North Texas Nonconformist

A nice summary of the various resentments that fuel authoritarian populism in the United States in 2010...

In which he explains, among other things, why the current GOP campaign of obstructionism on legislative ideas from the Obama administration is perfectly sensible from their perspective, even though logically it is a hypocritical pile of cack...
As Lakoff explains, discussing GOP hypocrisy over Medicare program spending:

The highest conservative value is preserving and empowering their moral system itself. Medicare is anathema to their moral system — a fundamental insult. It violates free market principles and gives people things they haven’t all earned. It is a system where some people are paying —God forbid! — for the medical care of others. For them, Medicare itself is immoral on a grand scale, a fundamental moral issue far more important than any minor proposal for “modest cost savings.” I’m sorry to report it, but that is how conservatives are making use of real reason, and exploiting the fact that so many liberals think it’s contradictory.

I disagree with Lakoff on his point somewhat. I know the GOP position is hypocritical and totally contradictory. Ditto the stunning GOP hypocrisy over stimulus funds, where politicians who voted against the whole stimulus package are now falling over themselves to obtain (and claim the credit for) stimulus funds directed to their districts or states. Anybody with more than half a functioning brain can deduce this. However, as has been pointed out by many other folks, politicians almost never score highly on their ability to be shamed when inconsistencies between their words and deeds are pointed out. Their normal response is to act like they never heard anybody pointing this out.
However, Lakoff once again returns to one of his favorite themes about framing:

Every time a liberal goes over a conservative proposal giving evidence negating conservative ideas one by one, he or she is activating the conservative ideas in the brains of his audience. The proper response is to start with your own ideas, framed to fit what you really believe.

I always remember Frank Zappa's testimony in 1986 before the PMRC, where he essentially ignored all of the "protect the children" framing of the (incredibly stupid and dangerous) PMRC proposals to label music with what was considered "explicit content", and also added in his own significant dash of ridicule. He also debated proponents of PMRC on "Crossfire" and once again ignored their framing, instead substituting his own derived from the First Amendment. More recently Jesse Ventura destroyed proponents of torture by blowing past their "ticking bomb" scenarios and other frames and focussing on the blunt realities that (a) torture is illegal under US and international law, and (b) torture is useless for obtaining useful information. Once again, he simply steamrollered the frames of the questioners and substituted his own. This is the approach that progressives and libertarians need to be taking when facing the sort of pernicious framing that regressives and authoritarians engage in - a mixture of different framing and ridicule where the ideas and philosophies being expounded deserve it.

Remember the sternly-worded copyright notice that the NFL always shows during games? That notice is a BS try-on, when compared to current US copyright law. This article explains why the notices are, in part, legal bluster.
The situation is similar to "shrink wrap" software license agreements first used in the 1980's. I remember an incident at one of my employers in 1984 when we handed our in-house lawyer the Software License Agreement that Lotus Development Corporation wanted us to sign in order to use Lotus 1-2-3, and asked him to review it. Several days later, he handed it back to my manager. He had red-lined two thirds of the clauses in the document with comments in the margins such as "try-on", "rubbish", and "unenforceable". Asked by my manager whether we should sign it anyway, his response was "go ahead. Most of the clauses will be laughed out of court if there is ever any dispute". We signed and never had any issues. (In addition to being full of legal bluster, such a contract would probably be regarded in most jurisdiction as a contract of adhesion, making it very difficult to enforce in any case.)

One thing I am struggling with is how a supposedly smart and highly successful person like Carly Fiorina is managing to run a Senate campaign in California without engaging in some basic fact-checking. Does this woman have no sensible informed people working for her?

