Minor Thoughts from me to you

Many people are blaming the mortgage crash on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act -- the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Biley Act. But did Gramm-Leach-Bliley cause the crash? I don't think so.

First, Glass-Steagall created a "wall of separation" between investment banking and commercial banking. Investment banks create and sell securities in the investment markets. Commercial banks earn money by offering deposits and making loans (home, auto, business, etc). Glass-Steagall said that commercial banks couldn't offer securities in the investment markets and investment banks couldn't offer loans or deposit accounts.

The law had been steadily weakened before being repealed:

The 1933 Glass-Steagal Act that prohibited commercial banks from owning investment banks, and vice versa, had been steadily weakened since the 70s by an increasingly diverse and complex new financial reality. Waivers from regulators for merger became routine and the 1998 merger between Travelers and Citigroup functionally repealed the law. Gramm-Leach-Bliley only put a de jure stamp of approval on a de facto regulatory framework.

Second, how did allowing a merger between investment banks and commercial banks cause the crisis? Investment banks were primarily buying mortgages from commercial banks. Commercial banks weren't creating the mortgage backed securities, they were selling mortgages to investment banks who then created the securities.

The rest of the previous link offers more details:

In fact, the evidence so far shows that Gramm-Leach-Bliley has helped soften the blow to taxpayers by allowing commercial banks to take over trouble investment firms. Just look at which organization's have failed:

• Bear Stearns was an investment bank before it was sold to JP Morgan Chase (which includes a commercial bank).
• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were government sponsored entities before the government bought them.
• Lehman Brothers was an investment bank before it want bankrupt.
• Merrill Lynch was an investment bank befor it was sold to Bank of America (which is a commercial bank).
• AIG is an insurance company with no commercial banking division.

Remember, Glass-Steagal was passed to protect commercial banks from failure by forbidding them from investment bank practices like trading in securities and underwriting stocks and bonds. As you can see above non of the failed institutions are commercial banks that got in trouble through risky investment banking. Instead, it is the commercial banks that are providing some stability to the system by purchasing troubled investment banks. Without Gramm-Leach-Bliley they would not even be allowed to technically do this.

Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen say the same thing, but both include links to scholarly sources and papers to back up their point. Megan McArdle also dubunks this myth and includes these interesting notes:

They can't say it more directly because it's moronic. Even if you ignore the economic history indicating that Glass-Steagall didn't help the crisis it was meant to solve--even if you assume, arguendo, that the repeal was a bad idea--there's simply no logical reason to believe it had anything to do with the current mess.

Securitization was not introduced in the 1990s; it was invented in the 1970s and became popular in the 1980s, as chronicled in Liar's Poker. (As an aside, if you haven't read it, you really must. Especially now).

GLB had nothing to do with either lending standards at commercial banks, or leverage ratios at broker-dealers, the two most plausible candidates for regulatory failure here.

Most importantly, commercial banks are not the main problems. If Glass-Steagall's repeal had meaningfully contributed to this crisis, we should see the failures concentrated among megabanks where speculation put deposits at risk. Instead we see the exact opposite: the failures are among either commercial banks with no significant investment arm (Washington Mutual, Countrywide), or standalone investment banks. It is the diversified financial institutions that are riding to the rescue.

Many people can agree that abortion is a bad thing. Many people can agree that we should have fewer abortions in the world. But how can we reduce the number of abortions?

There are two main methods: social and legal.

How can we work socially to reduce abortions? I asked: why do women have abortions? The Guttmacher Institute offers some clues:

• Fifty percent of U.S. women obtaining abortions are younger than 25: Women aged 20-24 obtain 33% of all abortions, and teenagers obtain 17%.

• Women who have never married obtain two-thirds of all abortions.

• The reasons women give for having an abortion underscore their understanding of the responsibilities of parenthood and family life. Three-fourths of women cite concern for or responsibility to other individuals; three-fourths say they cannot afford a child; three-fourths say that having a baby would interfere with work, school or the ability to care for dependents; and half say they do not want to be a single parent or are having problems with their husband or partner.

It's clear, then, that many women choose to have an abortion because they either feel unable to afford children or feel unable to give the children a good life. That offers us two main routes for improvement.

First, we need to do a better job of helping young, single women afford children. Children have a lot of start-up costs: a crib, crib sheets and pads, diapers, wet wipes, bottles, formula, warm winter clothing, cool summer clothing, etc. There are doctor visits, delivery costs, pre-natal vitamins, post-natal vitamins, vaccinations, and so on.

All of this can be tremendously overwhelming and scary for a young, single woman with no social support network. Planned Parenthood and the majority of the Democrat Party send the signal that there's nothing wrong with abortion. Is it any wonder then that many of these women choose abortion?

