kenlacrosse

(John Hinderaker)

IT’S COME TO THIS: Dems Trying To Blame IRS Inspector General For Targeting Scandal. “The Obama administration has well documented problems with assertive inspector generals, so this kind of push back is to be expected from Hill Democrats. It’s an attempt to smear the IRS inspector general and only shows how desperate the Democrats have become. It’s a hail mary pass that is going to fall incomplete in the end zone.”

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Fast Times At Eighth Avenue High: Our Adolescent Media.

(John Hinderaker)

TRAIN WRECK UPDATE: New Cover Oregon allegations: ‘If it’s true, someone’s going to prison.’ “Former Republican state Rep. Patrick Sheehan told the KATU Investigators he has gone to the FBI with allegations that Cover Oregon project managers initiated the design of dummy web pages to convince the federal government the project was further along than it actually was.”

Is the new normal really here to stay? Jim Pethokoukis spoke with AEI’s Stephen Oliner, who got to talking about the end of the big productivity gains we saw from the mid-90s until 2004:

The other thing that was happening during that decade is that the prices of information technology equipment – computing equipment, communication equipment – was falling at a historically rapid rate because of really rapid gains in semiconductor technology that allowed those prices to drop tremendously on a performance adjusted basis.

So firms had a lot of incentive to buy computing equipment, to automate, and they had the Internet as a tool to make those investments very valuable. And then, about a decade later, it really started to peter out. And that’s I think what was behind the break starting in about 2004. Part of it was just that, you know, the best ideas for how to use the Internet to improve profits and productivity are the ones that are developed relatively early on, and after a decade of development, there just wasn’t that much really good innovation that could be pulled out of the Internet compared to what had been done before.

And a second is that the prices for computing equipment stopped falling as rapidly as they had been, so firms had less incentive to buy that equipment.

And a third thing, which I think has not been given a lot of weight in the discussions, is that the U.S., through the ’90s, got a lot of productivity boost just from the production of computing equipment and semiconductors in this country. And a lot of that activity has been off-shored. It’s now in Asia. It’s in Mexico. And those sectors are very, very technologically dynamic sectors that by themselves contribute a lot to productivity growth. And we’ve shifted a chunk of that. A lot of that has now moved abroad, and isn’t in the United States anymore, and it doesn’t occur in the United States. It’s not part of our GDP.

We have the highest corporate tax rate in the world, which certainly isn’t helping. Apple has tens of billions in overseas banks, which they can’t even repay to American shareholders without first having to fork meaty chunks of it into Uncle Sugar’s gaping maw. And our business climate is no longer even in the Top Ten, which means of course we’ve lost dynamism.

That 2004 date is interesting to me however, and it goes back to a point I’ve made here before. That’s when the housing bubble was really starting to get big, and something like a trillion dollars had been diverted from potentially productivity-enhancing investments, and into bigger houses nobody really needed. People then borrowed against their bubbletastic home value gains — and again, largely not to invest in businesses, but to buy bigger SUVs nobody really needed. We’re still suffering from the debt overhang, and also from the lost productivity gains.

Growth is the only way out, but we have an Administration which prefers less work and more handouts, along with punitive taxes on the producers to pay for it all.

LAW: Man Charged With Killing Burleson County Deputy No Billed by Grand Jury.

McGee admitted to shooting Sowders before sunrise on December 19th while the deputy and other investigators were serving a no knock search warrant for drugs at McGee’s mobile home near Snook.

Magee’s Defense Attorney Dick DeGuerin says his client thought someone was breaking into his home and fired to protect his pregnant girlfriend and himself.

“Well we feel that the grand jury acted fairly and reasonably and had all of the information that it needed to make the decision that it did. That is that this was a justified shooting and, but we need to say that this is a tragedy,” Dick DeGuerin said.

The dangers of no-knock raids. One of the reasons for the knock-and-announce rule is so that homeowners can assure themselves that their home isn’t being invaded. Sounds like this grand jury did the right thing, but if the sheriff’s department had been more sensible, the deputy would be alive now.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Wall St. Journal: Obama’s IRS ‘Confusion:’ New evidence undercuts White House claims about IRS motivation.

The IRS hyper-scrutiny of conservative groups only began in 2010 amid the Obama Administration’s larger political attack on political donors like the Koch brothers, and emails show that IRS officials were acutely aware of this political environment. In February 2010, for example, an IRS screener in Cincinnati flagged an application to his superiors noting: “Recent media attention to this type of organization indicates to me that this is a ‘high profile’ case.”

From then on applications were routed through the offices of Mrs. Lerner and Obama-appointed IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, and long approval delays ensued. Extensive interviews and emails show that neither the initial Cincinnati interest, nor the subsequent Washington delay, was in any way driven by “confusion.”

Mr. Koskinen promised in December to restore public trust in the IRS, but he didn’t do much of that on Wednesday. He toed the Administration line on the new 501(c)(4) rules, promising to address concerns only “to the extent I have any control” over the process. He refused to say if he’d comply with Mr. Camp’s request for IRS and Treasury documents pertaining to the rule-making, fretting instead about low IRS “morale” and lack of funding.

The quickest way Mr. Koskinen could restore public trust in the IRS would be to halt the new politically toxic 501(c)(4) rules until investigations into the original targeting are complete. Meantime, the House should sharply reduce IRS funding until the agency is more responsive.

Zero out their conference budget. That seems quite important to them. . . .

