It looks obvious

A should be simple upgrade of the blog’s platform become a rather hectic mess today, but with the assistant of my hosting service everything seems to be in order now. In the meantime here are some links I collected today: 

A new research that checked people cooperations in different cultures had rather interesting finding:

Researchers use economic games to investigate how people cooperate in real-life. Now a team led by Benedikt Herrmann, at the University of Nottingham, have identified striking differences in the way university students from different countries play one such game known as The Public Goods Game. Compared with students from developed Western nations, students from less democratic countries like Saudi Arabia, Oman and Belarus tended to punish not only free-loaders, but also cooperative players, with the result that cooperation in their groups plummeted.

[...]

When players had the option to punish, the groups tended to display more cooperation, which is consistent with past research showing that the ability to punish can help foster cooperative behaviour. However, in some countries, ’selfish’ players also punished cooperative players, perhaps as a means of revenge for punishments they had suffered, or maybe as a way of punishing do-gooders for showing them up. The researchers called this ‘anti-social punishment’, and the groups where this occurred tended to cooperate less.

Anti-social punishment occurred more in those countries, including Belarus and Saudi Arabia, shown by surveys to have less faith in the rule of law and less belief in civic cooperation. In a commentary on the findings, published in the same journal, Herbert Gintis of the Sante Fe Institute, said the results challenge the way people have tended to view capitalist democracies. "The success of democratic market societies may depend critically upon moral virtues as well as material interests, so the depiction of civil society as the sphere of ‘naked self-interest’ is radically incorrect," he wrote.

I saw two interesting stories related to Clinton’s campaign today. The first, how ironic, discuss the fact that Clinton’s campaign is failing to pay its share in its employees healthcare insurance:

Among the debts reported this month by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s struggling presidential campaign, the $292,000 in unpaid health insurance premiums for her campaign staff stands out.

Clinton, who is being pressured to end her campaign against Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination, has made her plan for universal health care a centerpiece of her agenda.

[...]

But the unpaid bills to Aetna were at least two months old, according to FEC filings.

They show the campaign ended last year owing Aetna more than $213,000 for “employee benefits.”

During the first two months of the year, the campaign did not pay down any of that debt. In fact, it accrued another $16,000 in unpaid bills last month, and it finished the month owing Aetna $229,000.

The second story is about Clinton’s campaign manager involvement with the same sub-prime mortgages Clinton now attacking so fiercely:

WASHINGTON - Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign manager, Maggie Williams, earned about $200,000 on the board of a Long Island subprime lender that charged prepayment penalties - a practice that Clinton, a critic of the subprime industry, now seeks to eliminate.

Williams, who took over the reins of Clinton’s campaign in early February, served as a director on the board of the Woodbury-based Delta Financial Corp. from April 2000 until the firm declared bankruptcy in December, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records. 

[...]

Williams, 53, isn’t the only Clinton insider who made money from an industry the candidate has demonized. A month ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that Clinton ally and former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros grossed more than $5 million in stock sales and board compensation from Countrywide Financial, one of the nation’s largest subprime lenders. 

The truth is that both stories aren’t, in by themselves, important at all. The importance of these stories, for me, is to demonstrate how during political campaign we are being distracted by flood of unimportant information that aim in creating images that have very little with the reality. We are being told that Clinton is amazing executive, which she might or might not be - her struggling campaign isn’t the best demonstration of high quality management. And we are being bombarded with guilt by association which is many times completely irrelevant.

One comment about the sub-prime mortgage is due here. The fact that Clinton, and many other politician, choose to attack the practices of lending for minorities is noting but typical hypocrisy. Well into the crisis, lender were encouraged to use easier criteria when lending to minorities and poor families, a practice that is now being called predatory and irresponsible. I’m not arguing that those lenders aren’t guilty of being horrible bankers, but the involvement of other , political, motivations played major role in the creation of those lending practices - as we can see from the occupations of those Clinton’s aides.

When discussing political campaign, and campaign rhetoric - I find this story, which I scanned from William F. Buckley book - The Unmaking of a Mayor - hilarious:

Here she is, in the first installment of her birthday party:

Both of the girls had a lot of fun:

more pictures can be found here and here.

Tseela turning 6 this weekend and the first event marking her birthday was in her Kindergarten. I spent an hour with her yesterday morning, enjoying the children morning activities: 

I had so much fun that I needed to be reminded that I actually need to go to work…

What is the best way to protect your city workers interests? By limiting job opportunities!

I breaking my old decision not to right about the UN Human Rights Mockery Council, I simply can’t resist the irony:

I love the euphemism of calling murderous dictators “authoritarian leaders”, it stand in the grand tradition of the UN.

Whenever I think that nothing will surprise me someone like Mike Gravel shows up and prove me wrong. The former Democrat Senator from Alaska and former candidate seeking the democratic nomination joined the Libertarian party. One of the reasons he gave for seeking the LP nomination is:

The fact is, the Democratic Party today is no longer the party of FDR.

Obviously, the "natural" choice from someone who seek the support of the Libertarian party is to claim the legacy of the President who has the “New Deal” and WWII tightly attached to his memory. This will guaranty a very short campaign….

But what can you expect from someone who is moving to the LP because he is tired of:

By and large, I have been repeatedly marginalized in both national debates and in media exposure by the Democratic leadership, which works in tandem with the corporate interests that control what we read and hear in the media.

I regard politicians who promise to promote policies of:

“serving a cause greater than self-interest.”

[...]

“We are fast becoming a nation of alienating individualists, unwilling to put the unifying values of patriotism ahead of our narrow self-interests,” Mr. McCain warned in a speech during his 2000 presidential campaign. He added that “cynicism threatens to become a ceiling on our greatness.”

Scary and immoral (PDF).

My position on the bear-streans bailout was, and still is, that it was simple case of robbery. Having the taxpayers fund, directly and indirectly, welfare programs for banks, airlines companies, pharmaceutical companies or any other corporation doesn’t change the fact that this is improper use of the public trust. The only support a company should seek is the support of trusting investors and satisfied customers.

And the results of corporate welfare and bailout policies aren’t improve economics but rather:

When it is more important to win regulatory favors than winning consumers where would the money be invested?

How can one reconcile this statement:

“We need a president who can restore our confidence,” she said. “We need a president who is ready on Day 1 to be commander in chief of our economy.”

with this:

When asked why she’d appoint Alan Greenspan to a working group of financial leaders to design a response to the housing crisis, Clinton told the Philadelphia Daily News:

"Not only that, but the Fed didn’t act while he was there. But he has a calming influence still to this day on Wall Street — don’t ask me why because I never understand what he’s saying – but nevertheless people respond to that Delphic oracle approach. I think it would be wise to include him. And recently he’s come out and vert smartly so [sic] that we have to deal with housing and maybe we need to have some kind of buyout mechanism for mortgages. So he’s moved on his understanding and depth of the problem — but you know you could pick three others.

I guess that commanding the economy has nothing to do with actually understanding the monetary policies the central bank implements….

As a side note, and it isn’t only semantic - someone should explain the entire cadre of candidates that the President is not the commander in chief of the economy, nor the commander in chief of the country. The President is mere commander in chief of the Army, which is a lot of responsibility by itself. The country, its citizens and the economy have no commanders.