Cape Town townships

One high point of our trip to South Africa was a tour of black townships. We visited Khayelitsha and, more briefly, Gugulethu, met some friendly people and saw some interesting places. From the highway it may look like chaos, and there is vast hardship and poverty, but there's also entrepreneurship and improvement.

Playing the xylophone.

Visiting a church/school.

At a house that serves as a small church.

Meeting the kids.

Vicky's Bed and Breakfast.

A well-appointed room at Vicky's.

Drinking homemade beer.

I highly recommend our tour guide, Thabang Titotti, who can be reached here.

Candidate Kotlikoff

Laurence Kotlikoff is a distinguished economist whom I met at a conference in Boston in late 2009, when I presented him with an award for retirement income research. There's a photo somewhere of him and me standing arm in arm. I later reviewed his book Jimmy Stewart Is Dead for the (soon-to-be-archived) FrumForum.

Larry now has decided to run for president, as a third-party candidate emphasizing "purple" ideas that appeal across red and blue ideological lines. He's never held public office, but he's a knowledgeable, innovative thinker who's advised institutions all over the world and deserves to be given a serious hearing. In fact, he's far more deserving of that than some of the people who have been taken seriously this year (I'm looking at you, Herman). I'll be watching with interest and likely will have more about the Kotlikoff campaign down the road.

UPDATE 1/10: See Kotlikoff's campaign site and a write-up by my colleague Gil Weinreich.

Save the Rhinos (and RINOs)

Note: I wrote the following for FrumForum this morning — just before learning that FF is closing down.

My wife and I attended a cousin’s wedding in Cape Town, South Africa at year-end and added some time to be tourists in a country we’d never visited. The sites we saw ranged from the black township of Khayelitsha (on a van tour led by a local), where brick houses are slowly replacing tin shacks, to the well-manicured grounds of an elite high school (where our cousin-by-marriage was one of the first two colored, or mixed-race, students upon desegregation in the early 1990s; he studied particularly hard to show academic standards were not slipping on his account, and became valedictorian).

We spent the trip’s closing days at the Aquila Private Game Reserve, a sprawling site two hours’ drive from Cape Town. There, amid many other animals, we saw the southern white rhinoceros in its native habitat. The five rhinos on the reserve were all females, the site’s two males having been killed gruesomely by poachers in August. Rhino horn, valued for putative medicinal properties, makes a lucrative illegal trade in China, Vietnam and elsewhere.

Now, as a FrumForum contributor, I have been called a RINO (Republican in Name Only) and even taken a liking to that term (while scorning the RINO-baiters’ presumption of defining who’s a Republican). The magnificence of real-life rhinos gives the RINO label a cachet that defeats its derisive purpose.

The rhinos’ plight, unfortunately, is a severe one. Africa’s western black rhino has been declared extinct in the wild, and East Asia’s Javan rhino is close to meeting the same fate. As formidable as rhinos look, they have little defense against poachers carrying weapons and chainsaws (to cut off the horns, often leaving the animals alive and in agony).

At night, from our cabin at the Aquila reserve, we saw distant headlights of the security patrols that follow rhinos to protect against poachers. It’s a dangerous business, in which the armed “anti-poachers” easily can be targeted themselves.

Private reserves such as Aquila have been a valuable supplement to Africa’s national parks; the latter have military protection but are vulnerable to budget pressures and corruption. The private reserves, though, need stepped-up security. In response to the August attack, Aquila launched an initiative called “Saving Private Rhino,” to develop funding and support for measures including high-tech surveillance systems; rewards for informants; GPS tracking of microchips in rhino horns; educational centers and more.

Defending rhinos through private property rights and innovative technologies is a cause that should appeal to the conservative imagination, and it’s one that resonates with the longstanding conservationist tradition of Republicans such as Theodore Roosevelt. Let RINOs help protect rhinos and ensure their survival through the 21st century.