In late January, four former U.S. ambassadors to the Ukraine penned an open letter in the New York Times. In it they asked the leaders of the West to stop Ukrainian president Yanukovych while restraining immoderate actions from the opposition. They wrote:

Ukraine is on the verge of spinning out of control. A pro-European protest that began more than two months ago in Kiev’s central square has flared into broad, angry opposition to the authoritarian policies of President Viktor F. Yanukovych. If the United States and European Union wish to encourage a peaceful resolution, they must use their leverage now. Otherwise the situation could degenerate further, to the point where the West will be no more than a spectator.

The first days of February saw John Kerry meeting with Ukranian oppositionists to express their support. At about the same time the Obama administration began to negotiate with Congress on the possibility of imposing sanctions on the Ukraine in order to pressure that government “in response to the bloodshed touched off by Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to rebuff a long-awaited trade deal with the European Union.”

Two days ago the US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, announced his resignation. His departure was widely regarded as signalling the failure of the “reset” policy which he advocated. The Post wrote:

McFaul never wavered in his defense of the “reset” despite the increasingly rocky trail of U.S.-Russian relations in recent years. In a blog post titled “It’s Time, My Friend, It’s Time,” written in Russian and English, which he said would be his last as ambassador, he listed what he argued were the reset’s accomplishments.

Among them were the New START accord limiting nuclear arms, the opening of the Northern Distribution Network allowing the United States to send supplies to its troops in Afghanistan by way of Russia, cooperation on Iran and North Korea, and Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization — which Washington wanted on the grounds that it requires Russia to commit to international trade rules.

Along with a bunch of other, more headline-grabbing numbers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning that 14.4 million Americans were self-employed in January. Of those, 9.2 million were unincorporated self-employed workers and another 5.2 million were incorporated.

That’s interesting, given that back in January 2000 (which is as far as the BLS tally of the incorporated self-employed goes), the number of self-employed was  … 14.4 million. Since then there have been some modest ups and downs, but overall no change. And as you can see in the chart below, the long-term trend in the percentage of workers who are self-employed actually appears to be downward:

But isn’t this the age of Free Agent Nation, as Dan Pink declared back in 1997? What about “The Rise of the Supertemp” that Jody Greenstone Miller and Matt Miller reported in HBR in 2012? Or “The Third Wave of Virtual Work” described by Tammy Johns and Linda Gratton last year in HBR, which has untethered knowledge workers from offices and made independent work more practical? It is as if, to paraphrase economist Robert Solow, you can see the age of self-employment everywhere except in the self-employment statistics.

Why is this? Two reasons, mainly. One has to do with definitions — the BLS standard for self-employment isn’t the only valid one. The second is really about history. We may well be witnessing the rise of a new kind of independent worker, but there have been different kinds of independent workers in the past. Far more of them as a percentage of the workforce, in fact, than we see today or are likely to see anytime soon.

Defining Independence

First, the definitions. The BLS gets its self-employment totals from the Current Population Survey, a.k.a. the household survey, a monthly quiz of 60,000 American households conducted by the Census Bureau (this is the same survey that generates the unemployment rate). Respondents are asked, “Last week were you employed by government, by a private company, a nonprofit organization, or were you self-employed?”

This either/or choice excludes a lot of people who are doing independent work on the side, or whose jobs are really more like gigs. A survey conducted for the past three years on behalf of MBO Partners, a provider of support services for independent workers, counts temp workers, on-call workers, and those on fixed-term contracts as “independent workers.” That gets the total to an estimated 17.7 million in 2013, up from 16 million two years before. “When you start throwing these other people in, that’s where the growth is,” says Steve King of Emergent Research, which designed the survey.

“The household survey is really good,” continues King. “I don’t think they’re missing people who are working; they’re just categorizing them using methods they developed in 1950. Changing that survey takes an act of God, because it messes up all the time series.”

So others are driven to adopt their own categories. The Freelancers Union frequently cites a number of 42 million independent workers, about a third of the workforce. It gets that from a 2006 Government Accountability Office report that said there were about 42.6 million “contingent workers,” meaning “agency temporary workers (temps), direct-hire temps, on-call workers, day laborers, contract company workers, independent contractors, self-employed workers, and standard part-time workers.”

Now, classifying all the nation’s part-timers as independent workers is quite a stretch. I’m not going to carp too much because it’s in keeping with the Freelancers Union’s noble aim of taking the lemons dealt by the labor market over the past decade-plus and turning them into artisanal lemonade. Plus, they could have rounded up to 43 million if they wanted to. But there aren’t 43 million truly “independent” workers in the U.S.; there are 43 million people who are working but aren’t doing it full-time for somebody else.

Another approach to the self-employment data paradox is to measure something completely different. Dan Pink, for example, pointed me to the Census Bureau’s annual tally of “nonemployer businesses,” which is taken from tax return data:

This seems like a realistic proxy for Pink’s Free Agent Nation, and it shows some actual growth, especially in the early years of the millennium. What it doesn’t show is the kind of explosive growth that advocates for the self-employed sometimes proclaim. MBO Partners, for example, predicted in 2011 that by 2020, “70 million people, more than 50 percent of the private workforce, will be independent.” Given that the actual research commissioned by MBO says that there are now about 17.7 million independent workers and the number has been growing at 5% a year, this was either a bold bet that the Affordable Care Act is going to drive/lure a lot more people out of full-time jobs than the Congressional Budget Office is predicting, or silly marketing hyperbole.

Still, one perfectly valid reason why some people persist in being very bullish about the rise of independent work in the face of some pretty unbullish overall statistics is that some kinds of independent work, among them the kinds probably most relevant to HBR readers, are in fact on the rise. They’re just not the only or even the main kinds of independent work out there.

