Tag: politics

A View from the Inside

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I received an email yesterday afternoon from a reader who did not want to leave it as a comment because his name and email might be attached to it by Disqus.  Here it is:

I’m long-time reader and sometime commenter. I wanted to comment on your post on “Government is Magic”, but for reasons which will become obvious I didn’t want my name or e-mail associated with my comment publicly. If you believe any of this is worth sharing feel free to do so, without my name or e-mail address associated of course.

I work for the company responsible for the Obamacare web site fiasco. I don’t work for the Federal division, but a different one. I can tell you from personal experience that the problems that caused the web site to fail are institutional.

If you or I were going to embark on a project we’d try to get the most competent people in each area of expertise required in an effort to make the project a success. That’s not the way this company does things. First, especially if the project is highly visible, they make sure that the people assigned to the project are the “right” people. Not “right” as you or I would understand it, namely competent, with a strong work ethic, and capable of delivering. Oh no, the “right” people are politically connected, they belong to the “correct” groups of people, or they’re people who others wish to see advance (often despite their incompetence). So it’s more important that the project leader be a Hispanic woman than that the project leader have any actual experience with the technology, or even be capable of doing the job. Just as it was more important to give the project to a company whose VP was a black woman than that it have a proven track record of getting similar projects done successfully. All the better if that VP went to Princeton with a certain FLOTUS. Even better if money went to a certain re-election campaign.

A dozen competent developers could have delivered a functional web site, their compensation would have cost one or two percent of what the contract brought in. Doing so, however, would have required an acknowledgement that such people were required for the success of the project, or that a functional web site had anything to do with such success.

I used to think the problems I saw were localized to my little corner of the company, but it seems the problems are with the company mentality. Worse, as far as the company is concerned this was a big win. They made a TON of money, and they’re managing (so far as the media is concerned) to foist the blame off onto others. They’ll now make a ton MORE money fixing a system that should never have been broken in the first place.

I’ve been doing this for over 25 years, I’ve worked for a bunch of companies, and this is the first time I’ve ever been ashamed to have my name connected to the company that writes my paycheck.

Shame? I thought the Left had effectively destroyed that concept.

Most Transparent Administration EVER!

KevinLeave a comment

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72g7qmeP1dE?rel=0]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPIUAYvhk4U?rel=0]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXWTdTnhebs?time=4s]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw04chdCVXQ?rel=0]
Orly?

CBS News: Obama Reneges on Health Care Transparency (Warning: video runs automatically.)

Firedog Lake: Record Number of Leaks Prosecutions Downplayed by Obama Administration

HuffPo: Obama Whistleblower Prosecutions Lead To Chilling Effect On Press

Also HuffPo: ‘Reporter’s Privilege’ Under Fire From Obama Administration Amid Broader War On Leaks

New Yorker magazine:

When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.” But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined. The Drake case is one of two that Obama’s Justice Department has carried over from the Bush years.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, a conservative political scientist at the Hudson Institute, who, in his book “Necessary Secrets” (2010), argues for more stringent protection of classified information, says, “Ironically, Obama has presided over the most draconian crackdown on leaks in our history—even more so than Nixon.”

UPDATE:  Except, of course, when the leaker damages the Left’s enemies.  (End update.)

L.A. Times: Benghazi witnesses grilled in secret on Capitol Hill

CBS News: Government’s answer to “Fast and Furious” records requests: Blank pages

For more than a year, CBS News has been investigating the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms’ “Fast and Furious” operation and related cases that also employed the controversial tactic of “gunwalking.” With Justice Department officials refusing all interview requests to date, CBS News requested numerous public documents through the Freedom of Information Act.

So far, all of the requests that have been answered have been denied in part or in full.

