Gaza and Afghanistan, a common attitude

The actions of Israel against the aid flotilla headed to Gaza should be no great surprise. If you accept enough premises, you can justify almost any conclusion. The Zionist premise is that God gave them Palestine and the non-Jewish elements are there on sufferance. They cannot accept the notion of large numbers of people who hate them occupying much of Palestine and governing themselves. So they accept any method to defeat this result.

In fact, since the first establishment of a Zionist state in an Arab region, this outcome has been pretty much inevitable. The Palestinians are going to hate them and there are too many to drive away. Eventually, they will have a state and they will deeply hate Israel, even if they decide they need to do business.

Now consider Afghanistan. We refuse to contemplate a country governed by people who once allowed Osama bin Laden to hang out, so we try to change the country through war even though this won't work. We assume that given enough time, money, and American knowhow, anything is possible. All the evidence to the contrary will not change our leaders' minds.

The American view of nuclear weapons is going to be very difficult to sell in the UN now. Everybody knows Israel already has them. We want everyone to view Iran as the worst possible country in the Middle East to have nuclear weapons. Today, do we think this is going to fly?

We are living with North Korea's having nukes. We've lived almost 50 years with China having them. Pakistan and India live with the fact that each of them have them. Do we want Iran to have nukes? Of course not. Is it tolerable? Of course it is, and we will soon need to tolerate it.

David Brooks Scores Again

In his latest essay, David Brooks is at his best, looking at the nature of risk management in a complex world. He offers some advice on directions we should collectively take. I'd like to think we will, but I don't.

Mexicans Boycott Arizona. Not a problem.

There appears to be a movement by Mexican musicians to boycott performances in Arizona. I don't think they're getting the message. The majority of Arizonans will not miss them. And, in fact, if they can persuade their fellow Mexicans to stay out of Arizona, the citizens of Arizona are likely to feel that they got the job done.

Arizona police are not going to harass everyone who looks Hispanic. If you are legitimately in Arizona, you probably speak decent English. If you look Mexican and don't speak English and have no paperwork, there's a damned good chance you're illegal.

When The Free Market Isn't Enough

The news the BP chose a riskier but cheaper approach to their well shouldn't be a shock. The world works on the sum of individual decisions, and individuals know more about what they are doing than the higher bosses, let alone investors. So when people drilling in the deep ocean look at decades of success, they will ask themselves whether it's more profitable for themselves if they cut corners.

Not whether it's better for the public, because that's abstract. What's concrete is that if you do a job for another year in a manner that has been successful for 20 years, you'll get paid. If you insist on safety measures that nobody understands the need for, you may get fired. And if you guess wrong, you can take your savings and go to Montana.

But would regulation have prevented the blowout? Is it likely that regulators will know what all the issues are, let alone the appropriate level of safety required? Unlikely.

At the end of the day, the lessons is mostly that this is a very uncertain world, where doing things on a large scale must involve large risks and we should prepare ourselves for mishaps. The lesson the most people are likely to take away is unfortunately that we should stop drilling in deep water.

Dump Potiowsky

I've been watching the pattern of Oregon state tax revenue forecasts ever since the first time I ran for the Lane Community College Board. The person in charge for most of that time, except for an interim where he went back to academia, has been Tom Potiowsky. If nothing else, my observations have convinced me that Oregon should be cutting waste and inefficiency in order to balance the budget, starting by firing Mr. Potiowsky.

Yesterday, he announced that the revenue forecast for 2009-2010 was being reduced by a half billion bucks from what he had said three months earlier. He said this in an environment of no major surprises. No new flu epidemics. No wars or terrorist attacks. Nothing. But after three months, critically the three months during which the legislature went home thinking they'd done their job, the forecast plummets.

The problem is that the state's Democrats will spend almost every nickel that isn't nailed down, and the Republicans are so distrustful that rather than trying to nail much down, they prefer to ship it back to the taxpayers, especially since this earns them political points. A reasonable state operation would, after 150 years, have set aside enough reserves that it could proceed calmly through a biennium, spending what it estimated and handling noise in the revenue stream with reserves.

But this isn't going to happen. Nevertheless, if we're going to act stupidly we might as well save money. Let's get rid of the state economist and simply project Oregon's revenues to vary from the previous biennium by the average amount that CA and WA are estimating their own changes. I don't think we can do any worse, and it irritates me to think that our taxes in future years will be spent covering the amount of Potiowsky's PERS pension that we're not currently funding.

Palin Makes Inteligent Support Difficult

On a day when Sarah Palin said something rare that I could support, namely that Highland Park IL is being stupid in not sending its girls basketball team to play a game in Arizona due to that state's law on illegal immigrants, she follows up with nonsense.

Noting the school has allowed student trips to China, Palin questioned whether school officials knew “how they treat women in China.”

Women? China denies many freedoms to its citizens, but I hadn't heard anything about women in particular. The only thing I can think is that she is referring to the country's aggressive campaign to limit the size of families.

China has one and a third billion people and a very urgent need to cap that. Should we be pleased if they let matters run their course and went for two billion?

A reasonable comment would have been that China suppresses its ethnic minorities, which would be a good analogy with Arizona. Instead, she shows that she is less opposed to curtailing human rights than birth control. She still stops my list of dangerous politicians.

The Intractable Greek Problem

Everybody is getting into the act, with headlines that joke about Greek gods and phrases like "Acropolis Now." OK, the parody of "Apocalypse Now" is not new, but the meaning is.

Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, bemoans the fact that the Greeks, by joining the eurozone, gave up the freedom to solve their crisis by devaluing the currency. He seemed to suggest that all they got in return was some prestige, which wasn't worth what they gave up.

But when they gave up the right to "fix" their economy with devaluation, they gave international investors the confidence to buy their government bonds at rates comparable to what would be charged Germany. The assumption was that the return on such bonds would be safe because the government could neither devalue nor default. Greeks saved a ton on interest.

However, the Greeks lied and cheated. They never qualified for membership without cooking the books and they have run deficits that they hid.

The technique which Krugman thinks so highly of is one that screws the international investors, who eventually get back their money in Greek currency but it's worth less than when they loaned it.

I don't see the exit plan. Loaning Greece money in euros, while the economy deflates, means that later they won't be able to repay the principal. Greece has a bloated civil service with cushy retirement plans. They need a more active private sector producing goods and services to be sold to foreigners, but this isn't likely to happen during the forthcoming austerity period. Whatever happens, it's likely to be ugly.