We need to make pregnancy and child-rearing less scary and less expensive. We middle-class Christians need to do a better job of helping poor women afford pregnancy and child-rearing. We need to do a better job of being their emotional support network: comforting them, accepting them, and supporting them. We need to provide enough structure that they don't feel like abortion is the only way out of an unexpected pregnancy. If we can't be bothered to help then I think we bear part of the blame for the abortions.

Secondly, we need to change the way our culture views life. It seems clear from the Guttmacher Institute's data that many women are afraid that they won't be able to give their child a good life. I understand their concern but I strongly disagree with it. A life is far better than no life at all. Don't believe me? Start asking everyone you meet if they wish that their parents had chosen to abort them. I doubt you'll find many takers.

We need to recreate a respect for life in our culture. Every single life is precious. Whether a Down's Syndrome baby, a baby born to a poor single mother, or a baby born to wealthy parents -- every single life is precious. Every single life is worthy of respect, honor, and love. Every life lost is a tragedy and every person that would take a life is a villain. If we inculcate those attitudes, I suspect that the abortion rate would drop precipitously.

That's the social angle. What about the legal angle? We could pass laws making all abortions illegal for any reason whatsoever. But that wouldn't end abortions. Women have given themselves abortions throughout all of human history. Women were buying illegal abortions for centuries before Roe v. Wade was decided.

Does that mean that we should give up on making abortion illegal? Is it true that we can't legislate morality and that it's misguided to work for political and legal change? Should we instead work for the social changes mentioned above?

No. It's not misguided and it's not useless to work for legal change. It's very silly to say that we should give up on outlawing abortion because outlawing abortions won't end all abortions. People are raped, murdered, and robbed every day of the year even though these crimes have been outlawed since the days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Jamestown. We call certain actions crimes not because doing so will eliminate them but because doing so allows us to punish those who engage in such evil behavior. When we criminalize behavior we want to demonstrate the high value that we place on the victim's rights.

Should we put abortionists in jail? Yes! Absolutely! If a doctor murders granny, at the request of her daughter should we put the doctor in jail? Yes! Will doing so bring granny back? No, but it demonstrates just how heinous the crime was. It also prevents that doctor from murdering any other "patients".

I also believe that we should punish women who seek out abortions just as we would punish a woman who hires a hitman to murder her husband. The Guttmacher Institute's data indicates that many women seek abortions for reasons of convenience: "three-fourths say that having a baby would interfere with work, school or the ability to care for dependents". Killing someone to stay in school or killing someone to keep a full time job is evil. So is seeking an abortion to stay in school or seeking an abortion to keep a full time job.

We should work very hard -- we should give very generously -- to provide alternatives to abortions. But we should also recognize that some women can afford children but don't want to go through the inconvenience of a pregnancy. We should recognize that evil for what it is and punish it accordingly. If Christians aren't willing to recognize and confront evil for what it is who will? And what good are we?

Obviously we can't change everything overnight. I'm perfectly willing to work for incremental improvements in the laws. We've already outlawed partial-birth abortions and protected infants born alive. Those are very good first steps. We should work to protect doctors, nurses, and pharmacists who don't want to perform abortions. No medical professional should ever be forced to take a life. After that, we can start working to put limits on third trimester abortions. If a baby can be delivered and live -- and most third trimesters babies could -- then it should be illegal to abort that baby. After we've achieved that goal, we can decide what comes next.

Arguing against murder, rape, or robbery laws is silly. Arguing against abortion laws is just as silly. To say otherwise is to say that you don't value the life of an infant as highly as the life of an adult, rapee, or personal property.

Yesterday and today, joe chapman and I discussed Obama's votes on the Infant Born Alive Act. joe is distressed at my strong reaction to Obama's vote and has been urging me not to be a single issue voter over abortion.

I was planning to write a rebuttal to that charge. Then James and Adam stepped in and pretty much defended the position for me. I agree with James 100%, so I'll just quote his comment instead of trying to write something original that ends up looking mostly the same.

But there are numerous single issues that disqualify a person from public office. For example, any candidate who endorsed bribery as a form of government efficiency would be disqualified, no matter what his party or platform was. Or a person who endorsed corporate fraud would be disqualified no matter what else he endorsed. Or a person who said that no black people could hold office--on that single issue alone he would be unfit for office. Or a person who said that rape is only a misdemeanor -- that single issue should end his political career. These examples could go on and on. Everybody knows a single issue that for them would disqualify a candidate for office.

Adam also nails my feelings:

... it's not that I don't care who I vote for so long as he's pro-something. It's that people who are willing to do certain things should not be allowed into public office.

