Tyler Cowan‘s evil twin Tyrone thinks that Republicans didn’t do so badly as the popular narrative maintains.

Tyrone: I read what a strategic disaster the fracas has been for the Republican Party and for the Tea Party movement in particular, but I don’t see it. Where I grew up, this counts as a successful stare-down. Most of the time, the pit bull does not in fact lunge for your throat, but it is hardly a mistake for him to snarl, even if that raises his borrowing rates.
Look where we stand. In real terms government spending has been falling. Sequestration appears to be permanent, or it will be negotiated away by Republicans in return for preferred changes in tax and spending policy. Leading Democratic intellectuals are talking about future fiscal bargains with no new taxes. The American public polls as increasingly conservative.

With this sequence of events, combined with 2011, the Republicans convinced some of their opponents that they are crazy and irresponsible, without actually being crazy (though they were irresponsible, but that is the whole point). I peaked once into Tyler’s Twitter feed, and I found several accomplished Democratic economists — yes brilliant economists, as all economists are — suggesting that any day now markets are going to notice the truly crazy character of the Republican House and price that into interest rates and stocks. Oh what a tale! (A more accurate reading of the more radical Republicans would in fact be more cynical and ordinary than most of the pablum served up by their critics.) Imagine that you control only the House and can manage to convince your opponents that you are stronger and more dedicated to your cause than in fact you are. Only the truly strong and dedicated can pull such a caper off!

Someday, if the Democrats wanted to raise the exemption level for the payroll tax, and pull in a lot of new revenue, what kind of opposition could they expect? Probably they will shy away from that battle altogether, for fear of another Ted Cruz filibuster.
Yes, Virginia (literally), protecting the brand does sometimes mean going down with the ship. …

Even if most Americans do not agree, it is now considered common to believe and to argue publicly that Obamacare represents the end of freedom in our time. If Obamacare turns out to fail in the eyes of the public, that condemnatory view is being held in the back of people’s minds, whether they admit it or not, whether they agree or not. They will start to agree more and more, the less generous their Medicare benefits look as time passes. The future counterrevolution in redistribution is going to have to come from somewhere and it is a major victory to cement the word “Obamacare” as a hypostatized “thingie” in people’s minds, for future reference.

The Republican tactics understand the importance of skewed pay-offs. In an age of political gridlock, the goal is not to maximize the expected value of your image, any more than you would do the same on a date. Rather the goal is to maximize the chances of moving your agenda forward, conditional on the existence of world-states where that might be possible. The harder it is to pull off change, the stupider your strategy will look in most world-states, but hey that is the price of admission to this game. Capital is to be periodically run down, and if in politics, as in management more generally, if you always look good you are doing something badly wrong.

Another fallacy is that no DC crisis would have focused more attention on the failings of the Obamacare exchanges in a useful manner. People, that is small potatoes. No one is going to repeal or even modify ACA because of a few weeks’ bad publicity at the opening. (Recall the Medicare prescription drug bill, which took weeks to get off the ground but now is beloved and is part of the permanent furniture of the universe, like Supersymmetry or quantum gravity.) If Obamacare is really going to do poorly, it is better if we build up high or least modest expectations for it. Imagine the Christmas present of learning you don’t really have insurance coverage after all. Or the New Year’s resolution that after you have been billed three times for the same policy, you vow to pay for only one of them and live with the bad credit rating until it gets straightened out. How about extreme adverse selection into the exchanges, resulting in 50-100% premium hikes in the first year of operations? (The lower premia are now, the better! Bread, peace, land! Ach du grüne Neune!) That’s what will get further traction for the Tea Party on Obamacare, not a bunch of bad reviews on opening day, as if the policy were no more than a mid-tier Jennifer Aniston movie (I can no longer refer to Sandra Bullock in this context), to be swatted down by mild tut-tuts of disapproval and inconvenience.

The very best victories are often described as ignominious retreats.

Heinrich Rehkemper (1894-1949)

Franz Schubert: Sei mir gegrüsst (“O du Entriß’ne mir” ), song for voice & piano, D. 741 (Op. 20/1). Recorded 1928 Grammaphon 95103 (1014 bm).

