party. If Marcus is to be believed, Perry would limit the federal role to defense and not much more.

Illegal Immigration Hot

As they travel the triangle between Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, candidates for the Republican nomination for president are learning that illegal immigration is a topic they cannot duck. Likely primary voters or caucus attendees who make the effort to go hear them really care about the immigration issue.

A Washington Post article quotes GOP pollster Jon Lerner this way:

If a candidate is squishy on immigration, that symbolically suggests that he’s probably unreliable on a whole host of other conservative issues.

GOP frontrunner Rick Perry has been "squishy" on immigration; recently sort of against it, earlier more tolerant.

More on Climate Change

The hypothesis in the post below raises this question: what was involved in pre-humans becoming smarter during periods of relatively rapid climate change? Answer: a lot of not-so-smart pre-humans dying off as they could not adapt to changing climatic conditions.

If we experience more climate change in, for instance, the next several hundred years, we might experience a similar degree of die-off of those not able to adapt. The long-term result might be even better human beings, but the cost in human lives would be high. Many would earn the Darwin Award.

The human costs of future evolution pose interesting questions for ethicists. I can imagine someone alleging "eugenics."

Climate Change Positive

If you don't accept evolution as the way all critters, including humans, got to be how we are now, stop reading as you won't like what follows. With that housekeeping detail out of the way, let's proceed.

I watched a Nova program on PBS last night that put forward a very interesting hypothesis. It concerns a possible interaction between climate and human evolution.

Paleontologists working in Africa have established that the line of primates which eventually became us diverged from that of the chimpanzees about six million years ago. For a relatively long time our ancestors walked upright but had quite small brains. This was a period when climate was essentially stable in that region of Africa.

Brain size began to increase during a period when the relevant part of Africa experienced climate variability. Geologists decode climate change from sedimentation changes. They say this region went from wet to dry and back several times over what is, in geologic time, a brief period.

The hypothesis is that larger (and smarter) brains became a survival trait during a period when the region in which pre-humans lived experienced relatively rapid shifts from tropical to savanna and back. Smarter pre-humans (with larger brains) were able to cope as conditions changed and adaptation to variable conditions was necessary for survival.

If the hypothesis is correct, modern attempts to suppress climate change - to the extent such attempts are successful - can also suppress our evolution toward becoming even smarter human beings. On the other hand, perhaps we are already smart enough....

Tribal War in Libya?

A month or more ago, when NATO first got involved in Libya, I suggested to you that the "troubles" there could be tribal. I believe The New York Times' Tom Friedman has made the same point.

Now see the Associated Press article in Yahoo News which begins with this line:

Moammar Gadhafi warned from hiding Thursday that tribes loyal to him were well-armed and preparing for battle, hours after rebels hoping for a peaceful surrender extended the deadline for loyalist forces to give up in the longtime Libyan leader's hometown.

Let's recap: first, tribes in the east around Benghazi opposed the Gaddafi regime. With NATO help they defeated Gaddafi. Very soon these eastern tribes will constitute the formal government of Libya.

Now Gaddafi is claiming the desert tribes in the west, his tribes, will oppose the new regime. If he is correct, Libya may turn out to be less "Arab spring" and more civil or tribal war.

VDH: Cheney No Darth Vader

Victor Davis Hanson, the sage of California's Central Valley, writes a review of Dick Cheney's memoir In My Time. It appears on the website of the National Review Online.

Hanson says that the sensational hype about the book is mostly nonsense. Why am I not surprised? Cheney worked for many mainstream people and was almost always a second banana.

I suspect that liberals' cherished belief that Cheney was the dark eminence behind the Bush 43 foreign policy is, and always was, exaggerated. W knew what he wanted to do but, like all presidents, listened to the advice of several others, Cheney among them.

Nancy Who?

When a pain goes away you many not immediately notice it. You ignore it because the absence of pain is our natural state.

I just realized that I've been having that experience with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Whole weeks go by without hearing her name or seeing her photo in the news.

Like a headache that has gone, it took me several months to really notice the absence of Pelosi. I need to stop and enjoy our Pelosi-free political life.

Merge Canada and U.S.?

John Ellis, writing in Business Insider, starts out musing about what economic solution President Obama could possibly propose that would meet the "go big or go home" test. All the usual suspects are denigrated as "small ball."

This leads Ellis to suggest the president propose the idea of a merger between the U.S. and Canada. No question about it, that is not small ball.

