Despite my expectations this was not a Fantastic Four comic book
recounting their final defeat of Dr. Doom. Instead the subtitle
is "Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century". It is written by
the estimable science correspondent for Reason magazine, Ronald
Bailey. And thanks to the stunningly good efforts of the Interlibrary
Loan department of the University Near Here, who worked a copy out of
the clutches of Northeastern University.
Bailey's book is an antidote to the various predictions of near-term
ecological
disaster. Those have been with us since Malthus, I guess, but Bailey
is more concerned with more recent Jeremiahs: e.g., Rachel Carson,
Paul Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, Bill McKibben, etc. Wolf-crying continues to be
a popular and profitable undertaking to this day.
Most chapters deal with a subcategory of possibile global disaster:
overpopulation; resource exhaustion; genetic manipulation; epidemic
levels of cancer;
anthropogenic climate change; mass species extinction.
And there's an excellent chapter on the "precautionary principle"
used by those who would thwart technological progress; its clever
title: "Never Do Anything For the First Time".
Unlike a number of folks on this side of the libertarian/conservative
divide, Bailey has been persuaded to believe in the reality of
anthropogenic global warming. His chapter on the topic, however,
gives plenty of respect to the skeptics, and no support at all
to the notion that it's an excuse to hand worldwide governments
extraordinary new powers of regulation, subsidy, taxation, and mandate.
He argues, convincingly, that a lot of good would be done by
elimination of existing fossil fuel subsidies without
making the same subsidization mistake for "renewables".
If I had to quibble: the book at times seems to be stitched together
from old Reason columns and various op-eds. Which is fine,
but I'd welcome just reprinting those works, updating as necessary
to reflect recent events.
Bailey's prose is OK, but he sometimes makes regrettable choices
in what to include in the main text of the book. Endless studies
are summarized, and sometimes no detail seems too small to
omit. ("In Cartagena, Columbia, privatization boosted the number
of people receiving piped water by 27 percent.")
Our
PredictWise
punters noticed that Scott Walker's chance at the presidency have gone
from "slim" to "none", and that has created room in our poll for
the ample frame of Chris Christie. And, although Jeb and Carly
lost a lot of their phoniness over the past week, Jeb dropped
significantly more than Carly, which gives us a new phony front-runner:
I report, you decide. You can't help but notice, however, that
one side is desperately trying to discredit Carly, instead of
describing what Planned Parenthood does in non-euphemized language
and trying to defend it.
“Most importantly,” he said, “I brought my Bible,”
and lifted it up for all to see.
Given what followed, you can be sure he is not very
familiar with its contents, as he spent the next 20 minutes on his usual
spiel, showing a complete lack of humility and loads of hubris, and an
utter disparagement of everyone who is not Donald Trump.
No, I had not previously heard of Hrafnkell Haraldsson, but I miss a
lot. The PoliticsUSA
"About Us" page
claims "he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist
but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and
traditions of his Norse ancestors."
So lock up your daughters if you hear Hrafnkell's coming to your town.
Roque Planas (yes, we are unaccountably drawn to unusual names this
week) thinks he noted phoniness in the Jeb Bush's claim that he
"repudiated multiculturalism". Why, Roque argues,
"Jeb
Bush Is So Multicultural, He Doesn’t Even Know It".
His wife is Mexican! He studied Latin America in school! He speaks
Spanish! He eats Mexican food at home! In 2009, he identified himself as
Hispanic on his voter registration! He lives in one of the most
conspicuously multicultural cities in the U.S.! (Miami!)
OK, Roque. If what you think Jeb said is so easily refuted by obvious
facts, could it be possible that you missed the thrust of what
he actually said?
But Bush said later he viewed multiculturalism as not aspiring to an
American ideal. "You have to have people assimilate into society. But
that doesn't mean we have a monolithic, homogeneous population. To the
contrary," he told The Associated Press before headlining a legislative
fundraiser in Cedar Rapids. "The power of America is a set of shared
values with a very diverse population embracing it."
I dare say you can eat Mexican food at home and still believe something
like that.
And then of course, there's Hillary. It has
been another week of inconvenient facts coming to light,
revealing her previous prevarications. In NRO,
John Fund
notes:
"Democrats
Wake Up to How Bad a Liar Hillary Is". He points to
a quote from last Sunday's Meet the Press uttered
by Bill Clinton biographer David Maraniss:
She doesn’t have Bill Clinton’s charisma and amazing campaign abilities.
