WikiYawn

Been watching the Wikileaks freakout by the tighty righties and the U.S. government with amusement. Especially amusing is the fact that this latest document dump has even led a few journalists to, well, commit acts of actual journalism (gasp!). For example, this evening on NPR News, NPR's correspondent in Baghdad asked around quietly about the Iranian influence upon the current Iraqi government and... err... found that this part of the document dump was, well, true (duh!). Which even Poppy Bush coulda told you, that's why he didn't depose Saddam in the first place back in '93, 'cause it'd turn the place into Iran West, but WTF, you gotta lead today's "journalists" to stories by the nose and stick it into the story nostril-deep before they can see what's been in front of their face all along...

Meanwhile, watching the tighty righties and Obama administration fulminate about how they want to have Wikileaks declared a terrorist group (yeah, their document dumps are a terror alright, but only a terror to liars who don't want the truth to come out), about how Julian Assange should be charged with the crime of espionage (he's not in the United States, he's not a U.S. citizen, he's not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, about the only way you could do that would be to invade Sweden and kidnap him like we did Noriega, and that's unlikely), etc., just goes to show that the term "freedom of the press" is a foreign term to both the tighty righties and to the Obama administration, which continues its authoritarian ways. The person who gave Wikileaks the documents could be charged with espionage, but committing an act of journalism by, well, actually publishing them, that's called "journalism" a.k.a. "the press" and in case you haven't figured it out, you can't legally go after folks for publishing government documents here in the United States because said documents are public domain.

Next up, Assange is going to publish some documents from one of the big banks (rumor says BofA) showing that they knew they were issuing fraudulent mortgages, and engaged in many other sketchy activities, but didn't care. Unfortunately, this *will* open up Wikileaks to legal challenges that the current document dumps didn't address. Those documents are copyrighted by BofA, and publishing them outright is a violation of numerous copyright laws. Assange is probably going to argue that there is a public interest exception for documents of this nature, but that exception allows you to publish only the minimum amount needed in order to illustrate your commentary, it doesn't allow you to just verbatim publish copyright documents without any surrounding commentary for each excerpt published. Maybe Assange *should* be accepting that refuge in Ecuador (whose leftist President, an acolyte of Hugo Chavez, has offered said refuge)... on the other hand, Ecuador's tiny military would be hopeless if the U.S. decided to do a Noriega on him. Decisions, decisions...

-- Badtux the Easily Amused Penguin

Bobo Brooks and the Economists of Doom

Oh boy, Bobo Brooks says economics is hard and a lot of economists get it wrong, so we should abandon economics and go back to explaining economics with stories out of history. Gosh, right out of the Austrian handbook. The Austrians hold that any sort of mathematical / statistical social sciences approach to economics is doomed to failure, and thus only the Austrian method of logical reasoning from postulates pulled out of their bungholes as “truths” is correct for thinking about economics.

Of course, as my Philosophy 208 (Logic) professor pointed out some thirty-odd years ago, if you start reasoning from false postulates, you end up with meaningless conclusions. If I start reasoning with, “All politicians are orange; John Boehner is a politician, thus John Boehner is orange”, I might think it’s correct. But then I come up with “All politicians are orange, Barack Obama is a politician, therefore Obama is orange.” Which, err, he isn't ;). A false premise (“All politicians are orange”) led to a false conclusion. Yet that is where the Austrians take us — into the realm of false premises that they “prove” are true much as I “proved” that all politicians are orange by looking at the examples of John Boehner and Charlie Crist.

The reality is that economic models validated by statistics do have use — as models, that imperfectly capture aspects of an economic system and have validity only insofar as they agree with the data they supposedly model. Insofar as these models can predict what happens in certain situations — such as what happens when we hit the zero bounds and enter liquidity trap territory — and insofar as these models agree with what we’ve actually observed in prior incidents where economies have hit the zero bounds and entered liquidity trap territory — they are useful. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater just because some of the models proposed by the Chicago school have no correspondence to any reality lacking pink unicorns and cotton candy trees is ridiculous, but it doesn’t surprise me that Bobo Brooks does it. After all, hacks hate facts, especially facts that happen to agree with models that predict them. Facts are inconvenient, and make it hard for them to lie to the American people about the results of policy decisions made by government and their effect upon the economy. And what fun is that?

-- Badtux the Logical Penguin

Banned Books Week

And here are the most-banned books of 2008. Most of which are quite forgettable (if the Gossip Girls books had never been written the world would be no worse off), but... The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini?

This just goes to show the problem with banning books. Once you develop the mindset that it's okay to ban books, your aim goes from the trash that the world would not be any worse with out (e.g. Gossip Girls to collateral damage that is simply unacceptable (The Kite Runner). It's a slippery slope, and it's an unnecessary slippery slope, because it implies that books can hurt people. Well, unless you manage to bang someone over the head with a big heavy one (I suggest a hard-bound college dictionary), nobody gets hurt by even the trashiest of books.

But of course, that's not what people mean when they whine about "harmful" books. What they really mean is, "books that contradict my own personal prejudices and biases." It's all about closing off access to ideas that book banners don't like, in the end, and thus results in a world that is less than if the book banners had been left to die on a hillside somewhere the day after birth. It's about making the world a meaner, smaller, place. Which is what the book banners want, in the end -- a world where only themselves, and people exactly like themselves, exist, and where the rest of us -- penguins and people alike -- simply *aren't*. It's the same goal that motivated the Nazis, in the end: the goal to make the "master race" and "master ideology" be the *only* race and *only* ideology. Except that the book banners would be appalled if you mentioned that to them, because they insist they're just making sure that only the "right" ideas can get into their children's hands, and don't see that there is no difference between their notion of "right" ideas, and the Nazi conception of a "master ideology"...

-- Badtux the Ideas Penguin

Elitism

The next time I get accused of elitism, I'm going to ask the accuser, "so you want your brain surgery done by a plumber?" Fuck yeah I'm an elitist -- whether it's brain surgery on me or mine, or running new wiring for my iceberg, or whatever, I want someone who knows what the fuck they're doing on the job. That's elitist as all fuck, and you know what? I don't give a shit that it's elitist. When you want brain surgery you call a brain surgeon, not a McDonald's drive-thru clerk. And when it comes to formulating economics policy, fuck yeah I want that being done by people who, well, know economics -- not by some asshole plumber or snowbilly from Wasilly who don't know shit from shinola. Elitist? You betcha!

-- Badtux the Elitist Penguin

Walter Cronkite

I haven't talked about his death because reality is that American TV journalism died when he retired in 1981. Today, the buzzards of sycophantic government and corporate ass-kissing who replaced him celebrate Cronkite's career while spitting on what he did. And what he did was real, and true: He reported the truth. Not the government's truth, not corporate truth, not radical's truth, but the truth as he saw it based on the data that he and his reporters gathered.

We don't have that today. What we have today from TV "news" is propaganda from government and corporate shills thinly disguised as "news". If not for the Internet, there would be no outlet for real news in America today.

And that's the way it is.

-- Badtux the News Penguin