It is scientifically indisputable that a third-trimester fetus is a unique individual. He has a beating heart, a unique brain wave, moves and reacts to stimuli on his own, can hear, and has his own separate blood type and circulatory system. In every way that matters, a fetus is a baby capable of living outside the mother and surviving to adulthood. Obviously these premature babies need a lot of help and care to survive, but that's true of any other baby.

Given these facts, I believe that abortion -- especially in the third trimester -- is morally indistinguishable from infanticide and murder. I am quite aware that abortion is legally distinguishable from murder, but my political views are not based on the flawed decisions of legislators and judges but on the teachings of the Bible.

Given that abortion is morally indistinguishable from murder, I refuse to support any politician who condones and defends abortion. This does not make me a "single issue" voter. As discussed above, there are many issues that would disqualify a politician in my eyes. But this may be the issue that I feel most strongly about.

I will not support politicians who believe that women should have the right to murder their own children as long as the mother has wrestled with the issue sufficiently.

In case it hasn't been obvious from some of my recent posts, I don't like Senator Obama. Why? Well, aside from eloquent, soaring rhetoric, I haven't seen much about him to like. (The same is true of Senator McCain, but that's a separate series.)

While I haven't seen much to like, I have seen several things worth disliking. First up: he's really just another Chicago politician.

Democrats don't like it when you say that Barack Obama won his first election in 1996 by throwing all of his opponents off the ballot on technicalities.

By clearing out the incumbent and the others in his first Democratic primary for state Senate, Mr. Obama did something that was neither illegal nor even uncommon. But Mr. Obama claims to represent something different from old-style politics -- especially old-style Chicago politics.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Mr. Obama's petition challengers reported to him nightly on their progress as they disqualified his opponents' signatures on various technical grounds -- all legitimate from the perspective of law. One local newspaper, Chicago Weekend, reported that "[s]ome of the problems include printing registered voters name [sic] instead of writing, a female voter got married after she registered to vote and signed her maiden name, registered voters signed the petitions but don't live in the 13th district."

...

It is telling that, when asked at the Saddleback Forum last weekend to name an instance in which he had worked against his own party or his own political interests, he didn't have a good answer. He claimed to have worked with his current opponent, John McCain, on ethics reform. In fact, no such thing happened. The two men had agreed to work together, for all of one day, in February 2006, and then promptly had a well-documented falling-out. They even exchanged angry letters over this incident.

The most dramatic examples of Mr. Obama's commitment to old-style politics are his repeated endorsements of Chicago's machine politicians, which came in opposition to what people of all ideological stripes viewed as the common good.

In the 2006 election, reformers from both parties attempted to end the corruption in Chicago's Cook County government. They probably would have succeeded, too, had Mr. Obama taken their side. Liberals and conservatives came together and nearly ousted Cook County Board President John Stroger, the machine boss whom court papers credibly accuse of illegally using the county payroll to maintain his own standing army of political cronies, contributors and campaigners.

... When liberals and conservatives worked together to clean up Cook County's government, they were displaying precisely the postpartisan interest in the common good that Mr. Obama extols today. And Mr. Obama, by working against them, helped keep Chicago politics dirty. He refused to endorse the progressive reformer, Forrest Claypool, who came within seven points of defeating Stroger in the primary.

After the primary, when Stroger's son Todd replaced him on the ballot under controversial circumstances, a good-government Republican named Tony Peraica attracted the same kind of bipartisan support from reformers in the November election. But Mr. Obama endorsed the young heir to the machine, calling him -- to the absolute horror of Chicago liberals -- a "good, progressive Democrat."

Peter Kirsanow makes a really good point about Senator Abortion and the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act.

Even if one accepts any one of Obama's (four and counting) explanations for his vote against the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act, his position remains problematic, if not untenable. Consider:

• Obama sits through testimony that babies born alive after an unsuccessful abortion are left to die alone in a utility closet. The babies are provided neither comfort, care, nor sustenance during their brief lives. When this practice was brought to public attention horrified citizens petitioned their legislators to address the matter. Proposed legislation is drafted.

• Obama examines the draft of the Born-Alive Act and declares it deficient. Obama maintains that he would vote for the legislation if it did not curtail or derogate extant abortion rights.

• Remedying the alleged defect in the draft legislation is not a difficult task. It requires merely the insertion of a "neutrality clause" that says, in effect, "this legislation won't affect existing abortion rights."

• Obama, lecturer in constitutional law at the prestigious University of Chicago Law School, former Editor in Chief of the Harvard Law Review and undoubtedly the one most qualified in the entire Illinois state legislature to address the issue lifts not one finger to remedy the alleged defect in the draft.

• Instead, when the draft is amended to include the neutrality language, Obama votes against it.

Obama is the agent of change and compassion. He can heal the planet and lower the oceans. By stating that he would've voted for the bill had it contained the neutrality clause, he conveys that he supports the principles of the Born-Alive Act. Yet he takes no action whatsoever to make it happen.

