A tale of three Guineas

Before having read this article, I confess to not knowing anything about any of the three African countries named Guinea. Luckily, the Lydia Polgreen was there to tell me about how the assassination of two long-feuding potentates in Guinea-Bissau has led to, as the NYT's ever-poignant last paragraph tells us:

“This was a quarrel between two big men,” he said. “Now that they are dead maybe the country finally has a chance to start fresh.”

But, the reason I felt this article was blog-worthy was because of this great paragraph half-way down the second page:

Guinea-Bissau’s neighbors say they worry that West Africa is headed for a new era of instability and conflict. Regional leaders expressed outrage at the assassinations, which seemed of a piece with the coup that followed the death of the president of neighboring Guinea. An amphibious assault on a third country, Equatorial Guinea, aimed at toppling its government, recently failed.

No Papua New Guinea, though.

A better way to decrease homophobia on campuses

The Weekly Standard has an article criticizing Yale's new expenditure on an "Office of LGBTQ Resources," in light of recent cut-backs in other areas. Though I disagree with some things in the article (what's so bad about "gender-neutral housing," which doesn't cost a cent?), I agree with the overall gist, which is that an LGBTQ office isn't going to do jack-shit for anyone.

Might I suggest another strategy colleges around the country could take to decrease incidences of homophobia on campus: stop giving sports scholarships and recruiting people for sports who otherwise wouldn't have gained admission. It might not be PC to say it, but in my experience, those are the worst offenders when it comes to homophobia.

Is the iPhone really a failure in Japan?

Every once in a while some naïve American journalist hears that the iPhone is a flop in Japan because Japan is cell phone utopia/Japanese people are robots/etc. The latest attempt is from Wired, entitled "Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone." Apparently not only is this not true, but the author made up some of the quotes. That link, an original article from Apple Insider (a member of the Apple rumors community), also gives a much more nuanced and interesting look at the Japanese cell phone market and Apple's position in it.

The folly of capital requirements

Jeffrey Hummel at the History News Network has a great post (which repeats information originally give by Less Antman) on the harm of capital and reserve requirements, and how deposit insurance encourages banking consumers to ignore the risks their banks are taking with their money:

"While foresighted bank executives might have chosen to maintain capital in excess of regulatory requirements so that a decline in value wouldn't trigger a crisis, it would have made no business sense to do so, since it would have reduced their lending income and ability to pay competitive rates on deposits or offer other benefits to attract customers. In a free market, they would have been able to do so, since they would have gained a reputation advantage from their greater safety, but with FDIC insurance protecting all deposits, customers don't shop based on safety, as they assume they are protected by the government from the loss of their deposits. Thus, only the rates and benefits offered by a bank matter to a customer, not the reliability of the bank, thanks to the FDIC."

The whole post is well worth reading, as it delves into some of the other unintended consequences of bank regulation.

The economics of marijuana

There seems to be this notion floating around the internet that a marijuana tax would pull in a lot of money, but we're not in the 1930s anymore, and no tax on an intoxicant is going to make a dent in the economy. There would be some savings on the justice end, with reduced police and violence due to the illegal marijuana trade, but the American justice system already doesn't spend all that much resources on enforcing marijuana crimes.

Now if you wanna start talking about heroin and cocaine – where you would see extraordinary savings on law enforcement (in America, most crime is drug crime) and public health (heroin overdoses are almost always caused by prohibition, not the drug itself), then you might have a point.

How some tariffs can actually be pro-free trade

Here's something you don't see every day: anti-protectionist tariffs. The European Commission is reportedly considering tacking import tariffs on biodiesel from the US in order to counter the subsidies that American producers receive from their own government. The tariffs will be tailored to, among other things, the amount of subsidies that the fuel receives back in the US:

The level of tariffs would be tailored to individual companies to reflect the types and amounts of the fuel they produce, and the amount of subsidies and other support they receive from American authorities, the diplomats said.

While this action would cancel out the effects of some of the American subsidies, there's still the matter of the European subsidies. The obvious reason for the encouragement of biodiesel is that it's more environmentally-friendly than fossil fuels, though I wonder if this is really the case.

Obama's overture to Russia is doomed to fail

Apparently Obama has offered Russia a (not so) secret compromise, in which the US gives up on missile installations in Eastern Europe if Russia convinces Iran to give up its nuclear program and long-range missile development. My prediction is that Russia won't outright refuse, and it might even show signs of accepting, but Iran will definitely not be disarmed. Russia will perhaps issue some token public statement urging Iran to give up its military ambitions, but they will be intentionally half-hearted, and they might even communicate privately with Iran that they have no intention of stopping their support of these programs.

Or, perhaps, Russia will take the opportunity to squeeze Iran, allowing it much desired access to its oil and natural gas reserves.

