The good folks over at Catallarchy (yes, I refuse to call it Distributed Republic) have once again put together a great collection of essays on the horrors of communism to commemorate that most communist of holidays, May Day. I particularly recommend the excerpt from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and the videos on the intentional starving of the Ukranians and the deportation of the Kalmyks to Siberia linked here.
Farewell to Albert Hoffman, discoverer of LSD, who has died at the incredible age of 102. His discovery changed the world in ways previously unimaginable and still largely incommunicable. One thing that we certainly can say about Hoffman and his invention is that they made the world a far stranger place, which I for one greatly appreciate.
But not necessarily for protection. Syracuse professor Arthur Brooks points out some interesting correlations with gun ownership in the Wall Street Journal:
Who are all these gun owners? Are they the uneducated poor, left behind? It turns out they have the same level of formal education as nongun owners, on average. Furthermore, they earn 32% more per year than nonowners. Americans with guns are neither a small nor downtrodden group.
Nor are they “bitter.” In 2006, 36% of gun owners said they were “very happy,” while 9% were “not too happy.” Meanwhile, only 30% of people without guns were very happy, and 16% were not too happy.
In 1996, gun owners spent about 15% less of their time than nonowners feeling “outraged at something somebody had done.” It’s easy enough in certain precincts to caricature armed Americans as an angry and miserable fringe group. But it just isn’t true. The data say that the people in the approximately 40 million American households with guns are generally happier than those people in households that don’t have guns.
The gun-owning happiness gap exists on both sides of the political aisle. Gun-owning Republicans are more likely than nonowning Republicans to be very happy (46% to 37%). Democrats with guns are slightly likelier than Democrats without guns to be very happy as well (32% to 29%). Similarly, holding income constant, one still finds that gun owners are happiest.
Why are gun owners so happy? One plausible reason is a sense of self-reliance, in terms of self-defense or even in terms of the ability to hunt their own dinner.
Many studies over the years have shown that a belief in one’s control over the environment dramatically adds to happiness. Example: a famous study of elderly nursing home patients in the 1970s. It showed dramatic improvements in life satisfaction from elements of control as seemingly insignificant as being able to care for one’s plants.
But wait! There’s more! It also appears that gun owners are more likely to be all around good people than non-owners:
In 2002, they were more likely to give money to charity than people without guns (83% to 75%). This charity gap doesn’t reflect their somewhat higher incomes. Gun owners were also more likely to give in other ways, such as donating blood. Are gun owners unsentimental? In 2004, they were more likely than those without guns to strongly agree that they would “endure all things” for the one they loved (45% to 37%).
I don’t find any of this really surprising. Although I don’t personally own a gun, I grew up around lots of them, so I’ve always been perplexed by people that was somehow aberrant. And of course, these correlations don’t show that guns cause all these seemingly unrelated benefits, but they certainly don’t appear to hurt.
Link via Marginal Revolution.
So in case you hadn’t noticed, today is Earth Day. It’s not a holiday I really make a point of celebrating, but I had a couple of enviromental related points to make and this provides as good an opportunity as I’m going to get for a while.
First, did anyone else catch some of that Captain Planet marathon on Boomerang on Saturday? Holy shit, I had totally forgotten how hilariously bad that show was! The theme song was adequate reason for that show to be locked in a permanently sealed vault fully equipped with Ark of the Covenant style spirits to ensure that no one ever inflicts that show upon humanity, but that’s not even the half of it. The absolute most vexing part for me is that the villains on the show polluted for absolutely no reason. They weren’t even crude caricatures of industrialists whose gross negligence in pursuing profit led to oil spills or something of that sort. No, they were just pure evil, ruining the planet just for kicks. But really, what more can you expect from a show created by Ted Turner and that has Whoopi Goldberg voicing Gaia?
Second, has anyone else seen the two We Can Solve It ads about global warming featuring, respectively, Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson? If you haven’t, the gist is that although Pelosi and Gingrich or Sharpton and Robertson disagree on almost everything, they do agree that we need to do more to stop global warming. Am I the only one who thinks this is incredibly bad marketing. I mean, I think global warming could be a very serious problem (that being said, we need to make sure our solution isn’t worse than the problem itself–see ethanol), but when I hear that Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson agree on anything it makes me inclined to reject it in the strongest possible terms. That may just be me, but I doubt it.
But not necessarily for protection or sport. Syracuse professor Arthur Brooks points out a number of interesting correlations with gun ownership in the Wall Street Journal:
Who are all these gun owners? Are they the uneducated poor, left behind? It turns out they have the same level of formal education as nongun owners, on average. Furthermore, they earn 32% more per year than nonowners. Americans with guns are neither a small nor downtrodden group.
Nor are they “bitter.” In 2006, 36% of gun owners said they were “very happy,” while 9% were “not too happy.” Meanwhile, only 30% of people without guns were very happy, and 16% were not too happy.