Self-Employment Old and New

For the first century of its existence, the United States economy was dominated by independent workers. Most of them were farmers. Others were tradespeople, professionals, hands-on service providers, and such. Even after the huge economic transformations wrought by the first half of the 20th century, the self-employed still made up more than 19% of the workforce in 1949, according to the BLS, compared with just over 10% today. (The BLS data series on self-employment starts in 1948.)

Most of this decline has been due to the continued emptying and consolidation of America’s farms (or, if you prefer, the productivity revolution in U.S. agriculture). Self-employed farmers, ranchers, hunters, fishermen, and loggers made up more than 8% of the workforce in the late 1940s. Now it’s less than 1%.

It’s not just that, though. Other long-established varieties of independent work have been declining, or at least not growing much. Mom & pop stores, definitely, but also some other very large categories that may not immediately spring to mind. Doctors, for example, who have been reacting to the increasing complexity of their business by grouping together or joining hospital staffs. Sole-practitioner lawyers who are getting out of a field that seems to be in long-term decline. And real estate agents, contractors, and others who are dependent on a boom-bust housing sector which has been mostly a bust in recent years.

Here are the occupational categories that have seen the biggest declines in self-employment since 2001:

These numbers stem from data collected by the Census Bureau in the American Community Survey, a rolling census of about three million people a year that the House of Representatives voted in 2012 to defund (the Senate didn’t concur). The Census Bureau doesn’t publish these numbers in very user-friendly form, but Economic Modeling Specialists Intl., a subsidiary of CareerBuilder, gets the raw data, massages it with numbers from some other government surveys, and delivers a remarkably detailed portrait of what the unincorporated self-employed are up to. On Thursday, EMSI published a nice roundup of developments since 2006. They also sent me a spreadsheet with the numbers for every occupational category going back to 2001. Here are the occupations with the biggest gains in self-employment over that period:

This doesn’t exactly offer resounding support for the thesis of a boom in independent white-collar work. The world surely needs more landscapers and maids than management analysts, and it gets them. Also, some of those construction managers and first-line supervisors from the previous chart seem to have landed less-remunerated jobs as construction laborers in this one. “Management, other,” in case you’re wondering, is a grab-bag category of managers who can’t otherwise be classified as construction managers, purchasing managers, financial managers, etc.

These numbers don’t, however, include the incorporated self-employed, who tend to skew toward higher-paid work. Also, the vagaries of the occupational categories used by the government can have a big impact. All the nation’s maids get thrown into one category; its physicians are split into at least nine. With a few days of work, I might be able to coax a clearer narrative from the data. Failing that (I may get to it later), I pulled out a few categories that grabbed my attention:

The boom in musicians and singers took me by surprise. Maybe this is one case where the Long Tail really has panned out for people. The two financial occupations both show the impact of the financial crisis, but it’s interesting (and I think heartening, from the consumer perspective) to see that the financial advisors are rebounding while the salespeople aren’t. With editors, the upward trajectory seems indicative less of a boom than a bust — the publishing industry has been shedding jobs for years, and now relies on freelancers more than it used to. But that does represent a shift to independent white-collar work, even if a lot of the people doing it would prefer a regular paycheck. The boom in independent web developers is of course exactly the kind of New Economy, Free Agent phenomenon we’ve been expecting to find. And the rise of fitness trainers and mental health counselors is indicative that there are hands-on independent service jobs on the rise that are more remunerative and presumably more pleasant than mowing lawns and vacuuming floors. (Dietitians and nutritionists and lots of different varieties of counselors, therapists, and psychologists are also seeing substantial gains.)

Sprinkled among the EMSI spreadsheet are other attractive-sounding (if not exactly giant) occupations on the rise: scientists of various kinds, human resources specialists, computer and information systems managers, technical writers, market research analysts, and so on. Free Agent Nation is out there, and parts of it are growing fast. It’s just not always easy to find, and by the looks of it still has a long ways to go before it takes over the rest of the nation.

There’s a photo at the link I couldn’t bear to repost.

It may be decades before Russia is trusted with another Olympic Games. I hope it’s never.

“SMART DIPLOMACY:” The Emperor Has No Clothes. “The problems over the Ukraine come almost as a caboose to a long train of disasters, with a disconsolate State Department pulling along a whole string of derelicts: Libya, Syria, Iran, the Arab Spring and growing tension in the Western Pacific, so that the troubles with Russia pass almost unnoticed as the last car in the series. . . . Under his watch the 70 year old Pax Americana has fallen apart. Al-Qaeda has flourished. President Benigno Aquino of the Philippines caught the tone of rising concern when he warned, in an interview with the New York Times that China was doing to Southeast Asia what Nazi Germany did to Central Europe in the late 1930s. . . . Barack Obama is in trouble and so are we all. It’s time to stop the Happy Talk and for Republicans and Democrats to face the facts. The emperor has no clothes.”

Barry Ritholtz explains:

Why is the wealth effect a flawed theory?

Start with that correlation error: What actually occurs during periods where stock prices are rising? As Benjamin Graham observed, over the long term, markets act like a weighing machine — valuing equities based on their cash flow and earnings. During periods of economic expansions, it is the rising fundamental economic activity that reflects the positive things wrongly attributed to the wealth effect. Companies can hire more and increase their capital spending. Competition for labor leads to rising wages. Employed, well-paid workers spend those wages on capital goods such as cars and houses, and discretionary items like entertainment and travel.

