Orion's Hammer

Consumers drive our modern economy, and when consumers get scared, the economy drives off a cliff.

I thought it was notable that the big economic story of early 2008 was "consumer confidence numbers drop... AGAIN!", with the media not even seeing their own role in scaring consumers. So I've been paying fairly close attention to the language media folks use to describe the economy. To summarize, in 2006: "In other news", in 2007: "next, the SUBPRIME CRISIS!", in 2008 "HOUSING, THREAT or MENACE?", and finally in late 2008 and early 2009 "cower under your BEDS, ye MIGHTY, and DESPAIR!". Over the past six months, in a tiny, tremulous voice, it's been "recovery... maybe?". Read the good news on the recovery and then how it might all go TERRIBLY WRONG over at cnn.com. A curious spin on surprisingly decent numbers.

My wife and I have noticed a strange trend. Many restaurants in our town have started closing several more nights of the week (e.g., Monday-Wednesday). The remaining open restaurants are packed with customers, but the waitstaff is clearly stretched thin, and getting a table takes quite a while. Presumably, the restaurant managers read about the impending economic doom ("DOOM!!! Film at eleven."), and hence decided to cut way back on staff and hours. Paying customers are thus being turned away at the door, so revenues drop, which is blamed on "the economy."

A similar situation at several stores around town. Stuff that used to be there isn't on the shelves, it takes ten minutes to locate an employee, and when you find one, they "guess we don't carry that anymore." More money walks out the door, because the inventory's not there, the people aren't there, and half the time the store's closed anyway. Darn "the economy!"

It's not the economy, stupid. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy. So here's my antidote meme: "Most people still have jobs and money to spend. A well-stocked, well-staffed business can make you a fortune!"

So he's just lying there, in the middle of the road. It's dusk, and if I wasn't using the van's dashboard radar, I might not have even seen him. He's either really skinny or else he's not wearing much armor.

He does have a decent Chip on his shoulder, its little flickering blue LIDAR scanner still clearly enabled and watching for incoming projectiles. The newer model's electrically steered phased emitter array can ramp up its output into the kilojoule range in about a millisecond. That's enough delivered energy to melt incoming dumb lead, detonate high explosives, fry most e-bullets, or according to those old commercials "permanently blind the mugger, or instantly boil his brain matter--your choice!". Of course, even the best beam weapons can't stop another beam, but offense always wins these contests.

He's also wearing the orange headband, which indicates he's rigged to explode if he's jostled. More and more pedestrians are wearing "anti-hit-and-run" explosive devices nowadays, and since mutual assured destruction doesn't sharpen up drivers' attention unless it's really obvious, the orange headband is becoming a key part of the modern pedestrian's deterrance posture. ( Continue to noticably Libertarian yet dystopian conclusion )

Now, I dislike Iran's ruling theocracy as much as anybody. And newly "reelected" president Ahmadinejad is sure one nuke-loving, Holocaust-denying, *gay*-denying, America-and-Israel-hating bastard. He stinks. And I'm really jazzed that the protests show how fed up Iranians are with their crappy government, and that the government response (cops in riot gear with clubs, some teargas) is fairly tepid by police state standards (no tanks, no random shootings).

But.

This building houses the Azadi Square office of the Basji, who are either Iran's citizen's milita or Ahmadinejad's brownshirts depending on your point of view. If you're inside, what are you thinking?

First, you're kicking yourself for not properly anchoring down your white security fence. Second, there are angry protesters-turned-revolutionaries throwing burning projectiles into your building, which qualifies as attempted arson of an occupied structure. In America, that's one of the felonies you can defend against with lethal force.

You have a loudspeaker and a gun. The loudspeaker ain't stoppin' em. What would you do?

June 4 is the 20th anniversary of China's brutal crackdown on a group of students who in 1989 were protesting for democracy in Tiananmen Square. The Chinese government sent in tanks and infantry, killing hundreds. They've ruthlessly suppressed information on this event ever since: Bloomberg reports that today's edition of the (Hong Kong based) South China Morning Post was delivered to mainland China with the article on the massacre snipped out.