Therefore, even if we accept any one of Obama's explanations regarding his vote against Born-Alive, we're holding him to an incredibly low standard for someone who intends to lead the nation. If he supports the principle of Born-Alive, the question isn't why he voted against it -- the question should be, "Sen. Obama, given your education, skills and background why didn't you take the relatively simple step of amending the draft so that the bill would work?" Isn't that what we expect from a leader?

Obama voted "present" more than 100 times in the Illinois state legislature. Why did he rouse himself to vote "No" on this one?

Obama has found time to ponder the habeas rights of foreign terrorists but no time to ponder the rights of babies born alive? Is it that far above his pay grade?

As far as I'm concerned, this issue trumps all others when it comes to Senator Obama. I cannot find any charitable interpretation of his actions and nothing his campaign has said has changed my mind.

Last Christmas I asked for -- and received -- a SIGG water bottle. After checking it out for a while, my wife decided that she wanted one too. Now our daughter wants in the action. Although she's only 18 months old, she loves carrying Mommy's SIGG around and drinking out of the sports top.

Tonight, I figured that I'd hop online and start looking at bottle designs for the little one. I hopped online, but I couldn't look at bottle designs. SIGG's recent popularity has overwhelmed the small, Swiss company.

Due to the incredible demand for SIGG bottles, we are forced to close down the MySIGG shop. We are also unable to supply any other Internet business for Sigg Brand. Our Swiss factory is working around the clock to produce and ship more bottles to us, but the demand has currently and for the near future - exceeded the supply.

Huh.

Now let us tell you what we are doing at SIGG Switzerland to manage this situation:

• Reconfiguring our SIGG Switzerland facility and adding new equipment.
• Hiring new production workers and having them work around the clock, 3 shifts and weekends.
• Allocating 50% of our global production for North America.
• Once summer is over - we will be able to re-assess our supply situation and react.

Might I offer a humble suggestion? Try a little price gouging. Jack up the prices. It would be good for your customers. Right now, SIGG water bottles are sold out across the internet. Good luck finding an online store that still has some in stock. Higher prices would drive down the demand leaving some supplies available. While the water bottles would be more expensive, customers that really wanted to buy one now would be able to.

Higher prices would be good for SIGG too. Higher prices would enable them to expand more quickly, to pay their workers better (bonuses for those 3 shifts and weekends!), and to invest in more equipment and quality controls.

Apparently, SIGG is choosing to be "nice" by not gouging their customers. I wish they would "gouge" me. Then I might actually be able to afford one of their bottles.

Barack Obama didn't do so well at Pastor Rick Warren's forum Saturday night. How did the Obama campaign react? By whining and claiming that somebody else cheated:

I've been looking into all this buzz that McCain somehow cheated -- that he wasn't in a "cone of silence" -- during Barack Obama's half of the Saddleback summit Saturday night. The talk got started on "Meet the Press" yesterday, when Andrea Mitchell said, "The Obama people must feel that he didn't do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context, because that -- what they're putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well prepared."

Ah, yes. Because -- of course -- the only way to be "well prepared" for an event is to cheat. It can't be that one candidate has more life experience than the other. It can't be that one candidate is a good enough politician to know what kinds of questions to expect and to prepare accordingly. No. The other candidate must have cheated.

Even if it were true, whining isn't the right response. When you're auditioning for the job of "leader of the free world", you should expect everyone else to cheat. You should expect that other world leaders will often attempt to mislead you. You should expect others to gain the upper hand through devious means. Whining just means that you can't operate under normal conditions.

Except that McCain didn't even cheat.

As far as the McCain side is concerned, I spoke to Charlie Black a few minutes ago. He told me McCain's motorcade left his hotel at 5 p.m. Saturday -- that's the time Obama went on stage at Saddleback. Black told me the trip took 35 minutes, and that McCain was in the car with the Secret Service guys, Sen. Lindsey Graham, and press aide Brooke Buchanan. (Black was in another car.) Black says that McCain did not hear any of Warren's questions or Obama's answers during the car ride. Then: "We arrived at Saddleback and went into a holding room, which is a separate building from the main church. In the room there were four or five staff people, plus McCain, and there was no TV, no audio, no nothing. We talked through a few of the topics. We had spent time in the afternoon preparing, doing Q&A, and we did a few more questions to warm him up. At about ten til six, the advance guys came to get McCain to take him to the stage, because the handshake with Obama was a few minutes before 6 p.m. McCain never heard any of this stuff."

Tell me again why Senator Obama is ready to lead? Right now, he seems to fit in well with kindergarteners. Give me a call when he's moved up a few grade levels.

This sounds fairly dire.

