Obama's Star Wanes

Bob Robbins just sent me the following American Thinker piece by Lee Cary.

Cary writes:

"As the battle with McCain tightens, his demeanor is morphing into adolescent bravado in the form of trash-talking. For example, he reportedly stated that John McCain "doesn't know what he's up against" in this election and challenged him to stop questioning his character and patriotism...Obama's three-legged campaign strategy is in deep atrophy..."

Read it here.

Nice. But remember Sun Tzu's admonition: things often turn into their opposites. We must not let Obama's sociopathic "inner child" make us overconfident.

American Thinker on the Obama-Ayers Relationship

American Thinker's Thomas Lifson has a great blog on the relationship between radical Bill Ayers and Barack Obama in the failed educational experiment, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (h/t Bob Robbins):

"William Ayers, unrepentant terrorist and education professor, is once again being tied to Barack Obama in the public mind. Controversy builds over the withholding of the archives of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an expensive failed school reform effort headed by Obama and effectively run by Ayers, held by the library of the University of Illinois Chicago. Researchers who have gained access to a few documents recording the history of the project have found strong evidence of a very important working relationship between the two men on the project, Obama's sole claim to executive experience.

"Oddly enough, even though the project produced no measurable improvement in student performance according to its own final report, educators and administrators -- participants and grantees of the CAC -- were reported by outside monitors to be often "ebullient" about the activities. For insiders, it was an excellent adventure. For the pupils stuck in the failing public schools of Chicago, an ongoing, unrelieved disaster...

"Obama and his campaign long have gone out of their way to downplay, in fact distort, the long and evidently deep relationship between Ayers and Obama..."

Read it all here

Global Food Crisis Caused By Federal Reserve Bank

In a recent American Thinker post (hat tip Larwyn), JR Dunn is right to be concerned about potential United Nations and governmental interference in the food market, but in his capable discussion of causes of today's food shortages Dunn omits the fundamental cause: economic distortion or malinvestment for more than a decade due to the Federal Reserve Bank's monetary expansion. Those of us who remember the 1970s recall that the Nixon administration's monetary expansion's resultant price inflation was blamed on OPEC and oil prices. Dunn commits a similar fallacy and blames current food shortages on a litany of proximate causes,such as ethanol, which while important are not fundamental. Dunn is right that ethanol is a mistake that causes food shortages, but it is not the only mistake. For the past fifteen years, from America to China, economic resources have been diverted away from commodity and food production toward real estate investment and construction. In China, farmers have been uprooted to build dams and cities. In America, farmers have sold land to real estate developers. This amounts to malinvestment of artificially created credit. Now there are food shortages. The beneficiaries of the monetary expansion primarily have not been oil producing governments but Wall Street, hedge fund managers, real estate developers and the commercial banking system. Those who pay are those who cannot afford food now, those in dire poverty. Warren Buffett, George Soros and the new residents of Greenwich, Connecticut have waxed rich at the expense of those starving to death now.

Food shortages occur only if demand exceeds supply and supply cannot adjust. Several things can increase demand. These include the factors that Dunn enumerates in his blog: ethanol and the like. But in a free economy supply will expand to meet the higher demand. Supply shocks can be handled over a few year period. If this does not happen it is because there are blockages. None of the factors that Dunn enumerates explain the failure of farmers to anticipate or respond to shortages. Yet most economic theory suggests that firms are rational enough to at least approximately do this. What would explain farmers' hyper-irrationality? Distortion or malinvestment.

Worse, Dunn's analysis overlooks increasing prices across a range of commodities, not just food and oil. Gold has more than tripled in price in the past four years. Copper and other construction materials, rubber for instance, have increased since the millenium. The factors that Dunn enumerates do not explain an across-the-board increase in commodity prices. Does ethanol explain a three-fold increase in the price of gold?

Moreover, Dunn's discussion of OPEC omits the force of mistrust. OPEC has found it difficult to act in unison because of what game theorists call the prisoner's dilemma: economic actors find it difficult to act in unison in their own self interest when any one member can make side deals to sabotage collusion. That is why OPEC failed in the 1970s. Today, a broader swath of nations produce oil, so trust will be considerably less than it was then. Higher prices would motivate players to go behind the backs of their collaborators.

Dunn is correct to argue that the relationship between politics and food should be severed. But he omits the fundamental cause of the global food shortage: malinvestment away from commodity production toward real estate and stock market investment. This follows directly from Alan Greenspan's and Ben Bernanke's monetary policy, which is necessarily the cause of all general inflation.

President Bollinger's Criticism of Ahmadinejad Is Not Evidence of Academic Freedom at Columbia U

My wife's pal, Mary Anne, was going to visit us in Manhattan last night but couldn't because the streets were too jammed. At the invitation of Columbia's President Lee Bollinger, Iran's President Ahmadinejad was in town. As a result, Mary Anne couldn't find a taxi. It's been so long since she ventured into a subway that she forgot that she could take the cross-town shuttle. So she cancelled her visit. Unfortunately, President Ahmadinejad was not asked to cancel his.

I have previously blogged about President Bollinger's failure to protect Jim Gilchrist when student-thugs stopped Gilchrist from speaking at Columbia. President Bollinger has not invited any high profile conservatives or libertarians to Columbia, rather following Columbia's long tradition of paying special attention to the children of German romanticism, to include Nazis in the 1930s and Ahamdinejad now, and ignoring or suppressing the children of Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson.

Having invited President Ahmadinejad and having been subjected to criticism for doing so, President Bollinger aimed to show the world how robust academic debate at Columbia can be. He lanced President Ahmadinejad. The Chronicle of Higher Education (paid access)notes that President Bollinger called President Ahmadinejad "fanatical". President Ahmadinejad replied that President Bollinger had violated the rules of hospitality. President Ahmadinejad is apparently a supporter of academic collegiality, at least when he's not exterminating dissidents.

