Maggie's Farm

Michael Yon's independent dispatches from the war fronts are invaluable, and worth hitting his tip jar to support.

His latest, for example, addresses the political economics of suicide bombing:

Suicide attackers come in different “grades.”  Some are illiterate, unsophisticated people, unsuited for complex targeting.  A plotter could not expect to select an illiterate village boy from the hinterlands of Zabul Province to move to Florida, obtain a place to live and begin flight training to crash airplanes into buildings.

Young boys and women come cheaper, used for tactical targets. The college-educated are reserved for the more strategic. Some are strapped into locked vests or their families held hostage, but most are part of a cult.

Dogs have been trained to carry bombs to attack enemies for decades.  The Soviets and others have used dogs as low-tech smart bombs.  Yet canine platoons likely would rebel if they caught scent they were being duped to die.

Today, more sophisticated people employ men (mostly) to deliver bombs in Afghanistan.  Gullible souls are selected, conditioned, trained and deployed.  Malleable minds are identified then loaded with psychic software that uses their minds to create a vision.  Evil persons of superior intellect identify the raw material—that raw material might be an engineer from a stable family—and trains them to fetch myths.

But, even cults have their limits of utility.  The Taliban are Jim Jonesing themselves.

The impact of their KoolAid on Americans backfired:

There was a time when Americans seemed to view suicide attacks as a sign of the complete conviction of the enemy, an immutable dedication to their cause that many people found terrifying and cause for soul-searching.  “What could we have done to provoke such anger?” Yet with time, American views of suicide attacks have matured and become more grounded....Overuse of suicide attackers does not appear to cause Americans to cower, but to evoke Americans to want to kill the perpetrator.

As it is did on Iraqis and now Afghans:

The Taliban’s efforts at repackaging themselves as kinder, gentler mass-murderers is failing.  Their suicide bombing campaign is backfiring.  The Taliban are losing their cool.  Something is in the air.  The enemy remains very deadly, yet the scent of their weakness is growing stronger while our people close in.

$3-trillion of actual public pension liabilities on top of $trillions of actual ObamaCare costs and $trillions of ObamaCare taxes.

All private and public pension funds took a shellacking over the past few years.  Tougher accounting rules are leading private pension funds to decrease risk, and thus the required contributions, by reducing their percentage of funds in stocks.  Public pension funds, by contrast, are increasing the risks they are taking, to reduce voting taxpayers’ sticker shock at the unsustainable promises made to government employees.

Greenwich Associates, one of the top investment research firms, calls it a “swing-for-the-fences” attempt to avoid fiscal realities.

Public funds appear to be banking on the fact that the investment strategies they are implementing will help shore up solvency ratios by generating returns that far outpace the market. Municipal pension funds last year said they expect their investment portfolios to beat relevant benchmarks by 160 basis points — up from a 132 bps expectation in 2008. Public funds with assets of $500 million or less increased their stated expected outperformance to a staggering 180 basis points in 2009 from an already aggressive 135 bps in 2008. "These are very aggressive expectations," says Greenwich Associates consultant Chris McNickle. "Most investment managers struggle to generate the levels of outperformance expected by institutional investors; it would be rarer still for an entire portfolio to achieve that level of outperformance for any number of years." [Note: bps = 1/100^th of 1%, so 180bps = 1.8%]

The American Enterprise Institute’s study says that, contrary to public pension funds’ official accounting that they are about $½-trillion in actuarial deficit, their actual deficit is closer to $3 trillion.

The problem is fundamental: According to accounting rules adopted by the states, a public sector pension plan may call itself "fully funded" even if there is a better-than-even chance it will be unable to meet its obligations….

Public pension plans are hiding behind unrealistically low deficit figures. This allows policy makers to dodge difficult choices today at the cost of a much heavier burden on taxpayers in the future.

Today’s California Field Poll cooperates in the sham. In the face of a projected $20-billion shortfall, expected to continue in future years, Californians are more likely to support budget cuts than two-years ago, but still only two areas gain even marginal majority support for cuts, prisons and parks. Notably lacking from the poll questions of areas to cut is public employee pensions.

Some states and localities are trying to make adjustments to future pension liabilities to their employees, but the adjustments are relatively minor in comparison to the burden on and cuts to other government services.

Top that off with the new huge budget burdens upon the states mandated by ObamaCare’s expansion of Medicaid eligibility. Fourteen states are already suing to block ObamaCare’s effects on the states. For example, the Christian Science Monitor reports:

The suit says that, under the new law, Medicaid rolls in Florida are expected to increase dramatically. The corresponding soaring costs [already 26 percent of Florida’s annual budget] will fall increasingly on the Florida treasury, but state officials will have less authority to set priorities….

The lawsuit says this amounts to an unconstitutional exercise of federal power that violates principles of federalism protected in the 10th Amendment. It says the healthcare reform bill commandeers the states and their employees as agents of the federal government’s regulatory scheme, and that it does so at the state’s own cost.

Actually, at the cost of schools, roads, policing, and other high-priority government services.  The number of government employees, however, keeps increasing while the number of taxpaying workers decreases and their taxes increase.

Wake up and smell the tea.

Your Pennies at Work: UNICEF Funds Hate TV for Palestinian Kids:

"So the next time anyone — even someone short and cute — asks you for pennies for UNICEF, tell them about PYALARA and Palestinian hate TV for kids, and ask them to donate their allowances to another worthier children’s charity."

The best-named blog in the blogosphere is gone: "The Conspiracy To Keep You Poor And Stupid" by my friend Don Luskin.

Don got me started in blogging in October 2004, when he posted a long, documented  piece by me about the Swiftboat hypocrisy of the New York Times and its then ombudsman (also erroneously called its public editor).

I just received the following two emails from Don:

#1: Bruce, after 8 years at it, I’ve made the decision to stop blogging. It was great at the beginning when blogging was new and I had a lot of time on my hands. But since then my business has expanded dramatically, and I now have media platforms with the WSJ, NRO, SmartMoney and CNBC. Also, Google has announced various technology changes to the software that would require a lot of work to adapt to, so I just decided to let it go.

#2: [Reply to what happens to the blog name]: I guess if someone made me an offer I couldn’t refuse then I wouldn’t refuse, but…

Don Luskin (bio) knows a thing or three about making money.

The bidding is open.  Or, will Don contribute the proceeds to a cause that works to end the Conspiracy?  Or, will Don designate a heir?

There’s no replacing Don Luskin’s blog.  But, there is carrying on to end the Conspiracy To Keep You Poor And Stupid. The conservative and libertarian sides of the blogosphere have come a long way forward over the past years, so I can see Don’s logic, always sound.  But while losing Don, his contributions have been seminal.  Thank you Don.