Oceans on the Precipice: Scripps Scientist Warns of Mass Extinctions and 'Rise of Slime'.

Human activities are cumulatively driving the health of the world's oceans down a rapid spiral, and only prompt and wholesale changes will slow or perhaps ultimately reverse the catastrophic problems they are facing.

Such is the prognosis of Jeremy Jackson, a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, in a bold new assessment of the oceans and their ecological health. Publishing his study in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Jackson believes that human impacts are laying the groundwork for mass extinctions in the oceans on par with vast ecological upheavals of the past.

He cites the synergistic effects of habitat destruction, overfishing, ocean warming, increased acidification and massive nutrient runoff as culprits in a grand transformation of once complex ocean ecosystems. Areas that had featured intricate marine food webs with large animals are being converted into simplistic ecosystems dominated by microbes, toxic algal blooms, jellyfish and disease.

As far as I know, private property doesn't exist in the ocean. No one can "own" a portion of the ocean or have clear property rights to fishers. Therefore, few people have a financial incentive to conserve the ocean's resources. Instead -- because of the tragedy of the commons -- they have an incentive to use as much of the ocean's resources as they can possibly grab. Nutrient runoff and trash are a problem because no one owns the water and can sue polluters.

What a shame.

We should privatize the oceans before it's too late to save them. Mother Earth is depending on us to do the right thing.

For more information on the tragedy of the commons, you may be interested in a conversation between Russ Roberts and Bruce Yandle on "cooperative ventures such as incorporating a river, the common law, and top-down command-and-control regulation to reduce air and water pollution". It's really not as dry as it sounds!

For a long time I've believed that the people who complain most about America have no idea how truly unique, special, and blessed America actually is. James Lilek's touched on this idea in his euology for Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

In the summer of '78 I was back home in Fargo between college years -- exiled from the civilized world, cast into barbarity. During the day I labored under the hot sun painting giant fuel tanks in the hot sun, next to an auto-body shop that exhaled poison and Eagles all day. A sensitive soul, cast into such grim circumstances. A noble soul, a poet, reduced to living on the gruel of hometown "culture," almost unable to stir himself each day to face the hopeless allotment that stretched forth until the sun turned its face away.

Naturally, I was in the perfect mood to read the entire Gulag Archipelago. I got all three volumes from the drugstore -- which should have told me something about the land in which I lived, that one could buy this work from a creaky wire rack at the drugstore -- and it taught me much about the Soviet Union and the era of Stalin. After that I could never quite understand the people who viewed the US and the USSR as moral equals, or regarded our history as not only indelibly stained but uniquely so. Reading Solzhenitsyn makes it difficult to take seriously the people in this culture who insist that Dissent has been squelched. Brother, you have no idea.

This is why I cannot -- will not -- vote for Senator Barack Obama in November.

The tiny newborn baby made very little noise as he struggled to breathe. He lacked the strength to cry. He had been born four months premature.

"At that age," says nurse Jill Stanek, "their lungs haven’t matured."

Stanek is the nurse who found herself cradling this baby in her hands for all of his 45-minute lifetime. He was close to ten inches long and weighed perhaps half a pound. It's just a guess -- no one had weighed or measured him at birth. No happy family had been there to welcome him into the world. No one was trying to save his life now, putting him into an incubator, giving him oxygen or nourishment. He had just been left to die.

Stanek had seen it all happen. That family had wanted a baby, but when they learned that theirs would be born with Down syndrome, they wanted an abortion. For that, they went to Christ Hospital in the southwestern suburbs of Chicago, which is affiliated with the United Church of Christ.

In "induced labor" or "prostaglandin" abortion -- a common procedure at the hospital -- the doctor administers drugs that dilate the mother's cervix and induce contractions, forcing a small baby out of the mother's uterus. Most of the time, the baby dies in utero, killed by the force of the violent contractions. But it does not always work. Such abortions sometimes result in a premature baby being born alive. Sometimes the survivors live for just a few minutes, but sometimes for several hours. No one tried to save or treat them -- it is hard to save someone you just mauled trying to kill. But something had to be done with them for the minutes and hours during which they struggled for air.

Stanek says her friend had been told to take this baby and leave him in a soiled utility closet. She offered to take him instead. "I couldn't let him die alone," she says.

Stanek was horrified by this experience. This was not an abortion -- it was something worse. Could it be legal to take a living and breathing person of any size, already born and outside his mother’s womb, and just leave him to die, without any thought of treatment?

Hospital officials dismissed Stanek's concerns. She then approached the Republican attorney general of Illinois, Jim Ryan, who issued a finding several months later that Christ Hospital was doing nothing illegal under the laws of Illinois. Doctors had no ethical or legal obligation to treat these premature babies. They had passed the bright line of birth that had effectively limited the right to life since the Roe v. Wade decision, but under the law they were non-persons.