This week, we received a partial response to a request made more than a year ago. It asked for communications involving “Project Gunrunner,” the umbrella program for Fast and Furious, from 2010 through April 2011. Specifically, it sought any communications to which any of the following top Justice officials were a party: Attorney General Eric Holder; Lanny Breuer, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division; Kevin Carwile, chief of the Capital Case Unit; and Deputy Assistant Attorney Generals Bruce Schwarz and Kenneth Blanco.

The response includes mostly-blank pages.

HuffPo again: Obama Executive Privilege Asserted Over Fast And Furious Documents (Another autoplay video.)

U.S. News: Court: White House Can Keep Visitor Logs Secret

In a potentially devastating blow to transparency, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled Friday that the executive branch can choose not to release White House visitor logs.

The court ruling was in reaction to a lawsuit from Judicial Watch seeking thousands of records not voluntarily disclosed by the Obama administration.

And it’s not just .gov documents and employees:

New York Times: Head of The A.P. Criticizes Seizure of Phone Records

And now CNN:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHWEUPOFO8M?rel=0]
Finding all those didn’t take long.  How’s that Hopenchange going?

Just shut up and drink your Kool-Aid take your soma.

Oh, Right, Like THAT’LL Happen!

KevinLeave a comment

Got this one in an email tonight.  Actually, it’s a pretty damned good idea.

Doesn’t have a snowball’s chance, but it’s a good idea:

Amend the Constitution:
.
Amendment 28:  If during any Federal fiscal year the government operates at a deficit equal to or greater than 3% of Gross Domestic Product, no sitting member of Congress shall be eligible for re-election during the next election cycle.

On that “Reset Button” Question…

KevinLeave a comment

Hi, my name is Kevin, and I’ve been away for a little while. 

In trying to get caught up on my blog reading, I ran across a link to a little piece by Daniel Greenfield over at Sultan Knish that I think more people (lots more people) should read.  It’s titled The Supersessionists of the Liberal Confederacy, (h/t Otto).  Daniel’s premise is that, well:

Ted Cruz has come the closest to understanding that the other side just doesn’t play by any rules, but lacks the leverage to make much of that. Cruz is still a product of a system in which there are rules. And that system is as unfit for challenging the left-wing radicals running things as trying to play a game of chess against an opponent who feels like moving the pieces any which way he feels like and always claims to have won.

Law is a consensus. If you stop keeping the law, the police arrest you. If a gang of left-wing radicals in a basement somewhere stopped following the law, they might be locked up. It’s not a certain thing considering that mad bomber Bill Ayers is a university professor. But once those same left-wing radicals control much of the system and the media that reports on the system, they have no reason to follow the law.

He explores the consequences of this loss of consensus. To wit:

On one side there is no consensus and no law; only sheer will. On the other there is a body of legal traditions going back centuries.

It’s painfully clear that two such approaches cannot coexist within a single government. And those who have the power and follow no rules have the supreme advantage of wielding government power without the legal restrictions that were meant to bind the abuse of that power.

I’ve read the piece twice. I don’t think he’s wrong.

I’m reminded once again of Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, his magnum opus. I recommend you read (if you haven’t) my überpost on it from January, 2010.

This will not end well.

Edited to add:  Just after hitting “Publish” on this piece, I went and read Bill Whittle’s latest essay, Bamboo Spears.  Also highly recommended.

Shock! TEA-Party Members Aren’t Knuckle-Dragging Ignoramuses!

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Got this one via Instapundit.  (Sorry for the dearth of posting, but I’ve been working a LOT of hours.)

So a Yale law professor (and apparently amateur statistician) did a study.  Reports Politico:

Yale law professor Dan Kahan posted on his blog this week that he analyzed the responses of more than 2,000 American adults recruited for another study and found that, on average, people who leaned liberal were more science literate than those who leaned conservative.

However, those who identified as part of the tea party movement were actually better versed in science than those who didn’t, Kahan found. The findings met the conventional threshold of statistical significance, the professor said.

At the actual post, the Professor says:

I’ve got to confess, though, I found this result surprising. As I pushed the button to run the analysis on my computer, I fully expected I’d be shown a modest negative correlation between identifying with the Tea Party and science comprehension.