The New York Sun's reaction to President Bollinger's introduction was mixed. On the one hand, the Sun regrets that Columbia gave goose-stepping German romantics, common among Columbia's faculty, an opportunity to applaud at Ahmadinejad's holocaust denial. The quack academics' support "will be a gift to him that keeps on giving". The Sun argued that President Bollinger aimed to use Ahmadinejad's presence as a "teaching moment" especially in light of the widespread anti-Semitism among the Columbia faculty. President Bollinger strongly criticized President Ahmadinejad's holocaust denial conference and expressed "revulsion" for what President Ahmadinejad stands. According to the Sun, President Bollinger put Columbia' anti-Semitic Middle Eastern Studies department on the spot.

President Bollinger also criticized the incarceration of Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian-American employee of the left-wing Open Society Institute. President Bollinger also announced that Columbia was offering Tajbakhsh a teaching job.

President Bollinger's response to President Ahmadinejad raises several questions. First, why so much attention from the president of Columbia to the crackpot ideas of President Ahmadinejad? Such attention would be unnecessary were Columbia University committed to academic freedom. Were conservatives, libertarians and a range of views given free rein at Columbia, which suffers from the dominance of goose-stepping neo-German-romantics, then President Ahmadinejad wouldn't require the university president's attention. Second, from the standpoint of intellectual import, President Ahmadinejad deserves less, not more, attention from President Bollinger than does Jim Gilchrist. Third, there were a number of Ahmadinejad supporters in the audience, obviously a fringe, ideologically-obsessed segment of the public. Given this skewness, is Columbia University an institution that can be taken seriously?

Courtesy of Larwyn, quite a few bloggers have nailed this issue nicely. In Slate, Anne Appelbaum argues

"the novelty of Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia lies in the fact that he wanted to make that speech at all. Though a blustering Columbia dean foolishly told Fox News that "if he were willing to engage in a debate and a discussion," the university would happily invite Adolf Hitler to speak, too, it's impossible, in fact, to imagine the Führer accepting."

Hitler was really pre-television, while Ahmadinejad is post-World Wide Web. Perhaps Ahamdinejad's media strategy has more in common with Abraham Lincoln's. Lincoln nailed the presidential nomination when he came to New York to speak at Cooper Union. Whom or what country is President Ahmadinejad aiming to nail?

Arthur Herman in the New York Post calls Columbia's invitation to Ahmadinejad "abject, squalid and shameless", after a cowardly resolution by Oxford University's debating union in 1933 that it would not fight Hitler. Herman points out that Columbia bans ROTC but not President Ahamdinejad. While President Bollinger argues that a university is a forum for argument, Ahmadinjead is not a theorist, but a real-world murderer. Herman is in effect suggesting that the best people to argue the question of drug illegalization are not drug dealers and users, but people who have studied the problem academically. Or the right people to argue the case against the death penalty are not convicted murderers, and there is little or no free speech added to an invitation for a serial killer to speak on campus. The left views President Ahmadinejad as emblematic of an anti-capitalist struggle, and so implicitly applauds the incarceration of journalists, the holocaust denial and the thinly veiled threats of nuclear aggression.

Merv of PrairiePundit calls President Bollinger's invitation to President Ahmadinejad "corruption of academic culture" and "brainless activisim, not academic freedom". He notes that "professors seek publicity, not freedom". Prairiepundit mocks the "punk activism poisoning Ivy League faculties". Merv, quoting David Limbaugh, points out that the First Amendment does not oblige Columbia to invite President Ahmadinjead. He notes that "Contrary to the left's claims, there is nothing we can learn from Ahmadinejad that we don't already know -- at least not in this forum."

In contrast, Jules Crittenden raves about President Bollinger's speech. He notes:

"Among the many parts I liked, is this part where in plain terms he calls Iran the enemy in Iraq, and asks A’jad why he’s supporting terrorists who kill American troops. How come everyone else seems to have such a hard time saying that?"

Rick Moran of American Thinker quotes Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post calling Columbia's invitation to Ahmadinejad a disagrace:

"THE PROBLEM with Columbia's action, the reason that there can be no moral justification for the university's decision, is because by inviting Ahmadinejad to campus, Columbia has made the pros and cons of genocide a legitimate subject for debate. By asking Ahmadinejad challenging questions, Bollinger has reduced the right of the Jewish people to live to a question of preferences."

Moran goes on to quote several neo-German Romanticists such as Ezra Klein, who asks "When did America become so weak, so insecure, that we mistrust our capacity to converse with potentially hostile world leaders?" Perhaps an invitation to a university is unnecessary for conversation, though. And as Merv of Prairiepundit points out, we already know what President Ahmadinejad thinks. Perhaps Klein's neo-German-romantic appetite for holocaust denial was whetted during the Iranian holcaust denial conference last year. Or perhaps Klein want to see more evidence. Professor Julian Cole adds:

"Taking potshots at a bantam cock of a populist like Ahmadinejad is actually a way of expressing another, deeper anxiety: fear of Iran's rising position as a regional power and its challenge to the American and Israeli status quo."

Well, yeah. Hitler was a "bantam cock of a populist" too, Professor Cole. Shouldn't Neville Chamberlain have been afraid him? Or was Chamberlain right to follow an appeasement strategy?

Finally, Dinocrat quotes the lies about President Ahmadinejad's speech in the Iranian news agency, IRNA:

"…The audience on repeated occasion applauded Ahmadinejad..."