Stanek's effort to right this wrong would lead her to testify before various committees. It would lead her to a state senator, Patrick O'Malley, who would propose a bill to stop what was going on at the hospital.

Her attempt to change a corrupt medical practice and bring hope to defenseless infants would put her on a collision course with a state senator named Barack Obama.

On March 30, 2001, Obama was the only senator to speak in opposition to a bill that would have banned the practice of leaving premature abortion survivors to die.

Senator McCain and the other presidential candidates are wrong on a lot of issues. But right now I can't imagine any issue with more moral significance than this one. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who refuses to defend these weak, helpless infants is too morally bankrupt to be President.

Obama fans think that McCain's "The One" ad tries to link Obama to the anti-Christ. I think they've gone completely batty.

The ad has also generated criticism from Democrats and religious scholars who see a hidden message linking Sen. Obama to the apocalyptic Biblical figure of the antichrist.

The spot, called "The One," opens with the line: "It shall be known that in 2008 the world will be blessed." Images follow of Moses parting the Red Sea and Sen. Obama telling a crowd, "We are the change we've been waiting for."

Critiques of the ad started surfacing earlier this week when Eric Sapp, a Democratic operative, circulated the first of two memos pointing out images that he believed linked Sen. Obama to the antichrist.

"Short of 666, they used every single symbol of the antichrist in this ad," said Mr. Sapp, who advises Democrats on reaching out to faith communities. "There are way too many things to just be coincidence."

Stewart Hoover, director of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said the references to the antichrist in the McCain ad were "not all that subtle" for anyone familiar with "apocalyptic popular culture." Some images in the ad very closely resemble the cover art and type font used in the latest "Left Behind" novel. The title of the ad, "The One," also echoes the series; the antichrist figure in the books, Nicolae Carpathia, sets up "the One World Religion."

Ooookay. It takes a "special" kind of mind to see these connections. (Update: You can read an extensive excerpt of one of the memos.)

But don't take my word for it. Watch it for yourself.

I've been reading an article asking Is Obama the end of black politics? This excerpt jumped out at me:

I asked [Michael] Nutter [the black mayor of Philadelphia] if, during his private conversations with Obama early in the campaign, the subject of race and the historic nature of his candidacy came up. He stared at me for a moment. "Um, I knew he was black," he said finally. "I'd really kind of picked up on that."

Later, when I mentioned that it could be hard for a white journalist to understand all of the nuances of race, he looked over at his press secretary, who is black, and interrupted me. "He's not black?" Nutter deadpanned, motioning back at me. "You guys told me it was a skin condition. I thought I was talking to a brother." Nutter is known to have a dry sense of humor, but I also had the sense that he was tweaking me in these moments, watching with some amusement as I tried to navigate subjects that white and black Americans rarely discuss together. He seemed to think I was oddly preoccupied with race.

In fact, Nutter seemed puzzled by the very notion that he should be expected to support a candidate just because they both had dark skin.

Indeed, Matt Bai does seem oddly preoccupied by race. Most of the media seems to be. Most of the older generation of black leaders seem to be. Unfortunately, Obama himself seems to be oddly preoccupied by race. (At the very least, his supporters are.)

Isn't that sad? 40 years after Dr. King, many people still can't seem to see beyond skin color.

Many people like to point out how Americans work harder -- and longer -- than the rest of the world. Many leftists like to point out that America's work / life balance is out of whack and that we need to spend more time at home and less time at the office.

Maybe.

But we don't really work all that much more. We just work differently.

Recent studies show that Europeans work much harder than most people think, and some, such as the Germans, work every bit as hard as we Americans do. An analysis of why makes it tough to say that one culture is somehow wiser than the other.

The key to the research is a simple question: What's work? The statistics we usually see focus on jobs that people get paid for, and by that measure Americans do indeed toil much more than Europeans. But that measure overlooks all the cooking, cleaning, lawn mowing, and other home-based labor that most people do. We don't get paid for it, but it's just as real as other work. When we count it as well as paid employment, the whole picture changes.

A thorough study by Richard Freeman of Harvard and Ronald Schettkat of Utrecht University found that Germans and Americans labor almost exactly the same amount. (The researchers note, "While our data deal with Germany and the U.S., our findings reflect the difference between EU and American models of capitalism more broadly.") The difference is that we do more market-based work, and Germans do more home-based work.

Now, I'd much rather do work that I get paid for than work that I don't get paid for. I'll take my leisurely home life over the Europeans leisurely vacations any day. Not to mention: America's model produces more jobs for women and low-skilled workers.