Oh, and along with all of these economic positives, the stock market is buoyed as well, by increasing profits and more buoyant psychology.

In other words, all of the same forces that drive a healthy economy, leading to happy consumers spending their plump paychecks, also drive equity markets higher. The Fed, though, seems to think that the stock-market tail is wagging the fundamental economic dog.

Or as I’ve been saying for years now, the nation is being ruled by a cargo cult. Set the Wayback Machine to 2011:

Cargo cults arose in the South Pacific during the Second World War. US soldiers and marines would arrive on an tropical island, and one of the first things they’d do was build an airstrip. Then the cargo planes would arrive and — Americans being Americans — our boys would share their loot with the half-starved locals. Candy, clothes, condoms, whatever.

The war eventually ended and the soldiers left and the cargo planes stopped coming. So the locals would make their own airstrips, using whatever tools they had — some quite elaborate. Then they’d stare at the skies and wait for the cargo planes to return.

That’s what quantitative easing is. “Print the money,” they say, staring at the skies, “and the goods will come.”

Well, no.

The goods must first be produced, and with the expectation of a profit. I know it’s fashionable for Paul Krugman to assert that “uncertainty is just a myth.” But this idea that there are Person Units called “Businessmen” who continue to produce goods no matter what government does to them is a liberal conceit. It’s the same liberal conceit that believes there are other Person Units called “Doctors” who will go on treating patients and finding new cures for diseases, no matter what government does to them.

People change their behavior as incentives change. And for the last three years, the incentive has been to hunker down and try not to get hurt.

But Krugman and the rest are immune to simple reason and plain facts, because they’re creatures of faith. They’re cargo cultists. Print the money and the goods will rain down magically from the skies.

We’ve tried that twice now. It hasn’t worked. And so the cargo cultists tell us that the gods are angry gods. We have not appeased them enough. We must print more money. We must have a third round of quantitative easing. That will make the goods appear.

The first stimulus was a little Bush-Pelosi number from 2008. Then followed the mother of all stimuli in 2009. We’ve also experienced three rounds of quantitative easy and I’ve lost track of how many twists and asset purchases and the like from the Fed, boosting its balance sheet to over $4,000,000,000,000.

And it still isn’t working, not after six years.

But the cultists never learn.

(John Hinderaker)

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Fox News reports that Republican lawmakers in the House are pushing legislation that would prohibit the EPA from proposing new regulations based on science that is not transparent or not reproducible. The bill introduced by Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., would bar the agency from proposing or finalizing rules without first disclosing all "scientific and technical information" relied on to support its proposed action. "Public policy should come from public data, not based on the whims of far-left environmental groups," says Schweikert. "For far too long, the EPA has approved regulations that have placed a crippling financial burden on economic growth in this country with no public evidence to justify their actions." The bill, dubbed the Secret Science Reform Act of 2014 (HR 4012), would prohibit the EPA's administrator from proposing or finalizing any rules unless he or she also discloses "all scientific and technical information" relied on by the agency in the regulations' development including all data, materials and computer models. According to Schweikert's press release a 2013 poll from the Institute of Energy Research found that 90 percent of Americans agree that studies and data used to make federal government decisions should be made public. "Provisions in the bill are consistent with the White House's scientific integrity policy, the President's Executive Order 13563, data access provisions of major scientific journals, the Bipartisan Policy Center and the recommendations of the Obama administration's top science advisors.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WELCOME TO THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Number of Americans Who Renounced U.S. Citizenship Soars.

“SMART DIPLOMACY” UPDATE: Video: State Dept. Not Sure If Obama’s Bundler/Ambassador to Argentina Speaks Spanish.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Republicans Step Up Probe into IRS Targeting Scandal.

House committees continued their probe this week into the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) targeting scandal in which conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status were subjected to extra scrutiny.

Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who represents the Texas-based group True the Vote, told a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee Thursday that the IRS targeting is very “real” and “not pretend.”

“The IRS, at the direction of some political elites in Washington – not in Cincinnati, but Washington – took what had been for decades a process of reviewing applications for exempt status that for a 501(c)(4) organization could be expected to take three to four weeks,” Mitchell said. “And they converted that process into one that took three to four years and, in some cases, is still not over.”

True the Vote filed its application for tax-exempt status in 2010 and did not receive it until after the group sued the IRS.

Mitchell said the first time she became aware of the targeting was in October 2009 when she filed an application for another group, and did not hear from the IRS until June 2010. She said when the IRS got back to them it was not Cincinnati, but the Washington office.

“That group did one thing. It lobbied against Obamacare in the fall of 2009, in the spring of 2010, something that a 501(c)(4) organization is permitted to spend 100 percent of its program expenditures doing. We did not get the tax-exempt status for that organization until July of 2013,” Mitchell said.

In a Sunday interview with Fox News, President Obama said the IRS targeting controversy was a result of “bone-headed decisions” in the agency’s Cincinnati office and did not involve “a smidgen of corruption.”

Yeah, that’s basically a straight-up lie.

Wow:

Residents of bankrupt San Bernardino, California on Tuesday voted to complete a rout of the city’s pro-union old guard, electing business-friendly pragmatists who have pledged to try to reduce pension costs and take on vested interests.

As San Bernardino enters into a fourth month of mediation with its creditors, the biggest of which is Calpers, California’s giant retirement system, voters on Tuesday elected Carey Davis as the crisis-hit city’s new mayor.

Could common sense turn out to be California’s next big export to the rest of the country?