You know, and theater. You know, you talk about authenticity. I always
have called Bill Clinton sort of an authentic phony. He really is good
at that. And Hillary, if you look at it, just as theater, is a phony
phony. She’s not as good at it.
Here's the problem: the American people aren't very good at their
job either, which is to humiliate these people out of public life.
It was only a couple months ago that
the kerfuffle over the
Bias-Free
Language Guide made the University Near Here the
well-deserved target of nationwide
ridicule. (The link goes to the July 28 version
of the document available from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.)
Over the span of a day or two, the document was removed from the
University web server; President Huddleston put out a
disavowal
statement;
and the furor and laughter eventually died down.
But now the students are back in town, and one of them,
Ezra Temko, Graduate Student Body President, took pen in hand to
defend the BFLG, and the student newspaper
dutifully
published said defense both online and in its dead-trees edition.
Let us take a look at young Ezra's thoughts; I reproduce them in full,
lest I be accused of quoting out of context. His words are on the
left with a lovely
#EEFFFF background color; my comments are on the right.
This past July, a Campus Reform
web post that highlighted a “Bias-Free Language Guide” on UNH’s website
quickly entered the national news cycle.
That week, I was embarrassed to be a Wildcat.
Oh, no! Why?
I was not embarrassed by Campus Reform’s story. Campus
Reform’s founder and president promotes right-wing orthodoxy. He has
expressed solidarity with organizations that believe only Christians
should be able to hold public office and that support discrimination
against gay individuals.
A tortured chain of damnation indeed: the (factual)
news came from a website founded by
a (gasp!) conservative (unnamed, but apparently
Morton
Blackwell) who (somehow, at some point)
"expressed solidarity" with (unnamed) organizations that
held certain tendentiously-characterized political opinions.
OK, well that's a good excuse to ignore criticism.
And it also gives Ezra a chance to ignore the criticism of the BFLG
from
justabouteveryoneelse.
I was embarrassed by our university’s official response. President
Huddleston joined conservative pundits in lambasting the guide.
Huddleston removed the guide from UNH’s website and declared that speech
guides have no place at UNH. His statement was noticeably missing any
mention regarding the importance of addressing microaggressions on our
campus or of fostering inclusive language and discourse.
True enough. President Huddleston said X; Ezra wanted him to
say not-X instead. Ezra claims to have been embarrassed, but
since he's making his feelings an issue, it seems more accurate
to say he feels betrayed.
Language and behavior can reproduce
social inequalities and de-value people. […]
Language can also inflate trivial assertions into
pretentious and vague claptrap. As here.
Last year I witnessed white
students casually calling each other n—-r and a swastika painted
on a campus building. […]
Neither of these—not even casual use of the N-word—was addressed by the
BFLG. Now, if those white kids had
been calling each other "Negro": the BFLG
would have deemed that "problematic".
I heard stories from other Wildcats of rape jokes
and disparaging remarks about transgender persons and persons of varying
ethnicities. […]
Could we just stipulate that young people say all sorts of
stupid, filthy, and insensitive crap?
But this is a diversion:
the actual language the BFLG was written to
inhibit is far less obvious…
I also heard more subtle put-downs, some of which were
likely made by individuals who were not even aware that their language
was exclusive or stigmatizing. As someone who endorses UNH’s goal of
striving towards “a culture of inclusion and diversity” (one of UNH’s
six “Visions and Values” in our strategic plan),
I appreciated having a toolkit that encourages thoughtful
expression
that upholds and affirms the diversity present within our
community.
Now (finally) we're getting to it: the BFLG is (allegedly)
a well-meaning "toolkit" to implement "a culture
of inclusion and diversity".
And what kind of toolkit? Well, mostly a hammer: one you
can use to beat the heads of those who speak or write
at variance with what Ezra and his ilk
consider to be the Official University Ideology.
And, lest you doubt, Ezra is correctly quoting UNH's
Strategic
Plan. "A Culture of Inclusion and Diversity" is in the list of
"Six Visions and Values" (although
it's not clear whether it's a "Vision" or a "Value").
And (unfortunately for us all) the Strategic Plan makes
no mention of, say,
"A Commitment to Free Expression and Reasoned Discourse",
either as a "Value" or a "Vision".