Either way, Iran's nuclear program guarantees Russia a tighter hold on energy to Europe from the Caspian, and it's vital to the Kremlin's foreign policy that Iran stays an enemy of the West.

Italian underemployment

Tyler Cowen the other day remarked about the perhaps increasing irrelevance of unemployment figures, given the apparently rising phenomenon of "underemployment," where workers are counted as employed despite the fact that they work much fewer hours and earn much less money than they have in the past.

Perry Anderson, in a fascinating recap in the London Review of Books of Italy's history since the beginning of the Second Republic in 1992, gives a good example of underemployment-in-action:

Redeeming this desolation has, to all intents and purposes, been just one improvement, in job creation. Unemployment, which stood at 12 per cent in the mid-1990s has dropped to 6 per cent today. But most of this work – half of all the new posts in 2006 – involves short-term contracts, and much of it is precarious employment in the informal economy. No counteracting dynamism has resulted. In the formula of the Neapolitan sociologist Enrico Pugliese, Italy has gone from growth without jobs in the last years of the First Republic to jobs without growth under the Second, blocking productivity gains.

In case you're curious about Anderson's verdict on the so-called "reforms" of the Second Republic, here's the last paragraph:

Growth was not liberated, but asphyxiated. Export shares have fallen, and the public debt, the third largest in the world, has remained stubbornly above 100 per cent of GDP, mocking the provisions of Maastricht. When the Second Republic started, Italy still enjoyed the second highest GDP per capita of the big EU states, measured in purchasing power parity, after Germany – a standard of living in real terms above that of France or Britain. Today it has fallen below an EU average now weighed down by the relative poverty of the East European states, and is close to being overtaken by Greece.

Overtaken by Greece?! That's saying something...

Obama administration fights to keep inmates from paying for DNA tests that could prove their innocence

It's hard to say whether or not Obama or any of his appointees in the Justice Department approved this, but it's pretty appalling nonetheless:

Does the U.S. Constitution permit an innocent person to be imprisoned or executed? Seems like a question with an obvious answer.

Here’s another question: If a convict can establish irrefutable proof of his innocence with a simple DNA test, does he have a constitutional right to that test, even if he has exhausted his legal appeals?

The answer to both questions isn’t at all clear, and may depend on how the Supreme Court rules in the case of District Attorney's Office v. Osborne, which it heard today. Surprisingly, 32 states, the city of New York, and the Obama administration are urging the Court to answer "no."

The defendant in the case is William Osborne, who in 1993 was convicted of a brutal kidnapping, rape, and assault in Alaska. DNA testing on semen found in a condom at the crime scene didn't exclude Osborne, but it did include as many as 16 percent of all black men. More sophisticated testing not available at the time of Osborne’s trial would today conclusively determine whether he actually committed the crime. Even the state of Alaska concedes that a negative test would confirm that Osborne is innocent. The test would cost all of $1,000, a fee that would be paid not by the state, but by Osborne’s own legal team at the Innocence Project.

Yet the state of Alaska refuses to hand the sample over for testing, and has fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep it from Osborne’s lawyers.

Former FBI director William Sessions says something that makes me think that Obama hasn't heard of this particular Justice Department decision, though it's entirely possible that he's already sold out to political expediency:

It's a generally laudatory goal for a new president to continue the DoJ polices of the previous one when he takes office. But a change in position may be warranted in some cases. Osborne is one of them. The Justice Department's decision is particularly perplexing because when President Obama was an Illinois state senator, he responded to that state's wrongful conviction problem by leading a bipartisan effort to help prevent convictions of the innocent, including laws allowing access to DNA evidence.

People catching on to the second-generation biofuel scam

Obama had so much fun getting burned for his misguided support of state subsidies to corn ethanol producers that he's decided to do it again, this time with "next generation" biofuels that use things like prairie grasses to fuel SUVs instead of food. The thinking behind it is that despite the fact that corn-based ethanol caused massive increases in the price of food around the world, these "newer" and "greener" biofuels will use "marginal land" instead of crop land, and so will not be as harmful. This, of course, is bullshit, as I've written about earlier. Others are beginning to come around to this fact, and Counterpunch has a great article on the dangers of biofuels.

So far, Obama's energy plan has featured, as a cornerstone, tons of subsidization of "green" energy – first in corn ethanol, and later in advanced biofuels, wind, solar, geothermal, and some various other technologies. It's only been a few years since Obama's risen to prominence and taken a definitive stand on energy issues, but his record ain't too hot: corn-based ethanol and "advanced" biolfuels are looking like definite failures, wind is looking not too great, and the production of regulated solar panels has the nasty side effect of releasing a chemical which is much better at warming the planet than carbon dioxide.

The American government spends a lot of money making sure that Americans have access to cheap energy, so it's odd Obama wouldn't look into cutting subsidies for un-environmentally friendly suburban sprawl and automobiles rather than trying to play master scientist and build a perpetual motion machine.