Would you believe there’s something good coming out of the Syrian Civil War? There is:

Afghanistan’s insurgents have endured hard times before, but nothing quite like this. At first glance the war might seem to be turning in their favor. America’s combat forces are leaving by the end of the year, and every few days another insurgent bombing unnerves the inhabitants of Kabul, the country’s capital. Nevertheless, Mullah Yaseen and hundreds of Taliban foot soldiers like him—the heart and soul of the armed struggle against the U.S.-backed Kabul government—are running out of food, money and ammunition.

Their plight is unlikely to improve anytime soon. People familiar with the Taliban’s finances say the organization’s main sources of revenue have dried up. Wealthy Arab donors, Afghan businessmen and even Pakistan’s powerful and secretive spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, have all reduced or stopped funding, each for their own reasons.

The Saudis are now writing their checks to Syrian insurgents instead of to the Taliban — which might do more to hurt the Taliban than years of Professor Ditherton Wiggleroom’s “little bit pregnant” version of a surge.

The companion piece to Spengler’s article on the bone-tiredness of the US economy is SFGate’s upbeat story on “funemployment”. While Spengler worries that the US economy is losing steam, SFGate says: don’t worry, be happy. It writes:

Michael Van Gorkom was laid off by Yahoo in late April. He didn’t panic. He didn’t rush off to a therapist. Instead, the 33-year old Santa Monica resident discovered that being jobless “kind of settled nicely.”

What most people would call unemployment, Van Gorkom embraced as “funemployment.”

While millions of Americans struggle to find work as they face foreclosures and bankruptcy, others have found a silver lining in the economic meltdown. These happily jobless tend to be single and in their 20s and 30s. Some were laid off. Some quit voluntarily, lured by generous buyouts.

Buoyed by severance, savings, unemployment checks or their parents, the “funemployed” do not spend their days poring over job listings. They travel on the cheap for weeks. They head back to school or volunteer at the neighborhood soup kitchen. And at least until the bank account dries up, they’re content living for today.”

And they’re going to keep staying happily unemployed until corporate America gives them something meaningful to do.  You may have thought “Pajama Boy” was a person. He’s a way of life.

By thumbing their noses at unemployment, they also are sending a message to corporate America, Logan said.

“People are saying screw it, and they’re leaving companies,” Logan said. “We need to figure out how to make companies work better for everybody. Until that happens … early retirements and furloughs are going to continue. People are going to opt out of the system.”

There’s nothing to worry about because if money runs low the Fed just prints some more! See? The movie you’re watching isn’t the “Grapes of Wrath”. That’s so 1930s. It’s the “Beverly Hillbillies” because as you know, the ’60s are back.  For some they never left.

Are we in the 1930s or the 1960s? Maybe the smart money’s on the 1930s.

First, the Fascists are on the rise, cleverly disguised as seemingly normal people. The German Foreign Minister has warned that the British Party UKIP and similar groups pose a threat to world peace. For al-Qaeda. Forget Syria. It’s them Bible clinging, God-loving, King and Country types what you got to watch out for.

Speaking on a visit to London for talks with William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, Mr Steinmeier said he was concerned about a drift towards scepticism that has aided parties such as Ukip, Germany’s AfD and the French Front National, and led Mr Cameron to offer an in/out referendum.

Instead of moving further apart, European nations should cooperate ever more closely, he said, adding that history has shown that when European countries do not have close relations, military conflict can arise. “History before the First World War was a history of not talking to each other, of nationalisms which could no longer be [tamed] by reason,” Mr Steinmeier said. “These dangers have to be forever banned.”

And the “H” word is back. There’s an actual Hitler on the rise, and in Asia too. No it’s not China. It’s Japan.

Seoul (AFP) – North Korea on Tuesday denounced Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as an “Asian Hitler” intent on amassing military power under the guise of ensuring regional stability.
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The attack in an editorial carried by the North’s official KCNA news agency followed commentary by the ruling party’s newspaper Rodong Sinmun last month that described Abe as a “militarist maniac” for trying to amend Tokyo’s pacifist constitution.

Meanwhile in other news, North Korea was reportedly “expanding its main launch site to permit more advanced missiles which may eventually be able to reach the United States, a think tank said Wednesday.”  Time to send Jimmy Carter back or at least Denis Rodman.

Analyzing satellite images of the Sohae launch site over the past two months, Johns Hopkins University’s US-Korea Institute said North Korea apparently tested a rocket engine needed for its road-mobile KN-08 intercontinental ballistic missile.

The evidence indicates that North Korea may be preparing “for a more robust rocket test program in the future,” said the institute’s blog, 38 North.

This expansion could involve “larger space launch vehicles and road-mobile ballistic missiles able to attack targets in Northeast Asia and the United States.”

Peace-loving countries like China continued to ramp up their military expenditures. China now spends more on its armed forces than Britain, France and Germany combined. Not to worry. Those countries are doing their part by continuing to maintain their vigilance against UKIP.  The New York Times describes the scale of China’s armament:

China already spends more on its military than any country in the world except the United States. Now, as defense budgets at the Pentagon and in many NATO countries shrink, China’s People’s Liberation Army is gearing up for a surge in new funding, according to a new report.

China will spend $148 billion on its military this year, up from $139.2 billion in 2013, according to IHS Jane’s, a defense industry consulting and analysis company. The United States spends far more – a forecast $574.9 billion this year – but that is down from $664.3 billion in 2012 after budget cuts slashed spending. By next year China will spend more on defense than Britain, Germany and France combined, according to IHS. By 2024, it will spend more than all of Western Europe, it estimates.