In particular, the only existing photos of the tanks are super-telephoto shots smuggled out at great risk. In the free world, to see these shots you just search for 'tiananmen square' on Google image search. Back in 2005, I was surprised to find that the same search on "images.google.cn", the Chinese version of Google image search, showed no tanks, only sunny scenes of the square's flowers and architecture and obligatory giant photo of Chairman Mao.

Today, when I search for 'tiananmen square' on images.google.cn I get no pictures and this ominous message:

搜索结果可能涉及不符合相关法律法规和政策的内容，无法显示。

According to Google's translation service, this means:

Search results may not comply with the relevant laws, regulations and policy, can not be displayed.

And presumably, "CITIZEN, REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE. POLICE UNITS HAVE NEARLY REACHED YOUR LOCATION AND WILL PROVIDE THE OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT RESPONSE TO YOUR SEARCH."

I once lived with a hard-left pacifist Chinese apologist that claimed "Tiananmen Square was just China's version of Kent State". I think there are some pretty serious differences in body count (hundreds vs four), duration (hours vs seconds), and national response (eternal suppression vs public trials, commissions, and soul-searching). America may be slowly drifting towards the abyss, but at least we're not an Orwellian police state (yet).

I guess I'm giving into the pessimism of the times. I think it was "Earth Hour", the inexplicable once-yearly event where you huddle in the dark for an hour, when I realized that environmentalism is the new religion hollowing out the waning empire; the fatal parasite that could only take root in a fundamentally weakened society.

Here's the thing.

One hour is less than 0.02% of a year. Lighting consumes less than 15% of a household's energy. So if everybody huddled in the dark for just one hour, we'd cut the world's annual household energy usage by... seventeen millionths. Which is totally irrelevant. But of course this act is symbolic: it's not about saving souls, but saving energy, to be accounted for only in the fuzziest terms. Because significantly cutting energy usage in real life would mean permanently giving up most of our lighting, heating, plumbing, and so on; think Americans dying of cholera. But people don't do the math on this, and must not.

Another example: solar is the new thing. A Minnesota county installed a solar roof costing $900,000 that could save as much as $15,000 per year in electricity. Assuming they're right, and ignoring the discount rate, this would pay off in 60 years. Except solar panels almost never last more than 25 years. So in other words, every solar panel installed represents a significant net monetary loss to civilization, in addition to (American) warm fuzzy feelings, and (Chinese) pollution, trade imbalance, and wasted labor. But alternative energy is not about energy, or human reason, or even the environment. It's about faith, like buying carbon indulgences.

Speaking of carbon, I've got a simple reductio ad absurdum in the fight against global warming. We detonate high-yield explosives (ideally nukes) far above the barren regions of the arctic forests. First, this would kill and flatten the forest's biomass into a dense low layer of debris, thus sequestering its carbon in the permafrost (thawed and active ecosystems tend to be carbon-neutral; you have to freeze or kill biomass to reliably sequester carbon). Second, the flattened forest has significantly higher reflectance during winter (the layer of snow is unbroken by trees), decreasing the earth's overall solar intake. As the forest grows back, we repeat the bombing runs every few years as required to maintain climate at whatever level is desired. There's plenty of forested land area in Siberia, Alaska, and northern Canada to make this happen. But can such a thing really be environmentally friendly?

Clinging to their religion and guns, many people on the other side have responded by obeying Luke 22:36, and selling their clothes to stock up on guns and ammo. This is happening on a scale to cause price hikes and shortages nationwide. I fear for the republic.

"Vinnie, according to my handicapping I'd like to take out an 'insurance policy' against the event that Greased Lightening places in the third race."

"Why certainly. How much 'coverage' would you like?"

"Oh, say $100."

"Excellent. According to the '3:1' entry on my 'actuarial tables', the 'premium' for that policy will be $34. Would you like to take out any other policies?"

"Why yes! ..."