An important result is that we create far more service jobs than Germany does, and that nation's much smaller service sector is the main reason Germans are less likely to be employed, with an unemployment rate consistently higher than ours for the past 20 years.

New research by Richard Rogerson of Arizona State University finds that "almost all of the difference [between Europe and the U.S.] in hours of [paid] work is accounted for by differences in the service sector." Some people denigrate burger flipping and the like as dead-end jobs, but for young people whose skills aren't yet highly developed, they're gateway jobs that are the best economic use of their time.

Now carry the analysis a step further. The difference between Germans and Americans in work profiles is much greater for women than men. American women are far more likely to hold paid jobs than German women, and those who do are far more likely to earn higher pay.

The conventional wisdom is actually hilariously wrong in this instance. Americans only appear to work harder because we get paid for a higher percentage of the work we do. Americans can have just as much "free" time as Europe only if we agree to actually work for free!

No thanks.

Who thought it would be a good idea to let a brutal, repressive regime host the Olympics? As the Olympics kick off, we should all take a close look at what passes for "security" in the Chinese world:

The Beijing government, for starters, has denied visas to businessmen, backpackers, and middle-aged tourists holding Olympics tickets.

Moreover, the central government has also ejected long-term foreign residents and canceled) long-planned events involving foreign participants. Chinese citizens have been removed from Beijing, and many of them have been prevented from traveling there. The capital is now guarded by three rings of checkpoints and over 400,000 troops, police, and volunteers. Children cannot fly model planes, real pilots cannot quit or change their jobs, and dissidents have been forced to take "holidays." Spectators at the Games are not permitted to stand up in their seats. The only thing Chinese leaders have not done is declare martial law; but, even if they did, it's not clear that things would be much different than they are at this tense moment. The Games are supposed to be a joyous celebratory event, but the unprecedented clampdown means they have become the "No-Fun Olympics."

... Yet Beijing, in its efforts to ensure absolute security, is considering almost everything a "threat." Paramilitary police, for instance, beat two Japanese journalists in Kashgar and broke their equipment on Monday. That was an indication that the Beijing Olympic organizing committee was not serious late last month when its spokesman expressed regret for police roughing up Hong Kong reporters. The journalists were covering the chaos surrounding the sale of the last batch of Olympics tickets in Beijing and got caught up in events. There will undoubtedly be other occasions in the next few days when members of the press come up against police and other agents of the state, and the reaction of security officials will be telling. So far, it looks as if officials will continue to overreact. And if they do, we will know that Chinese officialdom, despite the supposed liberalizing influence of the Olympics, has not changed much over the years.

The Wall Street Journal correctly skewers T. Boone Pickens today:

Boone Pickens may be a fine man, and has played a colorful and useful role on the American stage for decades. But his "energy plan," which he's spending a fortune to promote on cable TV, is not a plan.

Asserting that something would be good to do is not "a plan." Saying how to do it is "a plan." By this standard, what the legendary oil man is devoting $58 million to pitch hardly amounts to a decent slogan.

He would replace natural gas in electricity production with wind, and use the natural gas to power cars. He fails to mention any practical theory of how to get there -- that would really be "a plan." Instead, he relies on the deus ex machina of Congress, waving a legislative wand to make people do things they would choose not to do, given the extravagant and unjustified costs involved.

Having reasons is not "a plan" either, but Mr. Pickens has his reasons. He says we spend $700 billion a year on foreign oil, which he calls a "transfer of wealth." But exchanging money for oil at the market price is an exchange of things of equal value. If we didn't value their oil more than our dollars, we wouldn't participate in such a bargain.

He laments that the U.S. consumes "25% of the world's oil." The phraseology is common, and misleading. Oil is produced to meet demand. He might as well complain that, with 25% of the world's GDP, we consume 25% of the world's advertising.

That "transfer of wealth" comment has been bugging me since I first saw it. It's such a stupid comment to make. It makes me wonder if a man of his skills and wealth is really that stupid or if he just thinks we are?

Whichever it is, I'm glad to see someone calling him on it.

John McCain, starting to hit his stride:

Thousands of motorcyclists greeted Republican presidential candidate John McCain with an approving roar Monday as he sought blue-collar and heartland support by visiting a giant motorcycle rally.

"As you may know, not long ago a couple hundred thousand Berliners made a lot of noise for my opponent. I'll take the roar of 50,000 Harleys any day," McCain said.

Sure, it's pandering. But it's effective and it doesn't cost the taxpayer anything. I'll take it.

Meet some high school students that are working their way through school:

Almost every weekday, 14-year-old Tiffany Adams rises before 6 a.m. in the Newark, New Jersey, home she shares with her grandmother and sisters. She dons her school uniform and catches two New Jersey Transit buses across the city, arriving at Christ the King Preparatory School, a Catholic high school that opened in September 2007, at 8. Most days she goes to the standard ninth-grade classes: algebra, Spanish, Western Civ. By all accounts, she excels at them. She is ranked first in her class. Her favorite subject is math, she says, "because it challenges me."