That's (as they say) problematic.
President Huddleston’s statement also bought into the right-wing framing
of the language guide as being about free speech. These charges were
associated with misleading headlines like “[UNH] Bans Word ‘American.’”
The guide, however, was not in a policy handbook; it was on UNH’s
Inclusive Excellence page under a section entitled
Resources. The guide explicitly states that it is about “starting
a conversation about word choice” and encouraging critical and
reflective thinking, and that it is “not meant to censor… [or] represent
absolute requirements.”
I am not the first to point out that those who claim to want to
"start a conversation" are often the first to
get really, really annoyed when people
talk back to them.
In truth, the BFLG makes no explicit disciplinary threats against those
who violate its guidelines. But its tone is unmistakeably didactic
and ex cathedra:
10 "avoid"s;
6 "should"s;
a whopping 55 "problematic"s. Ominously, the document is shot through
with references to "aggression", "assault", "violence": the fuzzy
conflation of language acts with terms
used to refer to actual physical brute force certainly
implies that certain language should be sanctioned/punished, even
if that's not (yet) explicitly stated.
Should our administration be taking cues regarding how to realize our
vision from Campus Reform? Or should our administration take its
cues from the students and community members who are on the receiving
end of microaggressions, and from the researchers and practitioners on
our campus who understand these issues and are on the front lines of
working for a campus climate that engenders inclusive excellence?
If we're giving cue-taking advice to President Huddleston:
It might be too much to hope for, but
the
Foundation
for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has an excellent
suggestion: UNH
should work to improve its current "red light" rating there.
Recommended additional reading:
"The
Coddling of the American Mind"
by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt,
in the September issue of that well-known right-wing
hate mag The Atlantic.
At all costs avoid advice from anyone who uses
the term "microaggressions" without giggling.
President Huddleston, whose side are you on?
That's not a very "inclusive" question, Ezra. Doesn't "diversity"
suggest that President H listen to diverse opinions, not just one
side?
This side, that side…
can't we all just get along?
In the coming months I will look to the UNH administration’s actions for
an answer to that question.
Hey, like all of us.
(My previous posts on the BFLG:
here,
here,
and some
here.)
Director Tim Burton directs the more-or-less conventional story of
Margaret Keane, the artist who became famous for her paintings
of kids with eyes the size of billiard balls. I mean to say, they're
big. The picture is genre-classified at IMDB
as "Biography, Crime, Drama",
but the crime is so low-level that nobody goes to jail, and
it's also hilarious in spots. Substitute "Comedy" for "Crime".
It starts off when Margaret (Amy Adams)
leaves her first husband in the late 1950s
and takes
off for San Francisco, there to make a living as a starving artist.
She gets a job painting pictures on baby cribs; nowadays, that would
be some Asian kid's job. In her spare time, she paints portraits
on demand at an outdoor art show. There she meets Walter (Christoph
Waltz) who takes her under his wing. Gradually, Margaret's paintings
develop into a cult item, then (more rapidly) into a mass phenomenon.
Unfortunately, Walter succumbs to the temptation to claim Margaret's
work as his own. The general sexism of the era, combined with
Margaret's dysfunctional relationship with Walter, make this easy.
Margaret is eventually forced out of the public eye, working in
solitude, while Walter sucks up the fame, adulation, and riches.
Can Margaret claim the recognition due to her, and get out
from under Walter's paint-stained thumb?
This could have easily turned into Lifetime Movie fare, but Mr. Burton,
Ms. Adams, and Mr. Waltz make the movie into kind of a treat. Worked
for me, anyhow.
OK, it's a fine movie. And I watched the first two, not to mention the
three before that. When the Extended Editions come out as an
attractive combination, I may take a long look at them.
It's just real hard to get excited about watching yet another two hours
and twenty-four minutes of fantastic PG-13 spectacle of fighting,
fighting, and more fighting. And sometimes tragic character flaws.
Anyway, when we left the Hobbit, Bilbo, he and his dwarf companions
had just awakened the evil dragon Smaug, who has flown off to wreak
deadly havoc on Laketown, whose inhabitants have pissed him off
by sending the retinue to the castle where he guards his immense
treasure. The town is nearly defenseless, because the only townsperson
with any defensive talent is locked up in the town jail.
Spoiler: dragon havoc is indeed wrought. But that's just the beginning.