The latest bloviations by Gov. Rick Perry about secession may be gold ole' crowd-pleasing stuff, but there is the pesky matter of reality, which sooner or later intervenes when you think about this subject for more than about 90 seconds.
I tried discussing the idea of Texas secession with a secessionist about 10 years ago ago via email. It was a very frustrating conversation, because while he insisted that Texas had the right to secede, he could not point to any verbiage anywhere defining a process for secession from the Union. The U.S. Constitution lays down no process for secession. That's not to say it can't be done, but there is no Application To Secede that a state can fill out, take to Washington D.C. and get processed. The guy I was debating with claimed that Texas has the right to succeed under its accession agreement, but that agreement as far as I know says nothing about secession. After a while the debate fizzled out as I realized that we lived in different universes.
My understanding is that talk in the 1990's by the Partie Quebecois concerning secession for Quebec was stopped quite quickly when the President of Canada at the time, Brian Mulroney, informed the PQ that if Quebec wanted to secede, that they would also have to assume their pro rata share of the Canadian National Debt. That sort of reality check tends to quieten rooms in a hurry...
The bad news is that it doesn't matter whether you do it on population or land area, Texas will have a very large bill to pay if it wants to secede and carry a share of the US national debt. Of course, the secessionists will probably argue that they should not have to carry any of the debt because Those Nasty Other States ran up the tab...
The secession of Texas is likely going to result in a net fiscal loss for the USA, since the last available numbers from 2005 show that Texas is a net contributor to the Federal Government, taking $0.94 for every $1.00 it pays the Federal Government. However, a lot of military bases and locations in Texas will most probably be closed, or Texas will have to assume them and pay for them (this could mean goodbye to large sources of employment like Fort Hood, folks).
There will be other structural changes resulting from Texas leaving the Union. It is unclear to me how many creative and knowledge workers from the Austin and Dallas areas will stay. Many of them may move back to the rest of the USA, especially if the governance of the newly independent country of Texas is dominated by the sort of narrow-minded, mean-spirited, Christianist people that appear to be dominant in the current political processes and governance of Texas. This is a state whose Board of Education is currently converting itself to a laughing stock, there are massive issues with jurisprudence and the judicial system, and the state has trouble balancing its books every year, partly because there is no state income tax. Only tax havens tend to be able to avoid income taxes in the rest of the world, and I do not see Texas, which has a large land area which requires a lot of infrastructure to provision, can avoid The Subject That Must Not Be Mentioned if it tries to become an independent country. There is also the potentially crippling expense of border security. I haven't gotten out my ruler, but the length of the borders between Texas and the rest of the USA, plus the length of the border with Mexico, is going to add up to one hell of a border security challenge. As this official page shows, the length of the borders from the new country of Texas to the USA and Mexico is a sobering number (if you take the smaller published number) and a frightening number (if you go with the larger number).

As you may have noticed, I don't have much time for the mainstream media in the modern USA. I don't watch the network news programs, since they are tediously superficial and focussed on Stuff That Looks Interesting instead of Things That Are Actually Important. They are also populated by journalists and talking heads who clearly believe that fundamental activities like fact-checking, asking probing questions, and calling interviewees on bullshit answers are really quite optional, especially if the interviewee is a Famous Person.
However, in amongst the distorted, superficial and mostly useless dross, one does occasionally find a useful article. Today, I came across an example of same; a polite but pointed identification of the main problem facing the USA from Jacob Weisberg, writing in Newsweek.
Weisberg starts as he means to go on:

Anybody who says you can't have it both ways hasn't been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the economic stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but polls reflect something more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, and other problems.

In other words, like many modern electorates, We The People (a profound phrase worth remembering) want to have our cake and eat it, and politicians, being the shrewd folks that they are, realized this many moons ago and are quite happy to go along with this fundamentally illogical worldview.
As Weisberg correctly notes:

At the root of this contradiction is our national-characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix our problems. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, according to CNN. But we love government in the particular: even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them.

This backs up my slightly cynical view that many people in the USA are fans of Big Government, as long as the government spends money on Stuff They Like. When the government spends money on Stuff They Don't Like, they suddenly become fans of Small Government.
As Weisberg correctly notes:

The politicians thriving at the moment are those best able to call for the impossible with a straight face.
...Increasingly, the crucial distinction is between the minority of serious politicians on either side who are prepared to speak frankly about our choices and the majority who indulge the public's delusions.

Given that the vast majority of representatives of the two major parties are still pandering to the mainstream electorate delusions, the short-term outlook for an improvement in the quality of governance in the USA is not good. The electorate as a whole needs to stop expecting contradictory things from government. As I tend to say in conversation, the USA needs to decide what it wants to be when it grows up.

On June 8th 1924, two members of the British Mount Everest Expedition, George Mallory and Sandy Irvine left their camp high on Mount Everest to attempt to reach the summit of the world's tallest mountain. They never made it back to camp, both men disappeared, after being briefly sighted on the ascent, and were presumed dead. Nobody knew what had happened to them, including whether they had actually made it to the summit of Everest. The general assumption was that they had perished on the ascent.
After persistent alleged sightings over the years, following the first officially recorded ascent of Everest in 1953 by Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, the body of George Mallory was finally located in 1999. However, no trace has been seen of the body of Sandy Irvine. Mallory's body carried no camera, but a photo that he was going to deposit at the summit if the two men succeeded in their ascent was not found on his body, which was intact and well-preserved. An extensive search of the area around Mallory's body showed no traces of Sandy Irvine.
However, a recent detail and searching examination of aerial photos of Mount Everest has turned up an artifact which may be the body of Sandy Irvine. The emphasis is on the word "may", since only an expedition to the site will reveal if this is a breakthrough or another false lead.
The Holy Grail that experts will be searching for, in addition to finding Irvine's body and bringing closure for his remaining relatives, is whether they can locate one or both of the two cameras that Irvine carried on his person. Any photographic film that is preserved enough to be developed might show if Mallory and Irvine actually reached the summit of Everest.