China’s on the moon. Europe’s never been there. Maybe that’s an argument for the 1960s. But the 30′s hypothesis has a lot going for it.  Even Antonin Scalia’s got the 1930s bug. He says that internments can happen again. “U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told law students at the University of Hawaii law school Monday that the nation’s highest court was wrong to uphold the internment of Japa­nese-Americans during World War II but that he wouldn’t be surprised if the court issued a similar ruling during a future conflict.”

Scalia was responding to a question about the court’s 1944 decision in Kore­ma­tsu v. United States, which upheld the convictions of Gordon Hira­ba­ya­shi and Fred Kore­ma­tsu for violating an order to report to an internment camp.

“Well, of course, Kore­ma­tsu was wrong. And I think we have repudiated in a later case. But you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again,” Scalia told students and faculty during a lunchtime question-and-answer session.

Scalia cited a Latin expression meaning “In times of war, the laws fall silent.”

Scalia clings to the quaint notion that the laws of men yield to those of physics and necessity. That is surely incorrect. It’s a betrayal of the notion that reality is whatever the law says it is. For example, we all know there’s no more war, only Lawfare. Why? Has Congress declared war lately? Glenn Greenwald recently denied selling classified NSA material on the grounds that it isn’t technically a sale. And recently al-Qaeda reportedly canceled the franchise of jihadi groups in Syria since the US military can only act against enemies defined as al-Qaeda. Greenwald knows how things work.

Greenwald, who is an attorney, acknowledged insisting on freelance contracts in order to supply the stories. However, he said that is itself a legal precaution aimed at ensuring that authorities treat him as a journalist and not as a source. Traditionally, sources have sometimes been subject to prosecution for disclosing secret documents, while the government has shied away from prosecuting those who act as journalists or publishers.

But maybe the problem with the modern world is that we’ve become too reliant on words; too dependent on spin. We’ve defined war, al-Qaeda and even unemployment out of existence. And we’ve redefined UKIP and Japan into modern day Hitlers. Therefore the problem is solved.

Is it really? The description formerly applied to those who had lost contact with reality was “mad”. Who was it that said “whom the gods wish to destroy they first put on funemployment?”

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IT’S COME TO THIS: School Officials Object To “No Guns” Signs Because They Have A Picture Of A Gun On Them. “Some find the sticker image disturbing.” And yet they probably make fun of the Victorians for sexual prissiness.

REASON NUMBER 173,321 FOR ABOLISHING OFFICIAL IMMUNITY: Scenes from a militarized America: Iowa family ‘terrorized.’

Watch this video, taken from a police raid in Des Moines, Iowa. Send it to some people. When critics (like me) warn about the dangers of police militarization, this is what we’re talking about. You’ll see the raid team, dressed in battle-dress uniforms, helmets and face-covering balaclava hoods take down the family’s door with a battering ram. You’ll see them storm the home with ballistics shields, guns at the ready. More troubling still, you’ll see not one but two officers attempt to prevent the family from having an independent record of the raid, one by destroying a surveillance camera, another by blocking another camera’s lens.

From the images in the video, you’d think they were looking for an escaped murderer or a house full of hit men. No, none of that. They were looking for a few people suspected of credit card fraud. None of the people they were looking for were inside of the house, nor was any of the stolen property they were looking for. They did arrest two houseguests of the family on what the news report says were unrelated charges, one for a probation violation and one for possession of illegal drugs.

A couple other points about this story. First, note that the police say they knocked and announced themselves before the raid. The knock and announce requirement has a long history in U.S. and English common law. Its purpose was to give the occupants of a home the opportunity to avoid property damage and unnecessary violence by giving them time to come to the door and let the police in peacefully. As you can see from the video, the knock and announce today is largely a formality. The original purpose is gone. From the perspective of the people inside, there’s really no difference between this sort of “knock and announce” and a no-knock raid.

I think I’m building an AI-directed facial-recognition taser setup that will tase anyone whose face is obscured. If the police knock and identify themselves, I’ll turn it off, of course.

MARK RIPPETOE: Squats, Presses, and Deadlifts: Why Gyms Don’t Teach the Only Exercises You Need.

News that Obamacare would cause the economy to shed 2.3 million jobs is being greeted with jubilation by some quarters.  This was foreseen long ago.  FactCheck.Org pointed out even in 2011 that unemployment is not the right word for the loss of remunerative activities caused by the program.  The word’s not “unemployment”. “That’s a distortion. CBO said some Americans would work less or leave their jobs if they can get health insurance outside the workplace.” It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

Employment is a prison, didn’t you know? Nancy Pelosi exults that breadwinners now can escape the confines of “job-lock”. The Washington Post reports on this wonderful new addition to the political lexicon.

“Yesterday, the CBO projected that by 2021 the Affordable Care Act will enable more than 2 million workers to escape ‘job-lock’ – the situation where workers remain tied to employers for access to health insurance benefits,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office said in a news release.

“Job-lock”. Now there’s a word. But it’s new days, mourning in America, the 21st century. A time of wonders and prodigies. Joblessness is no longer uncool but something everyone should look forward to.  Why, only the other day SFGate touted the benefits of “funemployment”.  It wrote about the wonderful new situation those who no longer have to work are finding themselves in. “People are saying screw it, and they’re leaving companies. We need to figure out how to make companies work better for everybody. Until that happens … early retirements and furloughs are going to continue. People are going to opt out of the system.”