But then again, I don’t know a single person who identifies with the Tea Party.

Paging Pauline Kael!

All my impressions come from watching cable tv — & I don’t watch Fox News very often — and reading the “paper” (New York Times daily, plus a variety of politics-focused internet sites like Huffington Post & Politico).

I’m a little embarrassed, but mainly I’m just glad that I no longer hold this particular mistaken view.

Of course, I still subscribe to my various political and moral assessments–all very negative– of what I understand the “Tea Party movement” to stand for. I just no longer assume that the people who happen to hold those values are less likely than people who share my political outlooks to have acquired the sorts of knowledge and dispositions that a decent science comprehension scale measures.

But that’s not the best part.

The blog comment thread is.

At the time of this writing, it runs 249 comments long, overwhelmingly pro-TEA Party, and IMHO this one is the best:

Let me add an international twist:

I am a Brazilian self-taught Software Engineer. I also taught myself English, to the point where I managed to hold a Cambridge CPE, despite the fact that I’ve never stepped on anglophonic soil and zero formal training. So my analytic and reasoning faculties seem to be in working order.

Now, with that out of the way, here’s why I strongly identify with the Tea Party: in my view, they are right, and they are the US’s lifeline. They represent the virtues that led to American Exceptionalism (and YES, this does exist).

I find caricaturing Tea Partiers extremely ironic, and it would be hilarious, weren’t it so revolting. In my experience, being a lefty liberal is EASY. It is the default stance of the intellectually lazy. All you have to do is feel (specially “good about myself” kind of feel), and never solve anything. Here’s, in my view, why:

I live in the logical endpoint of Fabian socialism. Born to and raised in a culture where the concepts of “right” and “left” are non-existent (I take that back, actually “right” is a language stand-in for “evil”). We have over 30 political parties, and they are all some variant of the left. From Social Democrat parties to “Trotsky-ish” parties. Our *current* constitution, which dates back all the way to the Gun’n’ Roses era (1988), is pretty much a Soviet Constitution (1936) copy/paste job. Culturally, the population is in pretty much a state of “1984 meets Brave New World” in terms of ideology.

Brazil is also a country where:

– the utter government control of the private sector trough bureaucracy managed to destroy entrepreneurship. To the point that it exists, it has to deal with the accepted fact of life that the bribes which feed the corrupt bureaucrats demand to allow business to exist have to be factored in business plans.

– a crushing tax burden that sustain a permanent dependent underclass of favelados in welfare ensures the populists remain eternally in power and that any semblance upward mobility is quickly “corrected”. For an employer to put 10.000 in the pocket of an employee, with will costs him nearly 18.000, so jobs market are always tepid at best so informal work and tax dodging schemes are commonplace.

– The relentless attack on Catholicism (the historical prevalent brand of Christianity practiced here) over the past decades eroded any semblance of morality form a large chunk of the country, and that coupled with utter corruption and/or incompetence of law enforcement made way for drug cartels to take over. Violence and crime spiraled to such inhuman degrees that between the 50K murders in average a year, this year we saw a soccer referee stab a player to death and then be beheaded and quartered in the field by the spectators for his trouble. His head was placed in a spike in the middle of the field, as an added dramatic bonus (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2357453/Brazilian-referee-beheaded-Angry-fans-head-stake-stabbing-player.html).
This act barely caused a murmur.

I could go on for ages with more evidence of social rot, but you probably already got the gist of it.

Now, remember, being immersed in this cultural cesspool since birth I, like most Brazilians, never even *knew* that this wasn’t actually just “the way things are”. I mean, we get a gut feeling that something is off, but like Plato’s cave dwellers, light is something really frightening and instinctively avoided. And the *obvious* solutions by all the *smart people* are always the same: more government “compassion”. More “social programs”. More “awareness”. Less “greedyness”.