Certainly not gambling. No, not gambling at all, merely 'insurance.'

So when, for example, AIG needs another hundred billion US taxpayer dollars to pay off 'insurance claims' from the Credit-Default Swap (CDS) 'coverage' that AIG sold on Lehman brothers before it went under, you can rest assured that this is not 'heads they win, tails you lose' gambling. Merely 'insurance.'

In a sane world, in October 2008 after Lehman fell, AIG would have gone bankrupt, and then every big bank in America would have briefly gone bankrupt. And then any smart bankruptcy judge would have torn up these garbage derivative contracts, leaving the sane *banking* side of these banks healthy and operating properly. After a few panicky weeks, during which fatcat financial idiots would have lost their ill-gotten shirts, life would have gone on. Instead, we bailed out the hedge fund Madoffia, to the tune of several trillion dollars--so far!

And what's worse is that this game is NOT over yet. Credit Default Swap contracts are still being written today; fat cats betting on which company is going to go under next. When said company goes under, the winning fat cats take a big payout, and the losing fat cats can usually just reimburse themselves with taxpayer dollars.

Luckily, congress is easily distracted by a paltry few hundred *million* going out in AIG bonuses. Talk about million-wise, trillion-foolish!

Boy, our perception of risk is sure weird. For example, which would you guess is more dangerous: being a farmer, or a front-line police officer?

This Bureau of Labor Statistics summary for 2006 shows the total "fatal occupational injury" rate per person per year for farmers is more than double that of police officers or firefighters. Fishermen are nearly ten times more likely to be killed on the job than cops; loggers and airline pilots about five times more likely; gravity-defying steelworkers, garbage truck folks and coal miners at over twice the rate; and truck drivers, taxi drivers, oilfield workers, and folks in the concrete-type manufacturing trades at slightly higher rates than police officers.

Much safer, typically by a factor of five or more, are white collar work, including government work, sales, food prep, and so on. Statistically, the safest job in America, over thirty times less fatal than police work, is working in a hospital, where you only have to worry about flesh-eating bacteria, dirty needles, and drug addicts!

Granted, a fisherman's main risks, like drowning, aren't the same risks as those faced by police officers. But here's a heartfelt thank-you to America's brave fishermen, loggers, miners, pilots, and drivers, who really do also lay everything on the line every day for us all.

The current financial situation is 90% a purely psychological downward spiral: folks aren't buying stuff because they're worried that people are losing their jobs. Yet people are losing their jobs because companies are worried that folks aren't buying stuff. It's frankly ridiculous--the only difference between 2006 and 2009 is what people think about the future. We could wake up tomorrow with a turned-around economy, if only believe that it will.

Truly the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.
( Click for dueling quotes from FDR and Obama, and future predictions )

I'm a contrarian--if "stocks are hot", and everybody's buying 'em, they're probably overvalued, so I stay away. If "emerging markets are bad", so nobody's buying 'em, they're probably cheap, so it's time to stock up.

Everybody knows that both western civilization and America are both completely permanent, fixed points in the political landscape from now until eternity. Everybody's wrong--western civilization will either collapse or mutate into something none of us could recognize, but it won't stay the same. But what's a contrarian supposed to do when USA Today wonders if this is 'another Great Depression?'.

Since the millennium, I've been very concerned about America's huge and growing trade and budget deficits for years, and I was pretty sure about how that imbalance would unwind: American dollar drops internationally, inflation goes up, standard of living falls (possibly dramatically), political uncertainty reigns (but think riot, not coup), and those with hard assets (guns, land, gold, wheat) win.

I was wrong. Instead, we're in the middle of a serious deflationary spike, because America isn't just a country, it's the heart of the western economy. So doubts about America's economic health are really doubts about the entire civilized world, and when folks worldwide face that kind of fear, they want promises backed by the strongest country in the world--America. So curiously, for now American economic uncertainty translates into a stronger dollar, not a weaker dollar.

