Tag: linkery

An Unaswered (and Unanswerable?) Challenge

The Rev. Sensing has thrown down a particularly interesting gauntlet:

If you support Kerry for president, I invite you to write a guest post for this blog explaining why. Here’s why it’s a challenge:

To be published, you must explain why Kerry is to be preferred in terms that do not simply say he’s not Bush. This is not an invitation to rage about Bush; it is an invitation to be positive about Kerry.

It will be insufficient merely to declare that Bush is wrong on Iraq, taxes, education, etc. You must explain why and how Kerry is right.

You must cite and provide links to Kerry’s speeches or campaign releases to back up your claims. These cites can reach all the way back to when Kerry declared his candidacy for the 2004 race.

Citing the Dermocratic platform will be unpersuasive, since neither party pays a lot of attention to its own platform once the election is over, even if they win.

Length limit is 1,500 words. That’s a long post, by the way.

I will not rebuild your html code, so when you email your entry to me, you MUST email it in plaintext format (not an html email) with html coding revealed intact. Do not email me asking how to do that. You may write the essay as a *.txt document and send it as an attachment if you wish, but I won’t take responsibility if my security software alerts and sets phasers to kill.

Your subject line must read OHC KERRY CHALLENGE ENTRY. I get pretty well buried in email every day, and unless it’s obvious your entry is there, I may well miss it and even delete it.

I do not have time to be your editor. If you can’t spell or use good grammar and syntax, I won’t help you. Your essay must be publishable in style and readability!

I am not promising to publish anyone’s essay. I will publish no more than one essay. I will not fisk any essay that I do publish, I will present it unedited and unabridged with your byline. You MUST include your real name; I will delete pseudonymous essays without reading them.

I reserve the right to publish (maybe with attribution, maybe not) excerpts of any essay submitted.

No – “means no” – profanity. Using the first and last letters of a cuss word with *** in the middle counts as profanity. When quoting someone else, delete profanity used in the quote.

ABSOLUTE DEADLINE is Saturday, Aug. 28 at 7 a.m. CDT.

The original challenge was issued yesterday.

This should be interesting.

Steven Den Beste, in his inimitable way, has a fascinating (Hey, I’m a geek an engineer…) new post up on, well, pretty much everything. But he eventually gets around to the main thrust of the topic and it has to do with Greenspan raising the interest rate by a quarter point in an effort to stave off inflation.

Generally, the Fed uses two main tools to try to control the economy. The Fed can pump new money into the system by “buying” federal bonds with money they conjure out of thin air. The Fed does this at a pretty regular rate, but generally they don’t like using this for primary control, and prefer to rely on the discount rate.

When the Fed changes the discount rate, in theory other kinds of interest rates tend to track it up and down. Of course, in practice it’s nothing like that straightforward. Sometimes they respond immediately and proportionally. Sometimes there’s a delay. Sometimes it has no effect. Sometimes other interest rates move in the opposite direction. Sometimes they move the same direction but less far; sometimes they move the same direction but much further. And in terms of larger effects, sometimes changes in interest rates affect overall activity and sometimes such changes don’t. And almost always it takes a long time.

The theory says that lowering the discount rate leads to lower interest rates overall, which tends to stimulate economic activity. But it doesn’t always work that way.

Now, I didn’t even get Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University education in economics (“Supply and-a Demand. That’s it.”) but I remember one thing I read long ago: The Fed has essentially only one control, and that control is like a rope around the neck of the economy. The Fed can pull on that rope and choke the economy with a fair amount of effectiveness – cut the money supply or raise the interest rates and the economy takes note right fast. But if it increases the money supply or lowers the interest rate, it’s a lot like pushing on that rope. The noose might not loosen, and the economy might not notice.

Hey, I’m my expertise is in gun control. Do you come here for economics dissertations? But that mental image stuck with me, and I thought you might find it interesting. And besides, I love Chaos Theory. I strongly recommend James Gleik’s Chaos: Making a New Science if you want to know more about this relatively new field in mathematics, physics, chemistry, economics, medicine….

As you know, I’ve blogrolled ProtestWarrior.com near the top, as this group takes the fight directly to the Left. No passive response here, they get right in their faces and force them to confront into congnitive dissonance by making them face their hypocrisy.

Well, there are still some young people able to think for themselves. I’ll have another example up later, but this one makes me want to stand up and cheer.

Go read Operation Tiger Claw. It’s worth every second of your time.