The Eastland and Government Regulation

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the capsizing of the S.S. Eastland in the Chicago River, trapping and drowning 844 passengers, most of whom were Western Electric employees on a family picnic.  Of the 844, most were women and children and over 250 were teenagers or young children.  This disaster has a place along with the Chicago Fire and the Iroquois Theater fire as the deadliest and most scarring in Chicago history.  The photos found on the internet of bodies being recovered still haunt today, and recently actual film footage was recently discovered in Europe (www.eastlanddisaster.org).

For years, many theories and myths surrounded the causes of the disaster.  A common tale passed down was that the passengers all moved to one side of the boat to witness a commotion on land.  That theory turned out to be a myth.  In 2005, George Hinton published a well researched book, Eastland: Legacy of the Titanic.  Hinton documented the construction and history of the ship and consulted with maritime engineers.   The Eastland had a history of stability issues from the start.  But the government regulation that required a place in a lifeboat for every passenger turned out to be a major contributor to this catastrophe [although that conclusion has been disputed by Michael McCarthy in his recent book : Ashes Under Water: The SS Eastland and the Shipwreck that Shook America].  The Eastland was not designed to carry the lifeboats and could not handle the additional bulk and weight.   As a result, in a matter of minutes, on that fateful July day, hundreds of lives were cruelly snuffed out.

We should never forget that tragedy.  But we should also never forget the real consequences when government regulation is blindly applied.  As Nassim Taleb so wisely noted in his book Antifragile, government often inadvertently and tragically increases risks when trying to control them.

If You Like Your Centrifuges, You Can Keep Your Centrifuges... Really

There are lots of happy faces in Tehran this week.   Not since the U.S.S.R. invaded Afghanistan and deployed intermediate range missiles in Eastern Europe have I so feared for the survival of the West.   Fortunately, we had Reagan and Thatcher (and Helmut Kohl) to pull our chestnuts out of the fire that time.   Despite the howling of the nuclear freeze crowd and the overt mocking of Ronald Reagan as the "amiable dunce" and the "simpleton warmonger,"  Reagan knew when to compromise and when to walk from a deal, as he wisely did in Reykjavik when he refused to commit not to deploy the strategic defense initiative (derided by Ted Kennedy and others as "Star Wars."

Well, the nuclear freeze, medal tossing folks are in charge of our national security now and it shows.  Less than 90 days after the Chinese launch a major cyberattack on a pitifully exposed OPM database protected by a washed up school administrator, the Iranians, starting from a position of complete weakness, and on their knees economically, ran the table on Team Obama.   Others have written more fulsome analyses of this catastrophic "deal" so I will just highlight the few points that I find most repugnant.

• $140 billion signing bonus.  Money is fungible.  Tehran has extended a line of credit to Bashar al-Assad.   Therefore, the United States is a large financier of terrorism in the Middle East.  For the sake of full transparency, I propose that all Hamas missiles now bear, "Financed by U.S.A. and E.U." labels on them.
• We left 4 Americans hostage in Iran that were not part of the deal.  Perhaps we should be thankful that the mullahs did not demand more.  But we released 5 Gitmo jihadis for deserter Bergdahl because of our commitment to "do everything we can to bring him home."  To facilitate this "deal," however, the 4 Americans can rot.  
• The U.S. has committed to cooperate with Iran to thwart Israeli sabotage to their nuclear program.  Evidently, Stuxnet really pissed off the mullahs.  So, now we have to turn our friends, the Israelis in to the authorities if they try that again.  The mullahs now want us to take on the role of Capos, which we have agreed to do.
• After the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey exclaimed, "Under no circumstances should we relieve pressure on Iran relative to ballistic missile capabilities and arms trafficking," we promptly agree to the military embargo in 5 years and ballistic missile technology in 8.  So, Obama is willing to sunset restrictions on a terror state and give an explicit timetable for that expiration.  For the Canadians that want to build an oil pipeline in the U.S., however, Obama grants no such timetable for relief.

Of course, Team Obama framed this up as a take this deal or war choice, which was a false choice, and always was.  There were plenty of options other than total war that were available to us.   

This "deal" confers legitimacy and power on a tyrannical and authoritarian regime that remains committed to destroying Israel AND the United States.  It all but ensures that Iran will become a nuclear power and sooner rather than later and cements the hold of the regime on that country.  

Eventually, Israel will have to take matter into its own hands.   If we learned one thing from the Third Reich, it's that evil people most often mean what they say.

Neville Chamberlain, you've been one upped.

Words and Symbols

I was taken aback by the Pope Francis's full throated attack on capitalism a couple of weeks ago and wrote a spirited response to His Holiness.  His views were not simply an appeal for people to do more to help the poor, but an assault on capitalism itself.  This assault came within weeks after I attended a panel discussion of three Nobel Laureates who showed that capitalist reforms were responsible for lifting hundreds of millions out of abject poverty in China, India and elsewhere and that it is starting to do the same in Africa.

The Pontiff ratcheted up the rhetoric on his trip to South America, deriding the pursuit of money as "the dung of the devil." His words harkened to Hugo Chavez's attack on George Bush at the U.N. in '06,"The devil came here yesterday.  And it smells of sulphur still today."  Chavez further skewered Bush, "As the spokesman for imperialism, he came to....preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation, and pillage of peoples of the world."  The Pontiff echoed these thoughts almost precisely, "Once capital becomes an idol and and guides people's decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and women, it destroys human fraternity, it sets people against one another and, as we clearly see, it even puts at risk our common home."  The Pope went on to call for "overthrowing an empire of money," and denounced "the new colonialism."   His themes and even his choice words were virtually indistinguishable from those of Chavez;  the former Venezuelan president has evidently been reincarnated with a miter.  