If we merged would the result be good? Probably. Is it possible? Very unlikely. Unfortunately, the only place in Canada where the idea would find much positive reception is Alberta, a place sometimes called "Texas North."

My sense is that most Canadians like the U.S. but don't want to be part of it. They view it the way Californians view snow: as fun to visit but not a place to live.

Whether or not merger happened, if Obama did propose a merger, it would certainly be a bombshell. He would get this country's attention in a way he hasn't been able to do since the Gulf oil spill.

Rogers: Class Warfare Wrong

Class warfare is an unfortunate feature of modern politics. It is mostly practiced by one of the two major parties, the Democrats.

Rev. Adrian Pierce Rogers (1931-2005), three term president of the Southern Baptist Convention, may be the originator of the following widely cited quote about the futility of class warfare:

• You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the industrious out of it.
• You don't multiply wealth by dividing it.
• Government cannot give anything to anybody that it doesn't first take from somebody else.
• Whenever somebody receives something without working for it, somebody else has to work for it without receiving.
• The worst thing that can happen to a nation is for half of the people to get the idea they don't have to work because somebody else will work for them, and the other half to get the idea that it does no good to work because they don't get to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

What makes the quote more pertinent is that there are many far-from-affluent Southern Baptists.

A Google search finds some version of this in 30,000+ places on the web. My source for this supposedly original version is the Rogers bio on Wikipedia.

Russia Fears China

Maps are wonderful things, geography is so often destiny. Russia is a huge country, the world's largest in size.

Spend some time looking at a map of Russia, and where it is located with respect to China. Now understand something the map doesn't show: most Russians live west of the Urals, in or near Europe.

Eastern Russia - Siberia - is a vast, forested land with mineral riches but few people. South of Siberia are two largely unpopulated nations - Mongolia and Kazakhstan, plus heavily populated China.

Tsarist Russian, followed by Soviet and now post-Soviet Russian generals have all worried about the world's most populous nation - China - coveting the huge unpopulated, resource-rich area to their north in Siberia.

See this article from The Moscow Times which explains those fears. Russia believes that their nukes keep China from annexing Siberia; they may be right.

The Paulist Phenomenon

The Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky isn't indifferent to the Ron Paul presidential candidacy, not by a long shot. Tomasky's opinion of Paul:

He is an unserious, extremist crank whose appeal among those who ought to know better is one of the bleakest facts of our bleak political life.

Why is a small fraction of the electorate so committed to Ron Paul? Tomasky has an answer:

Some people take great comfort in backing candidates they know will never win—they prefer, on some deep level, to fall short and be angry about it. It encases their loserdom in a carapace of purity and righteousness.

Loserdom encased in a carapace of purity and righteousness, that's nice imagery. It applies equally to the Lyndon LaRouche movement of some years back - an outsider who became a spokesman for other outsiders.

South Africa Deteriorates

Because of Nelson Mandela, South Africa didn't follow the sad path of Zimbabwe and other African nations. His idea was to keep white settlers in South Africa and grow the prosperity of the nation using their capital and skills.

Since Mandela retired, the political movement he founded, the African National Congress (ANC), has ever so slowly been moving away from his model. Now we see a popular ANC youth leader, Julius Malema, trying to take the nation farther in the direction of throwing out the whites.

It is bad news for the last semi-developed nation on the continent, but may be inevitable. This BBC News article is about developments there.

Apple - Jobs = ?

Many have written about the future of Apple without Steve Jobs at the helm. At least some of them will end up being right, if only by accident.

I remember what happened to Apple the last time Jobs left to do other things. What other things? Pixar, which succeeded, and NeXT computers which mostly didn't.

Anyway, in the absence of Steve Jobs, Apple didn't do much. It began to really take off when he returned.

Ask yourself what you believe would have happened to Apple if Jobs had not returned? Now ask yourself if this time around he has built into Apple a mechanism to replace his unique input? I'm inclined to doubt it; I hope I'm wrong.

Forbes: Obama a Failure

John Mariotti, writing for Forbes, makes a dire economic prediction in the opening two sentences of his column. In the rest of the column he marshals the facts which demonstrate this conclusion is correct. Here is what he writes:

There will be no significant recovery in the United States of America while Barack Obama is President. The evidence is overwhelming: everything Obama has tried to fuel a recovery (with his Democratic allies in Congress) has failed.

Waiting until January, 2013, to begin to see improvement will be painful. We have no guarantee it will happen then.