This article from James Allen explains very factually what is happening with StefanGP, the team that has no Formula 1 grid slot for 2010, but is acting for all the world as if it does:

“Stefan Grand Prix writes history! SGP becomes the first team in F1 history who did send a 40 foot container full of equipment to the race in Bahrain without having entry for 2010 season!” said a statement.

Leaving aside the slight English roughness, this is one of the great unrealized stories of the 2010 season. Why would a team that has no F1 entry (it was refused last Summer, and that remains the case despite threats of legal action by the team at the time) be spending millions of dollars on a car, freight, personnel etc. to test at a faraway circuit?
The answer may partly lie in the rumors that Campos Meta, one of the contracted teams, does not have the money to even build its car for 2010, much less go racing. Rumor has it that Tony Texeira, the CEO of A1GP, has already offered to buy the team off of Adrian Campos. However, that is not likely to be greeted with cheers inside Formula 1, since A1GP is insolvent and apparently owes Ferrari (the engine supplier for the series) a seven figure dollar amount.
Part of the full answer may lie in the behaviour of Toyota in all of this. It is already known that the StefanGP car (chassis and transmission) is the design that Toyota would have raced in 2010 as the TF110, had they not decided last year to withdraw from F1. Now there are rumours that one of the StefanGP drivers will be Kazuki Nakajima, who was a Toyota-supported driver at Williams GP for the last 2 seasons. In addition, Toyota is known to be providing all sorts of engineering support to StefanG, including supplying the engine, which is essentially the Toyota F1 engine from last year, rebadged.
There is a thread on the unfolding story here and here.
All of this leaves me wondering whether Toyota has decided to keep a presence in F1 in case they want to return when the economics make sense for them to return. This is similar to Honda, who withdrew from F1 in the early 90's, but retained an engineering presence via their Mugen subsidiary, and Renault, who withdrew after 1997, but retained an indirect engine supply presence via their Mecachrome subsidiary. Another factor to consider is that Toyota may have signed the post-FOTA contractual agreement to compete in F1 until the end of 2012, in which case they would have faced stiff contractual penalties for withdrawing. Their supply of resources to StefanGP may be a way of avoiding litigation.
The full answer, as is always the case in F1, is probably not simple. It is probably a combination of three or more of the following reasons:

1. StefanGP may have had a credible threat to go to the EU over the F1 team selection process from 2009. There were numerous complaints from other prospective entrants such as ProDrive that the FIA was demanding all sorts of concessions from applicants (including, in one case, that all new teams had to sign an engine supply deal with Cosworth). This might well have been frowned upon by the EU.
2. Toyota wants to avoid litigation resulting from their withdrawal from F1 after signing the new commercial agreement.
3. Toyota wants to keep its seat warm in F1, in case it decides to return in 2-3 years' time. Providing support to another team would be an ideal way to do this at arms length, to at least maintain presence and contacts within the sport.
4. There is a genuine belief that Campos Meta (at least) will not be able to compete in F1 in 2010 because of lack of money. StefanGP would be an ideal short-term replacement

Against this, it must be pointed out that the StefanGP team will be short of track time even if they do get an entry, and even if the FIA allows them to join after the start of the 2010 season. The team does not currently have an announced tyre contract with Bridgestone, so it is not even clear what tyres they would use for testing, although, as a team not entered in the 2010 championship, they would not be bound by the current F1 testing restrictions, which might make them attractive to either Bridgestone (for extra tyre testing) or even to a new tyre supplier for 2011 and beyond.
There is also evidence that the Toyota F1 engine was probably the weakest powerplant last year in terms of horsepower, and being an engine that is already homologated, Toyota cannot rework its design except in a very limited way with the agreement of other suppliers to address reliability concerns. It is therefore unlikely that StefanGP would be anything other than a grid-filler team, at least in the first season.
However, this current series of events is proof that in F1, nothing is ever simple...

Ridley Balko writes in Reason magazine about the egregious abuse of asset forfeiture laws in the modern USA. I previously blogged about one amazing abuse of the system in Tenaha TX.