Sunday, February 20, 2011

The Morning Blog

Reading about Bahrain, I'm struck that it provides an excellent example of why autocracies fail: Governments that fail to accept political dissent leave their citizenry with no option other than mass protest. By failing to embrace a legitimate mechanism by which citizens can voice their concerns and work to resolve them, they put themselves in a position where sooner or later, the people will simply do what they feel is necessary and take to the streets. At this point, autocracies have no other option but to respond with violent police crackdowns because they have put themselves in a situation where essentially, debate is illegal. Furthermore, government pleas to open dialogues are complicated to say the least. Having never established a legitimate line of communication between the rulers and the ruled, they're faced with the very basic problem of "who the hell do we talk to about this?".

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia looks on with trepidation. Bahrain represents a serious challenge to them. One of the Saudis chief concerns is being encircled by countries allied with Iran. It seems as though this basically translates to them as "anywhere with uppity Shiites." Whether or not the Bahrain monarchy weathers this particular crisis is also going to be indicative to the Saudis as to how reliable American aid is. Ultimately, they will not let the monarchy fall:

“Saudi Arabia did not build a causeway to Bahrain just so that Saudis could party on weekends,” said Toby Jones, an expert on Saudi Arabia at Rutgers University. “It was designed for moments like this, for keeping Bahrain under control.”

Meanwhile, Madison continues to be yell-y. I'm almost tempted to say that I would prefer police violence to a speech by "Joe the Plumber". It's notable that labor leaders have said that they're willing to accept higher pension and health care costs. However they won't budge on the following contentious parts of the bill:

1) Giving up collective bargaining on any issues other than wages: I think that the unions are right to resist this. It's a cornerstone of...well, what Unions are! If workers wish to join a Union, they should absolutely be able to maintain this sort of ability.

2) Stop union dues being automatically deducted from state paychecks: Not such a legitimate beef. Seems like the unions can handle dues collection on their own. I don't see any reason why it should be the states responsibility to handle this for them. It's not like they're expected to handle dues collection for AAA or anything. Why should Unions be special?

3) Holding annual elections to determine that state workers still want to be part of the union: I have absolutely not problems with this part of the bill whatsoever. The only reason employers (public or private) work with unions is explicitly because their employees demonstrate an interest in belonging to one. If a majority of employees don't want to spend money on belonging to a group that they don't feel serves their best interests, I see no reason why they should be forced to. If there's a better way to determine this than an annual ballot, I'd be happy to hear it.

In government transparency news; the government may have been swindled out of millions buying anti-terrorism technology that promised clearly magical results. Are they trying to get the money back? Nope. In fact, they've gone so far as to get two judges to issue orders barring information on the technology from being revealed in court citing "national security". Pretty much what happens when you throw billions of dollars at a bureaucrat: they have to BUY SOMETHING, ANYTHING, WHATEVER, WHAT HAVE YOU GOT FOR SALE?!?!?! if they're going to justify receiving the same budget next year. Currently, the proprietor of the technology is facing charges on passing $1.8 million in bad checks at Las Vegas casinos by the way.

Speaking of Nevada: Every state is facing serious revenue shortfalls right now. What's the best way that the Nevada legislature can think of to insure that taxes keep on coming in? Cutting funding for the treatment of gambling addiction of course! They collect quite a bit of revenue from slot machines! Might as well make sure it keeps coming in!

In the event you haven't got a crossword to keep you busy this Sunday, here are games from the World Memory Championship.

What were we talking about again?

Sarah Bait: This strikes me as a very, very weird local story. It's not the sort of neighborhood where you'd expect people to have...well, arsenals frankly.

This is utterly and totally inappropriate. That's all that can be said about it.

Here's what happened in the last 24 hours.

Scenes from the world's largest dump.

As a contrast, here's an expose on the life of the worlds richest man.

This has been kicking around for a bit and I've been following it a bit lazily. A website has used crowd funding to get sufficient funds raised to commission a statue of Robocop in Detroit. If you're interested, you can make a donation here. At a time when Detroit is facing enormous problems, does it really need a statue of a robot from the 1980s? Yeah, actually it does. Robocop is awesome. Everything about this idea is awesome. People independently raising funds for something as ultimately cool as a statue in honor of Detroit's greatest cyborg is....oh just so neat. I love it.

Words of the Week.

And finally...

Ever feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders?

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