Walken appears in four of these collected here.

Jeffrey T. Kuhner observes that the left may be celebrating now, but reality is on the side of the Tea Party.

The conventional wisdom is wrong. The mainstream media — and their parrots in the Republican establishment — are claiming that President Obama decisively won the government shutdown battle. In fact, the narrative being peddled is that the GOP brand has been badly damaged, paving the way for a possible Democratic Party takeover of the House of Representatives in the 2014 elections. This is puerile nonsense. Tea Party Republicans, led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, may have lost the battle, but they are poised for a major victory in the larger Obamacare war. …

This is myth and propaganda masquerading as analysis. The legislative deal simply does one thing: kick the can down the road. Yet the same, enduring problems remain — the very problems identified by Mr. Cruz and Tea Party Republicans. America is sitting on a ticking debt bomb, Obamacare — the most destructive law in modern memory — is a disaster, and our ruling elites are incapable of reining in out-of-control public spending.

America is increasingly dominated by one seminal reality: We are the most indebted nation in history. The national debt is approaching $17 trillion. By 2016, the debt is expected to hit $20 trillion. That will be Greece-like levels, a debt load so crippling that Washington will have trouble simply paying the interest on the debt payments. Our creditors will realize we are sliding toward the United States of Argentina — a fiscal basket case unable to live within our means. The value of the dollar will plunge. Interest rates will soar. Taxes will have to be increased. The social safety net will be shredded. Unless Congress immediately confronts the reckless spending and near-record trillion-dollar deficits, the United States will go bankrupt. The question is no longer if, but when.

Mr. Obama’s massive health care overhaul is precipitating the impending economic collapse. Nearly every aspect of Obamacare has turned out to be a lie. The real price tag is not less than a $1 trillion; rather, it is a multitrillion-dollar entitlement program that America cannot afford. Rather than lowering premium costs for the average family, it dramatically raises them — sometimes by thousands of dollars a year. Millions of citizens have lost their health benefits or are unable to keep their doctor. People seeking to enroll in Obamacare’s marketplace exchanges are stunned at the high costs of the health insurance plans. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office acknowledges that the law will not achieve its stated goal: universal coverage. Instead, about 30 million Americans will still not have health care. Hence, one-sixth of the U.S. economy will have been revolutionized essentially to put only 17 million new recipients on the Obamacare rolls. The complex law also undermines economic growth and job creation, compelling employers to either slash employees’ hours or not hire new workers. In short, Obamacare is a cancer, slowly devouring our economic dynamism, individual liberties and medical care.

As the law is implemented, its devastating effects will be increasingly felt. By next year, the government shutdown will be a fading memory. What the public will remember, though, is that a band of Tea Party patriots sought to thwart the oncoming disaster. Mr. Cruz, along with Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah, represent the future. The question is no longer ideological — small government versus big government, free-market-based health care versus nationalized health care, or capitalism versus socialism. Rather, it is about something more simple — and profound: basic arithmetic.

The United States is a giant bus that is rushing toward an economic precipice. A few more years of Mr. Obama’s borrow-and-spend policies and America will crash upon the rocks of fiscal reality and national insolvency. The Democrats are keeping their foot on the gas pedal, full speed ahead. The Republican establishment thinks we may need to slow down — at least a little. The bus, however, will still go off the cliff. Only the Tea Party is saying — in fact, yelling — to hit the brakes. They’re right, and they will be vindicated. The only question is this: Will Americans wake up before it’s too late?

Geneticist Bryan Sykes may have identified the mysterious Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas.

BBC story with video.

Research by a British scientist has concluded that the legendary Himalayan yeti may in fact be a sub-species of brown bear.

DNA tests on hair samples carried out by Oxford University genetics professor Bryan Sykes found that they matched those from an ancient polar bear.

He subjected the hairs to the most advanced tests available.

He says the most likely explanation for the myth is that the animal is a hybrid of polar bears and brown bears.

Prof Sykes told the BBC that there may be a real biological animal behind the yeti myth.

“I think this bear, which nobody has seen alive,… may still be there and may have quite a lot of polar bear in it,” he said.