Political monitoring

My new column at Research magazine, "Political Monitor," aims to track political developments through the election year with an eye toward issues particularly relevant to the magazine's financial-advisor readership. The January column, "Target: Wall Street," is now online.

Back from South Africa

Rhinos photographed at Aquila Private Game Reserve, 2 hours drive from Cape Town. UPDATE: Also see Aquila's Saving Private Rhino initiative.

UPDATE: Much more.

Off the grid

That's it for me for this year. Thanks for coming by, and see you in 2012.

Green Front

I'm slated to be on "The Green Front" (www.thegreenfront.com) on Progressive Radio Network Wed., Dec. 21 sometime between 2 and 3 PM, to discuss my recent climate pieces: "How the GOP Should Explain Climate Change" and "Newt, Your Ad With Pelosi Wasn't Dumb."

UPDATE 12/21: "Talking With the Left About Climate Change," my FrumForum post about the radio spot.

The overly strategic endorsement

Andrew Sullivan endorsed Ron Paul in the GOP primary race. David Frum criticized that endorsement, and then Sullivan defended it thus (excerpt):

Paul's riposte would be that the current long recession was perpetuated by federal intervention, because it did not allow the market to clear more quickly (Thatcher's position in 1981, by the way). I don't buy this, because the extremity of the crisis was so great, passivity in 2008 could have galvanized a crippling global depression and ended our financial system entirely.

But Paul is not internally inconsistent; and he is radical in his libertarian absolutism. My endorsement was not of all his proposals but in part to expose the fallacy of these abstractions in our current context, by airing them openly. An electoral defeat on pure Tea Party grounds would advance the kind of reforms David and I want. We would get a real debate about limited government. And, of course, I regard steep cuts in defense as indispensable to generating the revenues necessary to cushion the socially dangerous inequality that is the singular mark of the last thirty years. A Romney presidency would muddy those waters. And David is still wedded to a neoconservaive foreign policy, which is where another deep difference resides.

Emphasis added. I find it a very odd type of endorsement that's done in the hope and expectation that the candidate will lose so that his bad ideas can be exposed. Even odder is that Sullivan at the same time is genuinely endorsing some of Paul's positions. What makes him think a Paul defeat would discredit the positions Sullivan dislikes while furthering the positions Sullivan likes? Isn't it possible Paul's defeat would do the opposite? And for that matter, isn't it also possible (though I agree, this is unlikely) that a nominee Paul would win the presidency and try to enact all of his positions?

By the way, Margaret Thatcher offered a qualified defense of the mixed economy on the grounds that "as in a cocktail, it is the mix that counts." Would Ron Paul ever say something like that?

Climate stump speech

Today at FrumForum, I explain what I would like a GOP candidate to say about global warming.

UPDATE: The piece has been reprinted at Canada's National Post. Also, on 12/21 I'm slated to have a related discussion about climate policy and politics at "The Green Front" on Progressive Radio Network.

Defending Newt?

At FrumForum, I weigh in on a controversial episode of Gingrich past: "Newt, Your Ad With Pelosi Wasn't Dumb."

Dusk

Twilight over a nature reserve in New Jersey. This blog will remain an occasional thing for the moment.

Hiatus

A combination of computer problems, looming deadlines and other matters to be resolved requires a period of reduced activity here at Quicksilber. Thanks for stopping by.

Pictured: mandala in a store in Patan, Kathmandu, Nepal, 2009.

National security debate

Live-blogging at FrumForum.

Conquered into Liberty

Review copy received: Conquered into Liberty: Two Centuries of Battles along the Great Warpath that Made the American Way of War, by Eliot Cohen. We now think of the U.S.-Canada boundary as the epitome of a peaceful border, but there's a long history of conflict on and around it. Looking at the index I notice that George Clinton has some mentions but James Clinton, about whom I wrote recently, is absent. There's a lot of little known or largely forgotten history involving America's early wars, and this book looks like a promising avenue into some of it.

