Is Google Smart or What?

Earlier this week a new website went up. It is usgovernmentrevenue.com. It uses the technology developed for usgovernmentspending.com and applies to it government taxes and revenue.

Announcing usgovernmentrevenue.com!

Now you can go to usgovernmentrevenue.com and get the scoop on government receipts for all governments, federal, state, and local in the United States. Right now the data is complete for 1970 to 2013. Our crack data analysis team is extending the reach of the data by ten years every day. So tonight we should have data back from 1960 online.

And you can get all the graphs and charts you could imagine.

This is the website that could save the planet.

Of course, as soon as we got the domain name propagated across the internet, our crack sitemap team at usgovernmentrevenue.com immediately set up a site map and sent it to Google.

Oh all right. I admit it. That’s not quite true. We tried to set up the site with Google about 8 hours after the usgovernmentrevenue.com domain had been created and ran into a brick wall. The servers at Google said they’d never heard of it. So we had to wait a couple of hours for Google’s domain servers to catch up. Imagine!

Today is a day which will live in history.

Today the first Google Search was recorded on SiteMeter. Amazing, you might say, for a site up only a few days. How did the eager searcher have the patience to dig down through pages and pages of search results to find usgovernmentrevenue.com?

Ah, ye of little faith. Have you no confidence in Google?

Someone did a search for “historical federal revenues graph” and Google put usgovernmentrevenue.com as the #1 search item.

Is Google smart or what? They just know what’s important.

Are We Safe, Mr. President?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) tells it like it is. Yesterday, he told his colleagues on the Senate floor:

“Is the war in Iraq making America safer? By all accounts, the answer…is ‘no.’”

He’s right, of course, but for the wrong reason. Of course the Iraq War isn’t making us safer, not in the sense that seatbelts make us safer.

But it is pretty certain that a pullout from Iraq, as Gen. Petraeus testified yesterday, would make us less safe.

The war in Iraq is a battle in the great western war of conquest, the war of the modern commercial world of cities and trading against the ancient world of tribe and pillage.

The Middle East is the last holdout against this vast project and so that is where the battle is being joined.

Five hundred years ago when traders from Europe wanted to trade with the fabulously rich country of India they had to wait until they could do ocean navigation, build ships big enough to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian Ocean. They had to do that because the rapacious rulers of the Middle East, like robber barons in the mountain passes of the Alps, took too much in tribute from the trade between India and Europe to make it worthwhile.

Yesterday General Petraeus reported on the gradual progress that the United States is making in Iraq. Nobody can know if it will all work out.

So we cannot know if we are safer.

But we do know that the world of cities and freedom and trading and trust, and the world of the western team is our way. And the world of the tribe, of piracy and slavery and plunder, is their way.

Some people say that there is no good reason for the conflict in the Middle East. Maybe there isn’t

But we know that the west has always needed a navy and an army to enforce its regime of trading and trust. So why should things be any different now?

The Real Meaning of Honor

Honor is a much abused word.

Mostly it is abused by people who say: How dare you question my honor?

Honor, according to James Bowman in Honor: A History, is bravery in men and chastity in women. If you think that’s all baloney, then try telling a man he’s a wimp and a woman she’s a whore and see where it gets you.

The point is this. Honor in men is the absolute commitment not to break and run when standing shoulder to shoulder with his fellow soldiers in the face of certain death.

It was honor, writes W. Thomas Smith, that made John McCain refuse the Vietnamese offer of a ticket home.

Wracked with dysentery, having been tortured as a POW for nearly eight months (he would be imprisoned for another five years), at times suicidal... and beaten and bayoneted during his capture; McCain simply said “no.”

McCain’s honor saved him from the dishonor of providing the North Vietnamese with a stunning propaganda stunt, to

Show the world a “merciful” North Vietnamese government, while simultaneously creating a sense among other American prisoners that the “blue bloods” among the POW ranks would easily accept preferential treatment.

John McCain’s father was an admiral, at that time commander of naval forces in the Pacific. Imagine what the anti-war folks could have done with that.

However politics or business may work, an armed service needs people of honor. It is not a noble thing, but a practical thing.

Putting others ahead of oneself, being honest, and – to borrow an oft-uttered phrase – “being a Boy Scout” is a part of the mix which drill instructors have always tried to whip into raw recruits. Moral men simply make better, more-disciplined fighters who will put the unit above themselves. So as a consequence, former fighters are, more often than not, going to be good, moral people.

Of course, our liberal masters don’t really like this. They understand that the spirit of honor that permeates the armed forces is a culture that could one day be turned upon them.

That is why they work so hard to attack the US Armed Forces whenever they are accused of wrongdoing.

More People Entering Work Force

The unemployment rate was out today, up to 5.1 percent. As usual the headline “80,000 Jobs Slashed” was not the important story.

If you look at the Labor Department’s press release (archived) you will see that the interesting number is in the Household Data. It shows that the Civilian labor force increased by 410,000 last month and that the number of people “not in labor force” declined by 225,000.