However, I'm still a libertarian, and it still looks like the escalating series of federal interventions have so far just exacerbated the crisis:


There's a good debunking of the bailout rationale over at reason.com. Regarding past government interference, there's a good quantitative paper on the government's role in prolonging the great depression. "Regime uncertainty" is a nice roundabout way to describe the feeling of business owners everywhere regarding new taxes: "I could pour my heart and soul into building my business only to see those thieves tax away all my profits and more; or I could just say screw it and go golfing."

Plus, we haven't even talked about medicare and social security. So don't sell your guns, land, gold, or wheat just yet...

I've just about had it with X. First, X creep me out--bigtime--to the point where I can't stand being in a room with them. Second, X really are dangerous, especially around children. I don't know exactly how many of America's children are hurt or killed by X each year, but it's gotta be hundreds; and isn't even one far too many? Finally, there is no reason for X to even exist in our world, so I say ban 'em.

For democrat, substitute X = "guns".
For republican, substitute X = "gays".

My feeling is, both arguments are wrong.

I disagree with several of Obama and Biden's policies, including their redistributitive tax plans, their dedication to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq, and their evident support for gun control.

But unlike many of their opponents on the right, they both seem like honest, moral people, and they appear to be willing to reach out to those outside their party. And their victory is a testament to their hard work, dedication, and eloquence.

Finally, I'm happy that America is a country where a bright, talented kid from the midwest can grow up to be president, no matter what color his skin is. The fact that Americans really were honestly looking for the best person for the job during this election, regardless of gender or race, makes me proud to live in this country!

When the stock market is rising, everybody knows it's time to buy. When the stock market is dropping, everybody knows it's time to sell. But if you only buy after the stock market rises, you're buying high, and selling low.

I thought it was interesting that despite the 20% stock market drop over the last week, every "pro" Money Magazine asked is either buying or holding pat, and not one of the eighteen is selling (e.g., "Get out while you can!").

Rationally, selling when prices have dropped is just silly.

Reloading his heaviest weapon, sweat mixing with dirt as it streams down his face, the last and strongest defender looked back over his shoulder and said, with visible tension in his face:

"Don't worry, ma'am. Even though it keeps coming, now I'm going to throw everything I've got at it!"

Confidence builder, or no?

The markets say no. After congress voted through a $700,000,000,000.00 rescue package to fight the ever-expanding fear bubble, markets worldwide have cratered:



The stock market's rationale presumably is "If the feds are that scared, they must know something we don't--so this must be really serious!". Proving once again that government action is a good way to screw up markets, but a bad way to save 'em.

My take is that the recent banking crisis is not the end of civilization, it's is a relatively minor malfunction where the megabanks made large numbers bad loans, compounded their error by slicing and dicing and buying and selling those loans, and have now reached the point where no big bank really knows if it's solvent or not. In other words, they acted apocalyptically stupid, and they're now getting slapped around hard by Adam Smith's invisible hand.

By contrast many small banks, like the little local bank that wanted a 35% down payment when my wife and I were looking at a modest house back in 2004, are doing fine--they didn't make bad loans, they didn't buy and sell bonds nobody understands, and they will not go out of business. If all the stupid banks go bankrupt, then smarter banks will expand to fill society's banking niche. That's what's supposed to happen--in capitalism, as in nature, death serves the useful purpose of clearing out the weak and stupid. Trying to "save" the unfit banks just ends up subsidizing stupidity, which isn't sustainable (stupidity can grow faster than anybody's capacity to bail it out).

So I'm still buying stocks--they get cheaper to buy every day!

So today the House republicans torpedoed the $700,000,000,000.00 bailout plan, ignoring both Bush and Paulson's threat to end the world as we know it unless they were given $0.7 trillion to spend as they wished.