But five school days a month, Adams skips the uniform and dons business attire. On those days, after a morning assembly, she bypasses the classrooms and hops instead into a van bound for Essex County College. There Adams works in the human resources department from 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. or so, scheduling résumé appointments, doing clerical work, and generally keeping the place functioning. Far from being a distraction, this opportunity to work while going to school is what drew Adams to Christ the King in the first place. "I thought it would be a good school for me to learn about business," she says. "I would like to be an entrepreneur."

Few teenagers are so concretely focused on their future careers. But Adams' attitude is not unusual for the 89 freshmen at Christ the King Prep, part of a recently formed national network of Catholic schools that combine school and work. In the process, these "Cristo Rey" (Spanish for "Christ the King") schools have stumbled on a new business model for private urban education -- one that asks students like Adams to largely pay their own way.

At the 19 schools in the network (three new ones are opening this fall in Brooklyn, Detroit, and the west side of Chicago), four-student teams share entry-level clerical jobs at area employers. In exchange, these companies pay the schools $20,000 to $30,000 for each team. The subsidy of $5,000 to $7,500 per student keeps tuition low enough (usually around $2,500) that a prep school education becomes feasible for poor families.

This business model was born of necessity. But as the Cristo Rey Network has discovered in the 12 years since the first school opened in Chicago, the benefits go beyond financial sustainability. Introducing inner-city children to corporate America shows them the jobs they can have if they study hard and go to college. And that's what the vast majority of Cristo Rey's predominantly Hispanic and African-American graduates do.

Once these students have a chance to work, employers love them:

But soon employers were calling to compliment the Jesuits on the most eager temps they’d ever seen. "No one quite expected that the kids could perform to the level they were performing in the work world," Thielman says. "We found tremendous talent and tremendous potential among young people in that neighborhood."

These programs also appear to do a fantastic job of preparing students for college:

These start-ups are all committed to enrolling only low-income kids; network-wide, 72 percent of students qualify for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program. The schools are also committed to sending the vast majority of their graduates to college; of the 318 students who graduated from Cristo Rey Network schools in 2007, 316 were accepted to a two- or four-year college. That’s better than 99 percent. (Nationwide, just 67 percent of students who graduate from high school start college shortly thereafter, and in big cities that figure can be much lower. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley held a press conference last spring to boast that the Chicago public schools had sent almost half of the class of 2007 to two- or four-year colleges.)

And these schools aren't cherry-picking the smart students either:

Many of Christ the King's 89 students arrived unprepared for high school work. James Cochran, a social studies teacher, assigned an essay about ancient Mesopotamia around the third week of school. "I got kids who gave me Wikipedia articles printed out," he says. "They didn't make any effort to conceal the fact that it was a Wikipedia article. It's not like they were plagiarizing and trying to hide it. They just thought that was how you did a report." They didn't understand that they were supposed to generate original thoughts and analysis. "They didn’t know how to think," Cochran says. "I had to teach them how to think." By April, though, his ninth-graders were debating whether Emperor Augustus was better for Rome than the previous republican set-up. (Interestingly, most thought he was.)

This article really gets me excited. (Please do read the entire thing.) It's new. It's creative. It's innovative. Most importantly -- it works. This is change from the old ideas of the past. More please. Much more.

I've been wanting to get back into shape. These new pills could be the perfect solution.

In a series of startling experiments in mice, the drugs improved the ability of cells to burn fat and retain muscle mass, and they substantially prolonged endurance during exercise. Using one of the compounds for just a month, even sedentary, couch-potato mice improved their endurance running by a staggering 44%. Some mice that combined a month of exercise with the other drug bolstered their long-distance running by about 70% over untreated mice.

One of the drugs is already in late-stage human trials for other purposes, and the mouse experiments raise hopes for new strategies to protect people against obesity, diabetes and muscle-wasting diseases such as muscular dystrophy.

Anabolic steroids, often abused by athletes, enhance the performance of fast-twitch muscle cells -- those that provide power and speed. The two drugs being researched are among the first compounds shown clearly to improve the slow-twitch muscle cells used in endurance activities. Whereas fast-twitch muscle cells burn sugar, slow-twitch cells primarily burn fat, which means they could help combat obesity.

Now I'm just waiting until I can buy me a 90-day supply.

Seen on /.:

The main advantage of the Kindle over the iPhone is actually the fact that it's not a phone; do you realize how high you jump when you're sitting in a quiet place deeply into a horror novel, and right at the scariest part, the damn thing RINGS at you?!