What does that mean? Does it mean that people are flooding into the labor force looking for jobs so they can avoid foreclosure on their homes? Does it mean that people see job opportunities? Does it mean that laid-off people are starting new businesses?

At this time of the business cycle, the numbers in the Household Survey (from a BLS survey of households) are typically more optimistic than the numbers in the Establishment Survey (from a survey of employers). But what does that mean?

Anyway, the stock market is going sideways today. That’s because the unemployment rate is usually considered a lagging indicator. Financial markets are typically looking round the corner, six months to a year ahead.

The trouble is that you can’t really see what’s round the corner. That is why markets fluctuate.

Who's The Fighter?

Academics and government employees like Barack Obama for president, writes Michael Barone, because they are peacable souls who don’t like conflict.

Academics and public employees (and of course many, perhaps most, academics in the United States are public employees) love the arts of peace and hate the demands of war.

Of course there is more than sentiment here. War competes for public-sector dollars with education and domestic government programs.

But Clinton and McCain are fighters. They appeal to the Scotch Irish types in America, the kind of people who supported Andrew Jackson went he ran against John Quincy Adams for president in 1828.

Jacksonians, in contrast, place a high value on the virtues of the warrior and little value on the work of academics and public employees. They have, in historian David Hackett Fischer’s phrase, a notion of natural liberty: People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor. If someone infringes on that liberty, beware: The Jacksonian attitude is, "If you attack my family or my country, I’ll kill you."

In other words, if Obama gets to be the Democratic nominee for president we really will have a choice not an echo.

In my view, the idea that academics prefer the arts of peace is a little overdrawn. Academics have been ruthless in their purging of conservative voices in the academy and in their general marginalization of conservative ideas. And when it comes to opposing reform of the welfare state they stop at nothing.

But academics like to have someone else do the dirty work for them: policemen, tax collectors, and human rights commissions.

But I get the point.

Dem Divide: It Really Isn't Funny

It’s easy for Republicans to snigger at the problems the Democrats are having in nominating a candidate for president.

After all, they deserve it. For forty years since the civil rights era they have sat at the political table and played race card after race card.

Har, har, they would say to the white-faced players at the table as they cleaned up, and not just money, but power and the love of beautiful women.

But now it is looking as if their race politics is forcing the Democrats to nominate a very not-ready-for-prime-time candidate for president.

And there’s nothing the Democrats can do about it. That’s because their candidate is black. If the Democratic superdelegates ditch Obama—for another flawed candidate—then they are risking the fundamental base of their party support, the almost unanimous support of the black electorate. James Edmund Pennington calls it the Democrats’ devil’s bargain,

[the] devil’s bargain with American blacks, a bargain that promises, in exchange for nearly all black votes all the time, fealty to certain imperatives, be it a continuation of social policies that are poisonous to blacks and the nation, silence and denial in the face of widespread destructive behavior patterns at the root of much of the black American dilemma, obsequious veneration of hate mongering, racial arsonist black "leaders", or, as in the case of Obama, the nomination of dangerously untested, thinly-resumed candidates who may be deeply flawed and unelectable. For forty years this has been the bargain and it must hold now.

Devil’s bargains end in an almighty smash-up. When it comes, it’s not going to be at all funny.

But let’s face it, American blacks were going to have to come face to face with reality, the reality that life is not just race and slavery and Jim Crow and discrimination.

Why not this year?

Education vs. Family

In the sleeper movie hit “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” the heroine Toula breaks away from her imprisonment in the family Greek restaurant by getting some computer classes at the local college.

That’s a common pattern, a liberal friend told me. Children who don’t get an education are stuck in the ghetto of their family and don’t “get on.”

But for me, a light went off. For if the mission of the university is to break children away from their traditional family community, then isn’t the mission of every liberal program the same? Whether it’s education, health care, or welfare, every government dollar loosens a woman’s tie (and it’s usually a woman) to her family.

Isn’t that just what liberals want?

The question is: how much of a good thing is this, really? We westerners may all agree that it’s important to free women from patriarchal domination. But when does a government program get to the point of breaking up family ties so much that children grow up stunted from lack of parental attention, as Minette Marrin argues.

Increasingly it seems parents can’t or won’t spend time and care on their children. Increasingly both parents are working; increasingly single parents are anxious, harried and time-poor; increasingly children are consigned to inadequate day care and nurseries; increasingly they are offered wraparound educare (promoted by Gordon Brown [and Hillary Clinton]). Increasingly we see the results.

Many of us take it for granted that it is a good idea for adults to have independent fulfilling careers and consign their children to the care of help professionals. But there seems to be a cost.

[H]alf of all toddlers arrive at primary school unable to speak properly for their age. Their numbers are growing. To say this suggests a widespread failure of socialisation is surely an understatement.

When you take people away from their families and put them into institutional settings, be it childcare, school, factory, or office park, you lose something.

And we did not just get here by accident. We got here because the progressive class wanted us here.

The job of conservatives in the next few years is to develop a compelling critique of the liberal world in which we live. Then we should offer the American people a way out of this death spiral. We should offer them family and hope.