I'm actually glad the bailout didn't happen, for several reasons. First, the popular outcry against this plan means the man on the street actually cares about how many gigabucks the government spends, and congress knows it. Second, the chicken-little style warnings from Bush and his (shockingly inept and/or corrupt) cronies are now officially ignored by everybody, unlike in the runup to the Iraq invasion in early 2003, when the media, congress, and the public (including me) were fooled. Third, the ever-escalating series of government interventions reminded me strongly of the government-induced economic malfunctions in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Finally, I've been meaning to sock some money into the stock market anyway, so the massive stock sell-off means all stocks are now selling at a 7% discount!

Yup, that's right--when you hear the stock market is tanking, that's the time to plow money in, not out. And the lower it gets, the better!

The one macro thing that worries me is that the price of stocks, copper, and oil are still down, and dropping. That means the money supply is still contracting, so to avoid a deflationary depression, Bernanke and the fed still have to figure out some way to kickstart inflation.

Recently I've been building an AR-15 rifle (the legal semiautomatic civilian version of the M-16) in my garage using plans downloaded from the internet and... wood. You can follow my build process with pictures here.

For weaponeer.net's previous Home Build Challenge, in May I built a hideous but working semiautomatic pistol from metal originally used in heating ducts.

There's something really cool about building a working, legal gun yourself from trash.

Curious things have been happening with prices lately. Over the past five years or so, the prices of many of commodities went up; it was especially bad (300% or more) for oil, gold, and copper; but even stocks, corn, and houses have risen sharply, at least until just recently.

There's a name for the situation where the price of everything is rising, called inflation. The underlying cause is that nobody wants dollars, for example because they expect the government will print more and more dollars to pay off its debts. Mild inflation is good for debtors, because your $100,000 house loan will be easier to pay off in the distant future, when $100,000 is worth one small latte. Up until about this summer, America had fairly annoying but tolerable level of inflation, around 7%.

But over the past two years, house prices have been dropping--running contrary to inflation. Oil lost 30% over the last two months. During August, the US dollar rose against the Euro and other currencies. What's happening? Not inflation, but deflation, where prices go down, because everybody wants dollars.

Deflation sounds great--dropping prices!--but it's actually far more destructive than inflation, because it hurts borrowers. If you buy a house with a $100,000 loan, but then prices everywhere drop dramatically, your loan just got a lot harder to pay off, because now $100,000 might be worth two houses. Because deflation makes more borrowers unable to pay back their loans, deflation makes banks less likely to give loans. If everybody's desperate for loaned dollars, which is to say the demand for dollars goes up, this actually just makes deflation worse! This deflationary spiral was one aspect of the great depression during the 1930's, and the less severe (but still bad) end of the Japanese miracle in the 1990's. Ben Bernanke, current head of the Fed, back in 2002 gave a good speech on the dangers of deflation, where he said "I am confident that the Fed would take whatever means necessary to prevent significant deflation in the United States...".

One sure way to fight deflation is for the government to create and spend a huge number of dollars. And hey, as soon as the $700 billion (!) bond rescue package was announced, guess what happened to the price of gold, oil, stocks, etc? They started going back up! Inflation to the rescue!

Americans are rightly horrified by the stories from Iraq's police stations under Saddam Hussein, where even minor lawbreakers were subjected to electric shock torture.

Yet our own police forces regularly carry what can only be called portable electric torture devices--tasers. Originally intended as a more humane alternative to beating or shooting, the electronic torture device has undoubtably avoided nightstick or gunshot wounds that might otherwise have been needed. But there's a dark side to less-lethal force--it's more defensible than lethal force, so it tends to get used more often, in circumstances where lethal force would clearly be inappropriate.

Case in point is one Jesse Buckley, who after being arrested (for refusing to sign a speeding ticket), stopped while halfway to the patrol car, and wouldn't move. The lone arresting officer can't move the guy, and after waiting a few minutes, tased him a total of three times. This torture was unsuccessful in getting Mr. Buckley into the patrol car, and doesn't appear to serve any useful purpose. It's not until another officer shows up that the two cops are able to drag Mr. Buckley into the patrol car. Even without his (overly theatrical) sobbing, the following is not easy to watch:

(The first tasing is one minute in; the second is at 1:40; the third at 2:40. The second officer arrives at about 6:00.)