Imagine my shock when by a quirk of fate a Mark Levin book ended in my hands. That led me to Burke, Locke, Smith, Mises, Friedman, Hayek and many others. Conservative philosophy is what gave me a glimpse of the shinning city in the hill and a will to fight, along with a battle plan, to improve my lot in life, and of those I can reach.

So, Dan, I understand you are surprised that your results showed Tea Partiers not the raging bufons the media portrays them as being. The most obvious things are often the easiest to miss. But never doubt that being conservative is quite the intellectual effort, if only to overcome the moroseness of the mind that liberalism creates imposes with all its group-think and easy answers.

Best wishes,

Rodrigo

PS: written in a hurry on lunch break, no time to proof-read, so apologies in advance for eventual typos.

October 18, 2013 Rodrigo Del Cistia Andrade

The anti-Tea Party comments? Mostly ad hominems and “Your data/conclusion is not valid” arguments.

I cannot help but wonder if we’re not approaching another preference cascade.

Edited to add:  I’ll just leave this right here:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg_SsaP-9V4?rel=0;start=11]

So, Who Was Shocked by the Republicans Caving at the 11th Hour?

KevinLeave a comment

Not I.  The only thing I found surprising was they waited that long.

Someone likened the Republican “government shutdown” gambit to attempting an amphibious invasion without air superiority (media support). [ETA:  It was Instapundit.]  Can’t say I disagree with that assessment.  The major media outlets were in full uniform howl, predicting doom-‘n-gloom, downplaying and avoiding the embarrassingly childish acts of the National Park Service, blaming the Tea Party for its intransigence, and hurling epithets like “hostage-taker,” and “terrorist.”  It’s almost like there’s a narrative or something.  (*cough*Journolist*cough*)

And, honestly, I think the Republicans would have been far better off to have made noises about their inability to affect the implementation of Obamacare, and pointing out its every single failure – and they are legion.  Where else have you seen this image?

photo Obamacare_stack_0-1.jpg

Certainly not in the major media. That’s the 7-foot, 11,500,000-word stack of regulations spawned by the 2000+ page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that we had to pass to find out what was in it.

As some wag put it, “Pass it to find out what’s in it?  That’s not a law, that’s a stool sample.”

Why isn’t Rand Paul or Ted Cruz wheeling one of these stacks around everywhere he goes?  Apparently we’re learning more every day, but we’ve got a long way to go.

Remember this?

photo dscn1160.jpg

Those are pocket editions of the Constitution, and include the Declaration of Independence.  As P.J. O’Rourke famously said of it:

The U.S. Constitution is less than a quarter the length of the owner’s manual for a 1998 Toyota Camry, and yet it has managed to keep 300 million of the world’s most unruly, passionate and energetic people safe, prosperous and free.

Today?  Not so much.  It’s keepers have fallen down on the job.

Edited to add this:

photo Fiscal_Cliff_Ramirez.jpg

The Theory of Value

KevinLeave a comment

Sarah Hoyt has an interesting post up, Fifty Shades of Marx*, a discussion of her assertion that the ideas of Marx are currently ascendant – an assertion I concur with.  This bit reminded me of something:

You want to look at the decay of Western civilization? It’s mostly the unexamined absorption of Marxist ideas.

Now, I’m one of those people who live too much in books and theories, and, as such, I can tell you why they’re absorbed and treated as gospel: it’s because they make internal sense. This is not the same as having even a glimmer of real world application, of course, but they satisfy the minds of intellectuals by dividing everything into categories and presenting a (false but deceptively smooth) system for historical change and, in general, sounding REALLY plausible.

Take the Marxist theory of value. It is utter nonsense of course. The idea is that what gives value to something is the labor put into it. You can see how this would appeal to Marx, or, indeed, to any intellectual. Laboring forever over a book that sells one copy is now a genuine, bonafide “injustice”. The book is valuable. Just look how much work you put into it.

This came to mind immediately:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R28GPPl_5FA?rel=0&start=6]
RTWT