But it gets even worse.  Over the last few weeks we were caught up in the symbolism of the Confederate flag because many found that it symbolized slavery and bigotry.  I understand the power of symbols. When Evo Morales, president of Brazil  offered a gift of a crucifix shaped like a hammer and sickle to the Pope, while initially surprised, accepted it and later affirmed that he was not offended by it.

By heritage, I am part Lithuanian and Polish and grew up in a neighborhood with others from the former Eastern bloc.  I heard the stories of the murder, torture and starvation perpetrated by the Stalin regime under the symbol of the hammer and sickle.  My best friend's father witnessed his buddy shot in the head on a road in the Ukraine by the KGB.  The parents of another childhood friend of mine escaped one of Stalin's concentration camps in Siberia, and were chased by dogs through the woods before it to America.  Because they were schoolteachers, they were deemed part of the intelligentsia and would certainly have been killed.  There were millions like them that suffered under the boot of Communism (for an excellent novelization of the Lithuanian deportations, read Between Shades of Grey by Ruta Sepetys).

The hammer and sickle represent death, torture, and tyranny to me and nearly everyone I grew up with.  It is no less offensive to me than the swastika is to a Jew.  That the Pope chooses words that are nearly identical to those of Hugo Chavez and chooses to accept a symbol of death to my people tells me that I may not have a place in this Church while he is its leader.  His recent exhortations are antithetical to all the values I hold dear.  Indeed, freedom, democracy and capitalism have provided a decent, dignified life and have liberated more people across the globe than any other system.  It is the brutal, corrupt regimes that fly under the banner of the hammer and sickle that crush the human spirit, brutalize and impoverish.  As a result, I am taking a sabbatical, a trial separation from the Catholic Church and I do not know if I will be back.  I cannot be part of an organization that would so willingly embrace the symbols of totalitarianism and reject the things I hold most dear. 

Getting It So Wrong!

It's been a tough few weeks for advocates of individual liberty, capitalism, and the rule of law.   The competency and fiscal responsibility of the State has been on full display over the past few weeks.  Yes, government tried to make us feel better by bathing the White House in multicolored lights to celebrate the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage and there was lots of self righteousness on display as South Carolina was pressured to pack up its Confederate battle flag (has anyone even thought about that flag over the past 20 years?) in the wake of the tragic killing of 9 black churchgoers by a lone sick white supremacist.

But instead of all the hoopla over 150 year old flag, perhaps a better discussion should be around risk assessment and the competency of the state to deal with those risks.

And this administration's batting average in its priorities and actual actions in this area have been atrocious and, indeed, frightening.

• Yesterday, Katherine Archuleta, director of OPM resigned after it was discovered that the Chinese had hacked into the OPM system and swiped the records of 21 million federal employees, which records included sensitive information and social security numbers.  Many have called this intrusion the equivalent of Pearl Harbor, yet we get no statement or strategy from the President.  This fiasco comes on the heels of the botched rollout of the Obamacare website.  Perhaps Archuleta and Sebelius should start an IT consulting firm that develops websites that are too clunky to be hacked.
• After mocking Romney mercilessly for asserting that Russia is our largest geopolitical threat, Obama's nominee to the head the Joint Chiefs now says that Russia poses an existential threat to the U.S. and that it's recent geopolitical actions are, "nothing short of alarming."
• Of course, Obama's derision of ISIS as the J.V. stands as one of the largest blunders in assessment of all time as ISIS continues to ravage whole swaths of the Middle East and North Africa, murdering and destroying antiquities in the greatest display of genocide since Srebrenica.  After months of admitting he had no strategy, Obama last week said that "Ideologies are not defeated with guns.  They are defeated by better ideas and more attractive and more compelling vision."  That was it.  After months of not having a strategy, our strategy appears to rely on Obama's powers of persuasion.  Good luck with that.
• Now we learn that the South Carolina shooter, Dylan Roof's background should not have permitted him to have a firearm but that the FBI did not log him properly into its system.  So we can pass laws and take down flags if that makes us feel better, but again, lack of execution on the part of the government has turned out to be the real culprit.
• Undeterred by the consequences of the last time government meddled in housing markets, the Obama administration launched new rules attempting once again to discover "patterns of segregation".  It is a heavy handed way to force upper crust communities to house the poor in their midst.   Evidently current fair housing laws aren't enough, so the federal government has to meddle even more into people's local communities. What could possibly go wrong?
• Kate Steinle, a beautiful young woman, dies in her father's arms, crying, "Daddy, help me" after an illegal immigrant shoots her in the back.  The perpetrator was deported multiple times but was protected by San Francisco under its "sanctuary (read: defy federal law) laws."   There is no comment from President Obama (Maybe, "she was a beautiful young woman just like my daughter").   Why is it not OK for a state to defy federal law on gay marriage but it is fine for local governments to defy federal law on immigration?
• After Ferguson, the Obama justice department descends on local police departments to ensure that police aren't unfairly singling out black youths for heavy handed treatment (while offering no evidence that this was epidemic).  The result-- murder rates and violent crimes have spiked. Obama policies have actually caused more deaths in the black community.
• The Iranian negotiations drag on despite the ridiculous demands of the mullahs and our constant retreats.  No anytime anywhere verifications.  No divulging history of its past nuclear activities.  No "snap back sanctions."  A $150 billion signing bonus.  All while the Iranians affirm their commitment to wipe Israel off the face of the map and their parliament and citizens are chanting "Death to America."  The esteemed Henry Kissinger and George Shultz have warned Obama not to do this deal.  Yet he plows ahead anyway.

This is just a depressing sample of the horrendous judgment (and misjudgment) of this administration.  I can't remember a president that was so consistent in making bad calls, and then either having no strategy, or a strategy that is certain to result in the opposite of what is intended.