Here's the (readable, but long) eleventh circuit court opinion, which held the tasing was a constitutional use of force. The dissent, on page 21, disagrees. My judgement is that as a matter of law, Mr. Buckley clearly was resisting arrest. The use of nondeadly force when necessary to effect an arrest is legal. Mr. Buckley could have ended the torture at any time by obeying with the officer's simple request to get into the patrol car, but he chose not to. Yet does his noncompliance make the torture necessary?

Regardless of the answer, torturing noncompliant but non-dangerous suspects is clearly stupid. Torture, as this case shows, rarely produces the compliance the torturer wants. Torture's only communication medium, pain, conveys very little information, but plenty of irrational emotion. Finally, this sort of raw brutality on the streets only reinforces the destructive (but increasingly correct) notion that police are society's alien armed enforcers, instead of citizens providing an indispensible and beneficial service.

(Mr. Don't Tase Me, Bro', while a jerk, should not have been publically tortured either.)

After the government takeover of ailing mortgage giants Fannie and Freddie, both holding trillions of dollars in mortgages; and today the takeover of insurance company AIG, which insures about $1.1 trillion; the markets are now friggin' petrified. There's a good Wall Street Journal article describing the crisis, and one aspect I hadn't heard much about called a Credit-Default Swap.

In a credit-default swap, company A (such as AIG) sells company B (the Buyer) insurance against the failure of company C (say, "Crapco"). This is useful to the Buyer if Crapco is one of their suppliers, to compensate the Buyer for the loss of a supplier in case Crapco goes belly-up. Credit-default swaps are very old, but their use has been on a terrifying superexponential rise since about 2000. The financial giants have huge quantities of credit-default swap contracts protecting against each other's failure: in particular, company B now sees company A as a supplier (of insurance), and hence might buy insurance against the failure of A, for example from company C! This incestuous insuring has gone on to the point where today the total value of these contracts exceeds $45 trillion--over twice the value of the entire US stock market, and larger than the entire world's GDP, for example.

The credit-default swap market grew because when nobody's going out of business, folks are paying you to insure against an event that never happens, which is just money straight into your pocket. But if just one company goes out of business, everybody that insured against that failure has to pay out big money, which strains everybody's balance sheet. This strain can cause other failures, which then have to be paid off, in turn triggering yet more failures, and so on. So credit-default swaps are now acting more like a suicide pact among all the big financial companies, which of course work fine until somebody dies.

The destruction of these (shockingly stupid) financial interdependencies is called "deleveraging", the process of paying off or writing off your debts. To gauge the amount of debt that's going to have to go away somehow, compare the current debt-to-GDP ratio of 350% with, say, 1933's 260%. (Excellent chart from Naked Capitalism's article on deleveraging.)

The macro problems are going to resolve themselves somehow (but I, and I think many CEOs, have no idea how). But on a micro level, at the level of your own personal finances, paying off and thus eliminating debts is not that hard, yet incredibly psychologically rewarding. So work hard and get the good job, slow your spending and pay off your credit cards, buy the affordable used car outright rather than get the new-car loan, and rent or else pay off your mortgage!

I hereby retract my statement that Obama had accomplished nothing as a legislator. I changed my mind while fact-checking this glowing 2008 editorial which describes a solid 2004 Illinois state bill requiring (famously brutal and corrupt) Illinois police to videotape all interrogations. According to this editorial, Obama personally authored and pushed through this legislation despite fierce opposition. Granted, this contemporanious 2002 article describes fellow Democrat and Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan as "the legislature's leading advocate of videotaping", but frankly Madigan's bill didn't pass until Obama worked it over.

Other surprisingly little-publicized but useful Obama accomplishments: a 2005 nonproliferation law, the 2006 genetic nondescrimination act, a 2006 editorial supporting subsidies for hybrid car manufacturers, and a long list of others. I don't agree with Obama's choices on many of these issues, and none of these are the kind of (relatively) high-impact legislation like I've seen Palin create and push through, but Obama's record is not as empty as I thought. In my screed decrying the media's dishonest "she's totally unqualified!" mischaracterization, I should have known better. (Hey, this may be a crazyblog, but I've still got standards!)