Gen. James Clinton

My latest look at the confluence of national and family history is up at FrumForum for Veterans Day: "James Clinton, Revolutionary War Hero." Excerpt:

Previously at FrumForum, I wrote about two early American political leaders: DeWitt Clinton, New York governor and mayor and key figure in the nation-building achievement of getting the Erie Canal built; and George Clinton, governor turned vice president, whose efforts to limit federal power culminated in an independent (and erroneous, in my view) decision to terminate America’s first central bank.

Now, I take quill to parchment again, this time regarding James Clinton (1736-1812), a Revolutionary War general who was DeWitt’s father and George’s brother.

Though less remembered today than the other two, James struck important blows for American independence. For me, these figures are of interest for family history as well as national history. James and DeWitt are direct ancestors of my wife, and our son is named DeWitt after his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.

Veterans Day, which honors veterans living and dead, would be a suitable time to remember James Clinton. Although he had some involvement in politics, he was primarily a military man. One historian described him a few decades after his death as “a plain blunt soldier, born upon the frontiers, and who spent no inconsiderable portion of a long life amid the toils and perils of border wars.”

Whole thing here.

China watch

A couple of items:

"China committing climate blackmail with super-powerful greenhouse gas, say critics," by my friend Christopher Mims at Grist. As I mentioned on Twitter, if U.S. politics were less dysfunctional, a cross-party coalition would be demanding a hard line against China on this. Climate hawks and foreign policy hawks would find common ground. Something like that might happen in a world where the parties were divided to some degree on the environment, but not in one where acknowledging that a greenhouse gas even might be a matter of concern is anathema to a large swath of the political spectrum. This Chinese gambit, moreover, is an example of why cap-and-trade, especially on an international scale, is a sub-optimal approach to carbon regulation.

"The Reckoning Begins." That's a reference to a new blog and upcoming book by Michael Moran, and to the shrinking gap between U.S. share of world output and China's share. I would add some caveats to the stark view Moran presents here. Years ago, Francis Fukuyama told me (in an interview for Insight magazine about his book Trust) that he had some doubts about China becoming as important as many people expected, because it is a "low-trust" society where holding together large organizations and networks is difficult. I'd add that nobody can be sure how much trust to put in China's economic statistics, or that one's rights and investments there will be honored. Having said all that, it's clear that learning Mandarin is not a bad idea in the 21st century.

Live-blogging tonight

I'll be participating in a live chat session about tonight's GOP economics (or Herman Cain scandal) debate over at FrumForum.

Political realignments

Some links I find interesting:

-- Ongoing contretemps between FrumForum and James Pethokoukis. See here and here.

-- John McCain talking up a third party; makes me wonder if 2012 could be Bull Moose time a century later, with McCain on the ticket; probably not but these are turbulent times politically. As also evident in the next item.

-- Walter Russell Mead, in a post titled "Occupy Blue Wall Street?" seeing signs of fraying in the blue coalition. I disagree with his dismissal of a carbon tax (and I don't think something being an upper-middle-class good-government concern is a bad thing as such), but it's a very interesting post overall.

Bastiat Prize

Congratulations to Virginia Postrel on winning the Bastiat Prize, in part for her Bloomberg column that showed there is a cogent and non-hysterical argument against the light bulb efficiency standards. Also, congratulations to Tom Easton of The Economist, with whom Virginia shared the $50,000 prize.

Midcentury economic nostalgia

An emerging left-wing meme:

In the 1950s & 1960s when the top tax rate was 70-92%, we laid the interstate system, built the Internet, put a man on the moon, defeated Communism, our education system was the envy of the world, our middle class thriving, our economy unparalleled. You want that back? Raise taxes on the rich.

Also during that time, the defense budget was around 10 percent of GDP (about twice today's percentage), immigration was relatively restricted, and public-sector unions were largely just beginning to be allowed. That's without mentioning many other factors the OWS people surely don't want, such as the Organization Man ethos of staying with a company your entire career. Leftists who indiscriminately praise the midcentury economy should be careful what they wish for.