September 2018 – Page 2 – REPUBLIC REBORN

“So a place “allied” to the United States is a total monarchy, devoid of a constitution. But that is not what is morally shocking. A group of between seven and fifteen thousand members of the royal family runs the place, leading a lavish, hedonistic lifestyle in open contradiction with the purist ideas that got them there. Look at the contradiction: the stern desert tribes whose legitimacy is derived from Amish-like austerity can, thanks to a superpower, turn to hedonistic uninhibited pleasure-seeking: the king openly travels for pleasure with a retinue that fills four Jumbo jets. Quite a departure from his ancestors. The family members amassed a fortune now largely in Western safes. Without the United States, the country would have had its revolution, a regional breakup, some turmoil, then perhaps–by now–some stability. But preventing noise makes the problem worse in the long run.”

He may be stretching his analogies a bit too thin in places, generalizing them so as to apply them to a greater number of circumstances, but Taleb does point out the phenomenon of foreign aid creating political corruption in governments. A government is loyal to whoever writes the checks and delivers the guns. For a government to be somewhat accountable, both of those must come from the people they govern. It’s one reason I’ve always found the “tax the rich” policy argument strange: forcing the rich to pay the government more would serve only to more closely tie the rich to the government.

09/07/18 Overnight Links

Posted on September 7, 2018 by S. Smith

High Times: Study find marijuana use among Baby Boomer doubled in the past decade

RADLEY BALKO: “Cop of the Year” syndrome

FEE: All taxes undermine prosperity, but personal and income taxes do the most damage

Also FEE: The foreign war on drugs is failing, too

Reason: The TSA’s plastic screening trays are the dirtiest part of the airport

The Intercept: Dear anonymous Trump official, there is no redemption in your cowardly op-ed

NICK GILLESPIE: Anonymous tell-alls in the New York Times are more of a threat to the republic than Trump

DOUG BANDOW: John McCain leaves behind a hawkish void

AIER: The facts about immigration and crime

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: The hi-tech threat

Techdirt: Saudi government outlaws satire; violators to face five-year prison sentences

Astronomy.com: Saturn’s hexagon could be an enormous tower

Quote(s) of the Day

Posted on September 5, 2018September 5, 2018 by S. Smith

Another from Taleb’s 2012 appropriately arrogant Antifragile, page 58-59:

“Our antifragilities have conditions. The frequency of stressors matters a bit. Humans tend to do better with acute than with chronic stressors, particularly when the former are followed by ample time for recovery, which allows the stressors to do their jobs as messengers. For instance, having an intense emotional shock from seeing a snake coming out of my keyboard or a vampire entering my room, followed by a period of soothing safety (with chamomile tea and baroque music) long enough for me to regain control of my emotions, would be beneficial for my health, provided of course that I manage to overcome the snake or vampire after an arduous, hopefully heroic fight and have a picture taken next to the dead predator. Such a stressor would be certainly better than the mild but continuous stress of a boss, mortgage, tax problems, guilt over procrastinating with one’s tax return, exam pressures, chores, emails to answer, forms to complete, daily commutes–things that make you feel trapped in life. In other words, the pressures brought about by civilization.In fact, neurobiologists show that the former type of stressor is necessary, the second harmful, for one’s health. For an idea of how harmful a low-level stressor without recovery can be, consider the so-called Chinese water torture: a drop continuously hitting the same spot on your head, never letting you recover.”

And a bonus nugget, and sentiment I can identify with, from page 63:

“If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.”

09/05/18 Overnight Links

Posted on September 5, 2018 by S. Smith

The Week: The death of local news

Reason: Tariffs on steel, aluminum, and lumber blamed for spiking home construction prices

LA Times: In a trade war, everyone loses

Techdirt: ‘Five Eyes’ surveillance agencies say encryption is good, except when it keeps them from looking at stuff

Washington Post: That time a President deported 1 million immigrants for “stealing” American jobs

TAC: Industrial poison: The third phase of an overdose boom

The Federalist: Is a toxic public school environment behind increases in child suicides?

National Review: Mr. President, the problem is FISA, not the lack of hearings on FISA warrants

High Times: Malaysian court sentences man to death for distributing free cannabis oil

FEE: Venezuela’s nightmare is a tragedy, but not a surprise

New documentary, The Modern Surveillance State

Quote of the Day

Posted on September 3, 2018 by S. Smith

This one from page 413 of Nassim Taleb’s highly readable 2012 book, Antifragile:

“…the more complicated the regulation, the more prone to arbitrage by insiders. This is another argument in favor of heuristics. Twenty-three hundred pages of regulation–something I can replace with Hammurabi’s Rule–will be a gold mine for former regulators. The incentive of a regulator is to have complex regulation. The insiders are the enemies of the less-is-more rule.

…the difference between the letter and the spirit of regulation is harder to detect in a complex system. The point is technical, but complex environments with nonlinearities are easier to game than linear ones with a small number of variables. The same applies to the gap between the legal and the ethical.

…in African countries, government officials get explicit bribes. In the United States they have the implicit, never mentioned, promise to go to work for a bank at a later date with a sinecure offering, say $5 million a year, if they are seen favorably by the industry. And the “regulations” of such activities are easily skirted.”

Taleb is describing regulatory capture, which is the main argument against government-created “regulation” of any particular industry. The officials staffing each regulatory agency are, in effect, future employees of the industries they’re currently tasked with regulating. If a politician is in need of an off-the-books payoff, he ‘writes’ a “New York Times best seller”, and gets his money, nice and laundered. These are the ones you see in bookstores with a picture of a middle-aged man or woman, crap-eating grin on their face, entitled some variation of “Honor and Duty”.

Taleb’s book is charming, creative, arrogant, and fun to read.