Why is it that political discourse in this country so easily degenerates into duckspeak, where the intelligent and experienced persons on the other side of the aisle are denounced as dishonest traitors who, except for their own laziness, would already have destroyed our great nation?

After McCain's surprise pick of Sarah Palin as his VP, the left blogosphere has been abuzz about the choice. I think the smart thing for the leftosphere to do would have been to say "Sarah who?" and leave it at that, but what I found striking was the huge variety of attacks.

Yet railing against Palin's supposed lack of experience is a pretty shoddy argument, since I can think of several significant political accomplishments she has pushed through during her twenty months as governor:

• She re-wrote Alaska's oil tax structure after the previous tax structure, pushed through by her corrupt predecessor, was revealed to be full of loopholes favoring the big oil companies.
  
• She pushed through the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act (AGIA), a huge process for picking and kickstarting a $10 billion+ pipeline project to market Alaska's natural gas.
  
• A week after taking office, she sold the private jet (on eBay, no less!) that her corrupt predecessor had purchased with state funds.

Has Obama, despite his quite inspiring rhetoric, actually accomplished anything of consequence during his years in either the Illinois or US senate? And plenty of successful presidents and respected candidates, including Bill Clinton, have only had experience as governor of second or third-rate states. Finally, experience isn't a guarantee of success, or even competence--The Volkh Conspiracy points out that Dick Cheney, despite his years of very deep experience in foreign policy, was still almost single-handedly responsible for the Iraq war, arguably the worst act of diplomatic and financial self-immolation in American history.

Madeline Kunin, former governer of Vermont, considers the choice of Palin an "insult to women"; a transparent attempt to pander to the female voter by choosing a pretty but vacuous VP. But Palin became Alaska's governor because she stood up to her own party's corrupt good old boy network, defeated incumbent governor and ten-term congressman Frank Murkowski in the Republican primary, and then beat former governor Tony Knowles in the general election--Alaska's political landscape is littered with the corpses of folks that underestimated Sarah Palin. Kunin drags out the tiny state and "ice float" stereotype, as if Alaska's energetic, diverse, and vibrant people aren't real people like those that live in proper places such as the East coast. Kunin goes on to insult Alaska's "frontier-mentality", but then asks "Can this person protect and defend the United States in an increasingly dangerous world"? Perhaps I am tainted by the same frontier-mentality, but I suspect Alaskans like Palin that hunt moose understand honest-to-goodness mortal danger better than most Americans. A moose weighs about a thousand pounds, and it honestly doesn't give a damn whether you live or die. Yes, most rogue states are bigger than a moose, but the principle, the gut level understanding that "one bad choice, right here, could literally end my life," is exactly the same.

Volkh demolishes the "Palin supported Pat Buchanan" smear.

Somehow even Palin's mother-in-law's undecided vote is making the news. But how will all the other candidates' mother-in-laws vote? And more importantly, how could this ever be even remotely relevant to the nation's many problems?

As a lifelong Alaskan, I know my state has some remarkably tough, intelligent, and competent women. I married one. Sarah Palin is another. The sheer bigotry I see arrayed against my state and governor harken back to not-so-old segregationist Democratic Party, the formerly racist party that thoroughly repainted itself as the only party to embrace American diversity. I'm reminded of the similar experience of intelligent african-american jurist and strict constitutional fundamentalist Clarence Thomas, who now quite literally shows up in some encyclopedia definitions of "race traitor" because he disagrees with the left's support of affirmative action. The problem here is not the proffered objection that Palin or Thomas are unqualified, it is precisely that they are qualified capable individuals from "victim" groups, yet they both hold non-left views. The left must destroy these people, because they threaten the victim-identity politics at the core of the post-1960's Democratic party.