“It may be some sort of hybrid and if its behaviour is different from normal bears, which is what eyewitnesses report, then I think that may well be the source of the mystery and the source of the legend.”

Prof Sykes conducted the DNA tests on hairs from two unidentified animals, one from Ladakh – in northern India on the west of the Himalayas – and the other from Bhutan, 1,285km (800 miles) further east.

The results were then compared with the genomes of other animals that are stored on a database of all published DNA sequences.
Suspected yeti footprints in Nepal Suspected yeti footprints – such as these in Nepal – are regularly photographed

Prof Sykes found that he had a 100% match with a sample from an ancient polar bear jawbone found in Svalbard, Norway, that dates back to between 40,000 and 120,000 years ago – a time when the polar bear and closely related brown bear were separating as different species.

The species are closely related and are known to interbreed where their territories overlap.

The sample from Ladakh came from the mummified remains of a creature shot by a hunter around 40 years ago, while the second sample was in the form of a single hair, found in a bamboo forest by an expedition of filmmakers around 10 years ago.

Prof Sykes said that his results were “completely unexpected” and that more work needed to be done interpreting them.

Read the whole thing.

Wikipedia:

J002E3 is the designation given to a supposed asteroid discovered by amateur astronomer Bill Yeung on September 3, 2002. Further examination revealed that the surface appeared to contain the paint used on the Apollo moon rockets. The object is probably the S-IVB third stage of the Apollo 12 Saturn V rocket (serial S-IVB-507).

Via Ratak Monodosico.

Craigslist:

1997 Jeep Cherokee (XJ)
220K Miles
4.0 L in-line 6
4WD
AUTOMATIC Transmission
Bright Red
Straight Stock
Crank Windows, no cruise, no tilt, no delay wiper, no nonsense
POWER MIRRORS! Woo Hoo!

$1750

Here’s the deal, kids:
This is a Jeep Cherokee. This is not a luxury SUV, or a maintenance-free disposable import. It has solid front axles, wind noise, and character.
It’s a Jeep. It rides like a Jeep. It drives like a Jeep. All of these are GOOD things.
It is not new, it is not pristine, it is used. This will be apparent in the pictures.

If you do not own a toolbox, have never changed your own oil, and are scared of firearms: THIS VEHICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.
If you have been posting on facebook all about how excited you are for pumpkin latte season: THIS VEHICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.
If you get offended easy and often, whine to your co-workers, and bitch a lot: THIS VEHICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.
If you feel you are owed anything in the world & have a bullshit job where you fail to produce: THIS VEHICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.
If you own a bieber album, white oakleys, affliction t-shirts, or those candy-assed stitched-pocket jeans: THIS VEHICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.
If you consider the 2nd Amendment an anachronistic relic and have never owned a firearm: THIS VEHICLE IS NOT FOR YOU.

If, however, you have BALLS OF STEEL and consider adverse weather an excuse to do stupid shit: THIS IS YOUR JEEP.
Do you laugh at danger, and tempt fate?
Have you ever uttered the words, “Hold my beer and watch this …”?
While bored at work do you pick targets at random and think, “I could hit that from here with the .22 …”?
Have any of your friends quit hanging out because you were too much fun?
Do you have the number of a friend with cash memorized for bail?
When you pass an abandoned flatbed farm truck along a fenceline do you consider taking on another project?
Is your ol’ lady really sick of the random piles of parts, greasy footprints, and empty beer bottles in the garage?
-could you not care less?
Do you have Jalopnik saved on your laptop AND smartphone?
Do you own a service manual for every vehicle you ever owned?
Do you still miss your first ride?
Can you carry on a two hour conversation discussing tools, scars, and hi-lift jacks?
Remember when tool companies had the balls to put half-naked beauty queens on their calendars?
Do you consider the Prius an abominable affront to the Gods of displacement, torque, and All Mighty Internal Combustion?

If you answered in the affirmative to the preceding: THIS IS YOUR JEEP.

Read the whole thing (while it’s still there).

Hat tip to Matt MacLean.