One system you can’t opt out of though, is the Obamacare. Eugene Robinson says there’s no going back. Ever.

Now that the fight over Obamacare is history, perhaps everyone can finally focus on making the program work the way it was designed. Or, preferably, better.

The fight is history, you realize. Done. Finito. Yesterday’s news.

Any existential threat to the Affordable Care Act ended with the popping of champagne corks as the new year arrived. That was when an estimated 6 million uninsured Americans received coverage through expanded Medicaid eligibility or the federal and state health insurance exchanges.

Obamacare is now a fait accompli; nobody is going to take this coverage away.

That’s too bad. Because as John Podhoretz notes that the other thing the CBO report pointed out, besides the fact that the unemployment rolls would swell by 2.3 million, was there would be more people uninsured after Obamacare than before.

Even more damaging is this projection: “About 31 million nonelderly residents of the United States are likely to be without health insurance in 2024, roughly one out of every nine such residents.”

Why? Because, in selling the bill to the American people in a nationally televised September 2009 address, President Obama said the need for ObamaCare was urgent precisely because “there are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.”

Now the CBO is saying is that in 10 years, about the same number of people will lack insurance as before. This, after new expenditures of as much as $2 trillion and a colossal disruption of the US medical system.

So you go round in a circle, two trillion dollars poorer to wind up in exactly the same place. Except this time forever. What’s changed, besides insurance bailouts, data loss, penalties, higher premiums and more deductibles? Nothing. But Robinson’s right about one thing. Obamacare wants to stay. Insists on staying. Like some HAL 2000 it can’t be disconnected.

The Cato Institute notes that embedded in the Obamacare statue itself are provisions createing an Indepedent Payment Advisory Board whose decisions can’t be repealed. Not even by passing a law against it. Health care decisions are made by the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which in turns gives orders to the HHS Secretary. And not even Congress can overrule it.

IPAB consists of up to 15 unelected government “experts.” Its stated purpose is to restrain Medicare spending. If projected spending exceeds certain targets, Obamacare requires IPAB to issue “legislative proposals” to reduce future spending. Those proposals could include drastic cuts that jeopardize seniors’ access to care, leading some critics to label IPAB a “death panel.”

But the really dangerous part is that these are not mere “proposals.” Obamacare requires the secretary of Health and Human Services to implement them — which means they become law automatically — unless Congress takes certain steps to head them off. Congress may replace the Board’s proposal with its own cuts, at least initially. But Obamacare requires a three-fifths vote in the Senate to pass any replacement that spends more than the Board’s proposal. In other words, to override IPAB’s proposal completely, opponents must assemble a simple majority in the House and a three-fifths majority in the Senate and the president’s signature

Once an IPAB “death panel” condemns you — that’s it folks. It’s job lock over forever. Funemployment forever, here we come.

One group that wants out — despite Eugene Robinson’s belief that Obamacare is the Hotel California — are union supporters of president Obama himself. Steven Mufson and Tom Hamburger of the Washington Post explain:

Leaders of two major unions, including the first to endorse Obama in 2008, said they have been betrayed by an administration that wooed their support for the 2009 legislation with promises to later address the peculiar needs of union-negotiated insurance plans that cover millions of workers.

Their complaints reflect a broad sense of disappointment among many labor leaders, who say the Affordable Care Act has subjected union health plans to new taxes and mandates while not allowing them to share in the subsidies that have gone to private insurance companies competing on the newly created exchanges. …

“We want to hold the president to his word: If you like your health-care coverage, you can keep it, and that just hasn’t been the case,” said Donald “D.” Taylor, president of Unite Here, the union that represents about 400,000 hotel and restaurant workers and provided a crucial boost to Obama by endorsing him just after his rival Hillary Rodham Clinton had won the New Hampshire primary. …

“The unions here are asking to double dip,” said Robert Laszewski, a health policy consultant in Washington. “It is an unfair request. The Obama plan is very simple: If your employer pays for your health plan, you are not eligible for a government subsidy. What the unions are asking for is government and employers to fund their benefits.” …

During preparations for a September meeting of the AFL-CIO, administration officials lobbied to alter a resolution so that it called for repair, not repeal, of the health-care legislation. The resolution passed unanimously. At the meeting, O’Sullivan said, “We’ll be damned if we’re going to lose our health insurance because of un­intended consequences in a law. It needs to be changed, it needs to be fixed, and it needs to be fixed now.”

What? They don’t like it? The unions want an exemption? Well they won’t be the only ones. As is well known, Obama and many top Federal bureaucrats exempted themselves from this wonderful program from the beginning. Which only goes to show how beneficial it is. Why else would these hard working, selfless bureaucrats and union officials to pass up the chance of leisure and idle abundance that only an escape from the “job lock” can provide?

No. They must remain at their hardship posts posts.  For the doughty apparatchik stern duty calls and the pitiless requirements of public service means they must make the sacrifice and remaining laboring in the vineyards of the Lord.

… and then there’s Immigration Reform, which is the next attraction.

---

Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.

The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres

Rebranding Christianity for $3.99, or why the truth shall make you free

The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age

Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99, why government should get small

No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action.

Storm Over the South China Sea $0.99, how China is restarting history in the Pacific

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LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Nearly Half of America Lives Paycheck-to-Paycheck.

Perhaps things haven’t come all that far from the early days of hope and change, when this iconic photo captured the national mood.