In 1996, gun owners spent about 15% less of their time than nonowners feeling “outraged at something somebody had done.” It’s easy enough in certain precincts to caricature armed Americans as an angry and miserable fringe group. But it just isn’t true. The data say that the people in the approximately 40 million American households with guns are generally happier than those people in households that don’t have guns.
The gun-owning happiness gap exists on both sides of the political aisle. Gun-owning Republicans are more likely than nonowning Republicans to be very happy (46% to 37%). Democrats with guns are slightly likelier than Democrats without guns to be very happy as well (32% to 29%). Similarly, holding income constant, one still finds that gun owners are happiest.
Why are gun owners so happy? One plausible reason is a sense of self-reliance, in terms of self-defense or even in terms of the ability to hunt their own dinner.
Many studies over the years have shown that a belief in one’s control over the environment dramatically adds to happiness. Example: a famous study of elderly nursing home patients in the 1970s. It showed dramatic improvements in life satisfaction from elements of control as seemingly insignificant as being able to care for one’s plants.
But wait! There’s more! Gun owners also appear to be all-around better people than non-owners:
In 2002, they were more likely to give money to charity than people without guns (83% to 75%). This charity gap doesn’t reflect their somewhat higher incomes. Gun owners were also more likely to give in other ways, such as donating blood. Are gun owners unsentimental? In 2004, they were more likely than those without guns to strongly agree that they would “endure all things” for the one they loved (45% to 37%).
I don’t find any of this surrprising because while I do not currently own a gun, I grew up around lots of them, so I’ve always been far more perplexed by people who think of gun owners as somehow deviant. Of course, none of these correlations show that guns cause all these external benefits, but they certainly don’t seem to hurt.
Link from Marginal Revolution.
No, this post has nothing to do with Robert Mugabe, as the title might suggest, but you will see the connection momentarily. The New York Times Magazine has a lengthy article up on the potentially huge role cellphones can play in ending global poverty. I’ll confess that I haven’t read the whole article. However, what I have read has been thoroughly interesting, but give that I’ve written about some of these possibilities for ending povery before, I want to touch on the idea that cellphones offer a radically new–and almost completely private–system of banking. From the article:
During a 2006 field study in Uganda, Chipchase and his colleagues stumbled upon an innovative use of the shared village phone, a practice called sente. Ugandans are using prepaid airtime as a way of transferring money from place to place, something that’s especially important to those who do not use banks. Someone working in Kampala, for instance, who wishes to send the equivalent of $5 back to his mother in a village will buy a $5 prepaid airtime card, but rather than entering the code into his own phone, he will call the village phone operator (“phone ladies” often run their businesses from small kiosks) and read the code to her. She then uses the airtime for her phone and completes the transaction by giving the man’s mother the money, minus a small commission. “It’s a rather ingenious practice,” Chipchase says, “an example of grass-roots innovation, in which people create new uses for technology based on need.”
It’s also the precursor to a potentially widespread formalized system of mobile banking. Already companies like Wizzit, in South Africa, and GCash, in the Philippines, have started programs that allow customers to use their phones to store cash credits transferred from another phone or purchased through a post office, phone-kiosk operator or other licensed operator. With their phones, they can then make purchases and payments or withdraw cash as needed. Hammond of the World Resources Institute predicts that mobile banking will bring huge numbers of previously excluded people into the formal economy quickly, simply because the latent demand for such services is so great, especially among the rural poor. This bodes well for cellphone companies, he says, since owning a phone will suddenly have more value than sharing a village phone. “If you’re in Hanoi after midnight,” Hammond says, “the streets are absolutely clogged with motorbikes piled with produce. They give their produce to the guy who runs a vegetable stall, and they go home. How do they get paid? They get paid the next time they come to town, which could be a month or two later. You have to hope you can find the stall guy again and that he remembers what he sold. But what if you could get paid the next day on your mobile phone? Would you care what that mobile costs? I don’t think so.”
In February of last year, when Vodafone rolled out its M-Pesa mobile-banking program in Kenya, it aimed to add 200,000 new customers in the first year but got them within a month. One year later, M-Pesa has 1.6 million subscribers, and Vodafone is now set to open mobile-banking enterprises in a number of other countries, including Tanzania and India. “Look, microfinance is great; [Grameeen Bank founder Mohammed] Yunus deserves his sainthood,” Hammond says. “But after 30 years, there are only 90 million microfinance customers. I’m predicting that mobile-phone banking will add a billion banking customers to the system in five years. That’s how big it is.”
This could actually serve as a bulwark against inflation in the countries that have central banks gone wild (Now, I’m looking at you, Zimbabwe). I do expect the price of cellphone minutes to continue falling but not at anything like the value of money in a hyperinflation situation. Also, if you want to change the minutes back into cash, you once again run into the problem of inflation, but you might be able to change it into a different currency, or it may be unnecessary to change the minutes back into currency at all if they are traded widely enough. All in all, this is a wonderful development for people who live in underdeveloped and/or horribly governed countries.