Aoshima, Japan: left by humans to the cats.

Via This Isn’t Happiness.

William Galston, in the Wall Street Journal, sees the recent shutdown struggle as evidence of a crucial internal struggle for the soul of the Republican Party.

More than a decade ago, before the post-9/11 national fervor set in, Walter Russell Mead published an insightful essay on the persistent “Jacksonian tradition” in American society. Jacksonians, he argued, embrace a distinctive code, whose key tenets include self-reliance, individualism, loyalty and courage.

Jacksonians care as passionately about the Second Amendment as Jeffersonians do about the First. They are suspicious of federal power, skeptical about do-gooding at home and abroad; they oppose federal taxes but favor benefits such as Social Security and Medicare that they regard as earned. Jacksonians are anti-elitist; they believe that the political and moral instincts of ordinary people are usually wiser than those of the experts and that, as Mr. Mead wrote, “while problems are complicated, solutions are simple.”

That is why the Jacksonian hero defies the experts and entrenched elites and “dares to say what the people feel” without caring in the least what the liberal media will say about him. (Think Ted Cruz. )

The tea party is Jacksonian America, aroused, angry and above all fearful, in full revolt against a new elite—backed by the new American demography—that threatens its interests and scorns its values. …

Supporters of the tea party… see President Obama as anti-Christian, and the president’s expansive use of executive authority evokes charges of “tyranny.” Mr. Obama, they believe, is pursuing a conscious strategy of building political support by increasing Americans’ dependence on government. A vast expansion of food stamps and disability programs and the push for immigration reform are key steps down that road.

But ObamaCare is the tipping point, the tea party believes. Unless the law is defunded, the land of limited government, individual liberty and personal responsibility will be gone forever, and the new America, dominated by dependent minorities who assert their “rights” without accepting their responsibilities, will have no place for people like them.

For the tea party, ObamaCare is much more than a policy dispute; it is an existential struggle. …

Many tea-party supporters are small businessmen who see taxes and regulations as direct threats to their livelihood. Unlike establishment Republicans who see potential gains from government programs such as infrastructure funding, these tea partiers regard most government spending as a deadweight loss. Because many of them run low-wage businesses on narrow margins, they believe that they have no choice but to fight measures, such as ObamaCare, that reduce their flexibility and raise their costs—measures to which large corporations with deeper pockets can adjust.

It’s no coincidence that the strengthening influence of the tea party is driving a wedge between corporate America and the Republican Party. It’s hard to see how the U.S. can govern itself unless corporate America pushes the Republican establishment to fight back against the tea party—or switches sides.

Pasilobus sp.

HuffPo, last August, linked a slideshow of macro photos of unusual spiders described as taken in the neighborhood of Singapore by Nicky Bay.

Nicky Bay blog

————————

Oddly enough, the same photograph appears in two version, 1 and 2, on the web attributed to Melvyn Yeo, who also specializes in macro photography in Singapore.

Who is plagiarizing whom?

43 Hillhouse Avenue, built for Henry Farnum by architect Russell Sturgis in 1871. Victorian features were removed in 1934. It has been the home of Yale’s presidents since 1937.

If the US Department of Defense ever finds itself falling short on its spending goals, if it ever can’t find enough $750 toilet seats and $450 claw hammers to buy, DOD procurement specialists can just call up the geniuses running Yale University and ask them to lend a hand with some building or renovation project.

Building the truly verdant green Kroon Hall, erected as a kind of Taj Mahal shrine to environmentalism that cleans its own water with aquatic plants, cost only $501 a square foot. In the recent renovation, including fixing plaster, installing a “state of the art” security system, changing over from steam-heat to hot water, and generally tidying up, the stately mansion on Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven, once called “the most beautiful street in America” by Charles Dickens, provided for the use of the university’s president, Yale managed to spend $810 a square foot, a total of $17,000,000!

If we assume that Yale tuition and room and board is running something like 60 grand per annum these days, that means Yale could have given 283 and 1/3 students, more than half the population of one of Yale’s 12 residential colleges, a free year of college for what all this cost. The mind boggles.

Yale Alumni Mag blog