A Visit to the Ovine-Infested Austral Isle of the Antipodes

Hello, friends. It's been a while. Don't get too excited, I'm not breaking my blogging moratorium quite yet, but I just wanted to share some things. Consider this a hiatus from the moratorium.

A little while back I got my two weeks of mid-tour "Rest and Recuperation" leave. I knew I wanted to take advantage of the taxpayer-funded airfare (thanks guys!) by going somewhere with expensive fares, and I knew I wanted to get to the greenest, most un-desert-like place I could think of. So I went to New Zealand's South Island, and it was amazing. This picture sums it up pretty well:

From Enn-Zedd

Seriously, I could go on and on about it, but I'll just let you look at all the pictures. Oh, and yes, that album "outs" my real name. I'm okay with that at this point -- really effective internet anonymity being nearly impossible anyway -- and eventually I'll get around to fully onymizing this blog, once I figure out exactly what I want it to be and start posting again.

On Corruption

I recently shared our Fearsome Comrade's worries about the intersection of government and business in America. The Skeptical Bureaucrat shares a related concern, that of the incestuous world of "formers" consulting, in which former politicians become consultants advising businesses how best to deal with politicians. He recalls a conversation with a Turkish official:

He furiously resented a World Bank effort that was going on at that time to combat public corruption, which the Bank saw as an impediment to economic development. The Turk maintained that in the Third World public corruption is more or less benign, since it consists of small amounts of graft broadly distributed throughout society all the way down to the level of traffic cops, whereas the U.S. style of corruption consists of huge amounts of money passed out to a very few people at the top of the government-business nexus. I had no good answer to him then, and I haven't thought of one since.

I have to say, I had never, ever thought of it that way. And it's pretty strange, when you think about it, that Americans would be outraged at a traffic cop demanding a $20 bribe, but are relatively unruffled by millions of dollars in payola at the state and federal levels.

Third World America: Sacramento Tent City

Sacramento is considering routing utilities to a tent city that has grown in the shadow of the California state capital. Do we really need to explain why its a bad idea to haphazardly legitimize and make permanent establishments out of unauthorized housing (or tenting, as the case may be)? Anyone who doesn't think this is a problem, I've got a movie you ought to see.