Link from Hit and Run.
This Onion video about al-Qaeda calling 9/11 conspiracy theories ridiculous brings up a little explored aspect of the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement: it’s premises are incredibly Amero-centric and subtly anti-Muslim. I’ve interacted with a few of these people who believe that the federal government or some major corporations must have ordered the destruction of the World Trade Centers, and they usually seem to believe this at least in part because they see the American government as so overwhelmingly powerful, and the terrorists as so undeniably ragtag that it is impossible for them to conceive that the latter could ever land a blow against the former.
But really this is just another form of American exceptionalism, as ugly and ignorant as that of the neoconservatives who urged us to go to war in Iraq believing that because of America’s virtue, we could radically transform the Middle East. The 9/11 Truther must believe the government to be so powerful and competent that there is essentially no such thing as a mistake, which I think is crazy enough to not warrant further comment. But the concomitant belief is just as important if less obvious: they implicitly believe that the Muslims who perpetrated the attacks could not have possibly done so because they were too small, too unorganized, and too poor compared to the mighty United States. In short, it denies the agency of the those outside our culture, the other.
It may be simple and reassuring to believe that only the actions of fellow Americans–even if sinister–can effect your life, but the world is a far more complicated place than that, so you better get used to it.
New proposals are being put forward by the Bush administration for serious financial regulation changes. The proposals would give even more power to the Federal Reserve, assigning a role of “market stability regulator” to the body. I guess giving more power to the organization that is responsible for much of our financial turmoil will somehow help solve the problem? Instead of turning towards more central planning, why not abolish the Fed and let the free market work?
It looks like Iraq is getting hit by yet another shitstorm–not that the place has been anything close to safe over the last eight months, but the violence seems to ratcheting back up. From CNN:
Fighting between Iraqi government troops and what officials call rogue or outlaw members of Shiite militias has spread through southern Iraq’s Shiite heartland to Baghdad since the launch of a government crackdown in Basra on Tuesday.
Three days of fighting have left more than 100 Iraqis dead.
Casualty figures from Basra weren’t available Thursday, but the number of deaths is expected to rise from the 40 to 50 reported Wednesday.
The fighting threatens to unravel a seven-month cease-fire by al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army….
Iraq’s Interior Ministry said mortar rounds killed one person and wounded four in the city’s central Karrada district on Thursday evening, and the ministry’s own compound was hit by one shell, wounding seven police officers.
Also Thursday in Baghdad, dozens of gunmen kidnapped the spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, Tahseen Sheikhly. Three of his guards were killed and his house burned in the attack, which an Interior Ministry official said was carried out by “outlaws,” a reference to al-Sadr’s militia.
Over the last eight months to a year, countless pundits have credited the Surge with bringing down violence, particularly violence by Sunni terrorists and insurgents, in Iraq. There is some truth to this, but I think the two primary factors at play are Sunni leaders desire to eliminate indiscriminate terrorists from their midsts and the Shia victory in the massive ethnic cleansing and miniature civil war that followed the destruction of the Golden Mosque by a terrorist’s bomb.
So what may be happening now is the Shia–no longer united against the Sunnis–are free to pursue intra-religious power struggles as they did from early 2004 to early 2006. If this is true, it is almost assuredly worse for the American military than dealing with the Sunnis ever was. For one, the Shia are roughly 60% of Iraq’s population to the Sunni Arabs 20%. But the other problem as I see it is that there are basically no American troops in southern Iraq (where the Shia predominate) and there haven’t been since practically the beginning of this thing. That area has always belonged to the British, and they will be leaving in the near future.
So what happens if southern Iraq explodes with intra-Shia violence? Does the military shift troops to the unfamiliar territory of Basra? That seems highly problematic as it would clear the path for a return of the Sunni insurgency. Does it continue to pursue the current strategy? Unlikely because high levels of intra-Shia violence will destroy any possibility from some semblance of democratic Iraqi goverment for a long while. It’s quite the predicament, and I sure hope no one ever has to face it, but if I were a betting man–and I am–I would bet that something like this will happen within the next year.
Mike Gravel, who you might remember for his cantankerous tirades against the other Democratic candidates and their pro-war positions at the presidential debates last summer, is now seeking the presidential nomination of, wait for it, the Libertarian Party. I’m not saying Gravel doesn’t have some libertarian qualities, but no libertarian (or even Libertarian) I’ve ever known has advocated socializing health care and paying for it with a national sales tax. It’s also more than a little unusual for an LP presidential candidate to chastise the Democratic Party for “no longer [being] the party of FDR.” (Usually, you don’t hear a libertarian praise any Democratic presidents past Grover Cleveland.)
Oh well. This could be another unifying thread between the left and libertarians, which I think, for the most part, is a good thing. Or, considerably less likely, Gravel could lead a leftist takeover of the LP, for whatever that’s worth. Or, most likely, the whole thing will disappear like a fart in the wind. But for the time being, I for one welcome our new Alaskan ally.
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