Thomas Frank spanked by Colbert

Posted by Marc Hodak on August 9, 2008 under Politics | Comments are off for this article

Thomas Frank can’t even argue well against a faux conservative.

What chance would he have against a real one?

The FBI’s leaky case against Ivins

Posted by Marc Hodak on August 6, 2008 under Scandal | Comments are off for this article

Ivin’s suicide has been viewed from two distinct perspectives. The government stenographers posing as a free press, dutifully typing up the selected FBI leaks provided by their sources would have us all breathing a sigh of relief; the FBI cracked this case, and saved us from the domestic terrorist. The inquisitive, skeptical press would have us reserve judgment, which is what civilized people do, even if the government hadn’t given us every possible reason to be skeptical of their claims.

The FBI says they will release the evidence shortly. I’ll believe it when I see it. Or not.

Update: WaPo is finally allowing some expression of skepticism. Touch a hot stove enough times, you start to get the idea, I guess.

“We’re against killing any animals…except innocent humans”

Posted by Marc Hodak on August 4, 2008 under Revealed preference | 2 Comments to Read

In case you haven’t heard this before, it’s the serious, bona fide position of the Animal Liberation Front, a group that is legitimately referred to as domestic terrorists.

They or their compatriots firebombed the home of a UCSC researcher while he, his wife, and two children were asleep. The family had to escape from an upstairs window. The Mercury News picks up from here:

While a spokesman said he didn’t know who committed the act, the Woodland Hills-based Animal Liberation Front called the attacks a “necessary” act, just like those who fought against civil rights injustices. Spokesman Dr. Jerry Vlasak showed no remorse for the family or children who were targeted.

“If their father is willing to continue risking his livelihood in order to continue chopping up animals in a laboratory than his children are old enough to recognize the consequences,” said Vlasak, a former animal researcher who is now a trauma surgeon. “This guy knows what he is doing. He knows that every day that he goes into the laboratory and hurts animals that it is unreasonable not to expect consequences.”

The article then captures the appropriate response to such a rant:

Clark, the Santa Cruz police captain, said it was “unconscionable” for anyone to defend such acts: “To put this on par with any of the human rights issues is an absolute insult to the integrity of the people who fought and went through the human rights movement. This is what people do when they have an inability to articulate their point in any constructive way. They resort to primal acts of violence. Any reasonable person would need a logic transplant to begin to understand this level of degraded thinking.”

I’m with the police on this one.

The media, on the other hand, are due for a correction. This person they generously refer to in the present tense as a “trauma surgeon” is no such thing. He has apparently not been employable as any kind of doctor since 1998. Even the PCRM, a fairly radical, but non-violent, animal rights group, distances itself from Vlasak.

The GM Model

Posted by Marc Hodak on August 2, 2008 under Economics | Comments are off for this article

There’s a lot of clucking about GM’s $15.5 billion loss. (That may sound like a lot of golf balls, but it understates the true level of value destruction when one accounts for the opportunity cost of equity.) There seems to be two big questions being debated about all this: (a) whose fault is it? and (b) will GM survive?

Easy one first: GM will fail. It’s not 50% in 10 years. It’s 100% in less than five. In fact, GM has been economically bankrupt for nearly a decade, with liabilities far exceeding productive assets; it simply hasn’t run out of cash yet. Yet.

As to fault, the press seems to be geared entirely as if their readers want to know who to blame. Well, the leading contenders for villain in this game are management and the unions, primarily the UAW. And the correct answer is…

Both. Unions were the irrational response to irrational management in the late 1930s. Once in, the unions steadily undermined GM’s productivity–and their profits–especially, once they were faced with essentially non-union competition. Reduced profits meant cost cutting. Cost cutting meant reduced quality. No, I don’t mean just “Monday morning cars,” although that didn’t help. I mean lower quality everything, including management. GM eventually reached a point where it wasn’t exactly attracting the best and the brightest. Their retarded management was constrained by their retarding union, and the problem became self-reinforcing. GM became an idiocracy.

What we are seeing today is the logical end of a union that didn’t give a damn about the future of the company that hired them. Management, who was charged with fighting for the shareholders, had their weapons taken away from them by the Wagner Act, and replaced with squirt guns and rubber knives. At a point, management simply said, “Screw it. It ain’t worth it.” What became a pointless fight with shareholders in the cross-hairs ended up as a murder-suicide. Once the trajectory became clear, the shareholders bailed out. There was no one left to hurt but future managers and workers. Incumbents on both sides agreed on all kinds of promises that couldn’t be met.

Here we are.