THE HILL: CBO: ObamaCare Slowing Growth, Contributing To Job Losses. “The non-partisan group’s report found that the healthcare law’s negative effects on the economy will be ‘substantially larger’ than what it had previously anticipated. The CBO is now estimating that the law will reduce labor force compensation by 1 percent from 2017 to 2024, twice the reduction it previously had projected.”

UPDATE: This must have been painful for Chuck Todd to write: “CBO essentially reaffirms GOP talking points on health care. Says it will cost jobs, feel as if it raises taxes and contributes to deficit.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Flashback: FactCheck.Org: A ‘Job-Killing’ Law? House Republicans misrepresent the facts. Experts predict the health care law will have little effect on employment. So were these “fact-checkers” right about anything? Or were they just engaged to defend the Obama narrative until after the election?

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Going On 30, Living With Mom And Dad. “Perhaps a chunk of millennials will never catch up, our lives channeled by the deep grooves of an economic calamity forced upon us by the timing of our births and graduations.”

I once got a humorous column out of my unwillingness to provide my personal data to Healthcare.gov, which is now looking like a very smart move:

U.S. intelligence agencies last week urged the Obama administration to check its new healthcare network for malicious software after learning that developers linked to the Belarus government helped produce the website, raising fresh concerns that private data posted by millions of Americans will be compromised.

The intelligence agencies notified the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency in charge of the Healthcare.gov network, about their concerns last week. Specifically, officials warned that programmers in Belarus, a former Soviet republic closely allied with Russia, were suspected of inserting malicious code that could be used for cyber attacks, according to U.S. officials familiar with the concerns.

The federal government subcontracted out to Belarus?

Remakes are an inevitable part of the Hollywood development process, but for fans of the original films, said remakes are often horrifying. But few respond as passionately as producer David Seger did when he found out that Robocop was about to be “updated” for modern audiences.

Seger, who currently works as a commercial director after years of participating in the Los Angeles video community, assembled a team of 59 other collaborators for Our Robocop Remake, an unauthorized ode to the original 1987 film directed by Paul Verhoeven. Charging under the the banner of “If anyone is going to ruin Robocop, it’s going to be us,” the creators involved (including Cracked.com, Fatal Farms, Waverly Films, ScreenJunkies, JD Ryznar, Paul Bonanno, Team Tiger Awesome and The Indie Machines) each took a scene from the original film and remade it in their own way.

When you watch Our Robocop Remake, you get to see 10 Alex Murphys, 12 Broddickers, 15 Lewises, and 30 Robocops. The players include cartoons, puppets, babies, street dancers, a Robocop cosplayer (who drove from Arizona to Los Angeles to film his scene) and guys dressed in the official Robocop Halloween costume. The violent climax becomes a trippy video remix. There’s an original musical number. There’s even some modern dance.

Legally, ORR walks a fine line with regards to the rules about fair use and parody (especially as it does include original footage from the film and some copywritten music). But the endeavor is entirely not-for-profit: While the film screened several times over the last weekend in Los Angeles, and will be shown in New York on Wednesday, Feb. 5th, tickets are and were entirely free.

And they’ve gotten away with it before: ORR is a follow up to Our Footloose Remake, an equally unauthorized 2010 remake of the Kevin Bacon dance classic made in response to the 2011 remake directed by Craig Brewer.

According to Seger in a phone interview, the only legal blowback he and the OFR team experienced from that project was when the company behind the Footloose remake’s DVD release asked to interview them for a featurette about Footloose‘s cultural impact — only to be told, six weeks after being interviewed, that the company’s lawyers had forbidden their inclusion. “The legal department said we couldn’t show any of the footage or mention your remake at all,” he said.

ORR (as well as OFR) was made possible in no small part thanks to Channel 101, the 11-year-old screening series founded by Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon (the latter of whom is the once-ousted-but-back-again creator of NBC’s Community).

Channel 101′s premise is simple: People submit five-minute episodes of shows, ten are screened each month, and five are voted back to continue the next month. Over its run, Channel 101 has featured comedians like Jack Black and Sarah Silverman, but more importantly created a community of people passionate about having fun making videos — many of whom were contributors to ORR.

In fact, Seger did the numbers, and of the 60 scenes, 36 were made by currently active Channel 101 filmmakers, while seven were made by those who at one time had participated in Channel 101. Though the concept of a Channel 101 alumni participating in ORR was awkward for Seger to explain: “Once you catch the bug, you’re still submitting shows if you’re interested in doing something like [ORR],” he said.

Seger has been submitting to Channel 101 for eight years, even before he moved to Los Angeles, and creating shows for the community also was a help to him professionally. “Almost every job I’ve gotten in L.A. has been through doing stuff for fun at Channel 101,” he said.

This included working as Harmon’s assistant for the first two seasons of Community while also creating web content for the show, and Seger has continued to shoot behind-the-scenes and second-unit material. But on top of all that, plus producing ORR, he has an active Channel 101 series, Car-Jumper going.

“People ask why I keep submitting,” Seger said. “But it’s really satisfying to sit in a room and listen to people laugh at stuff you make.”

In fact, that’s a big factor in why he keeps producing projects like Our Robocop Remake. “I kind of love that stuff, and watching it with filmmakers, celebrating the effort we put into it. So many of us in this industry have to work stuff that isn’t necessarily fun. But this is such a fun thing — that’s why I got into making movies in the first place.”

Our Robocop Remake will not be available on DVD. But it will be released online, Seger promised, ad-free and “soon.” Meanwhile, they’re considering their own remake of Point Break, prior to the proposed plan to remake it officially, even though the official version, at this point, is “all talk.”

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