Other problems abound: Thorin, the dwarf leader, is succumbing to
the madness involved in hoarding great riches. The lovely elf, Tauriel,
has taken a shine to one of the dwarves, and that gets her in trouble
with the elf king. Meanwhile an orc army is bearing down on the
Lonely Mountain, threatening all sorts of nastiness. Gandalf has been
imprisoned by the Necromancer. And …
Well, that's probably enough.
Observations: Orlando Bloom returns as Legolas, and it's a sheer joy to
watch him in fearless action. I was trying to figure out where I had
seen Lee Pace, who plays the snooty elf Thranduil. Ah, it was in the
the quirkily charming comedy "Pushing Daisies": he played Ned, the
pie-maker with the ability to bring the dead briefly back to life.
The guy has an impressive range.
Our 2% PredictWise
criterion causes us to welcome Carly Fiorina to our phony poll,
and bid adeuadeiuadous
farewell to John Kasich. And Carly makes a fine showing:
One of the big current "phony" drivers for Carly is her
claim
in last
week's debate about what the Planned Parenthood videos released by
the Center for Medical Progress show:
"Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs
kicking while someone says, ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its
brain."
Nay, shouted many "fact checkers".
Federalist
has a decent rundown of Carly vs. the "fact checkers". Key:
The media have consistently failed to cover the Planned Parenthood
footage, and now they are covering up the truth. The reality is that
babies of the same gestational age are having their organs harvested
every day. These videos feature graphic footage of abortionists mangling
babies to harvest organs to sell. They feature abortionists admitting
that babies often survive those abortions. They show high-level Planned
Parenthood officials encouraging this organ-harvesting scheme,
acknowledged that it is happening, and attempting to skirt scrutiny from
it.
We try to keep things light here. And (disclaimer) I haven't watched
the Planned Parenthood videos, don't plan to. I know they are
horrifying, not only due to the explicit gore, but also the window into
the depraved and ghoulish mindset hiding behind the fundamentally
dishonest "Planned Parenthood"
moniker.
Jeb still has a comfortable lead on the field, though.
In an effort to put the game away,
his Super PAC recently
released
an ad
that contrasted Jeb's upbeat optimism with Trump's dour darkness.
The video, called "Bright," then pivots to the sun rising in a field
along with the text “choose a brighter path” as Bush says his message
will be an optimistic one.
"If we get a few big things right, we can make lives better for
millions of people in this nation where every life matters and everyone
has the right to rise,” he says.
The only problem: The sun is rising over a field in Cornwall, England
— a clip available for between $19 and $79 on Shutterstock.
The Politico story also claims the ad uses the "silhouette of a
construction worker"—taken in Southeast Asia and
"kids heading off to school"—probably from the United Kingdom.
Any presidential election has a superficial quality to it, but as Rachel
Maddow pointed out recently on MSNBC, merely looking presidential, in
the patrician sense that John Kerry and Mitt Romney embodied, means
little. Instead, a modern candidate has to pass the “phony test.” The
history of recent electoral losers tells the story—Romney got caught
dismissing half of America, McCain lost his maverick credentials when he
added a fringe lunatic from Alaska to his ticket, Kerry was a
flip-flopper, and Gore was a snob. There are a thousand reasons why one
candidate loses and another wins, but personality defects are no small
part of the formula.
… and then loses it in the very next paragraph:
When you hear progressives laud [Bernie]
Sanders’ “authenticity,” it goes deeper
than his political record. The judgment takes aesthetics into
account—with his guileless manner, and the way his face defaults into a
dogged, curmudgeonly glare, you get the sense that it would never occur
to him to tell anything but the truth. Just like it would never occur to
him to change his positions on wealth inequality over three decades, or
to accept money from super PACs, or to shy away from the word
“socialist.”
Swooning over a "curmudgeonly glare" — that's what American
Progressivism has come to. Shane, please play the Who's
"Won't Get Fooled Again" over and over on your iPod until
you snap out of it.
Somewhat more honest leftism is to be found from
Stephen
Lendman at Counterpunch,
in which Bernie Sanders
is compared with current head of the British Labour Party,
Jeremy Corbyn:
Differences between them are stark. Sanders is more opportunist than
populist, nearly always supporting Democrat pro-war, pro-Israel,
pro-business, anti-human/civil rights policies – voting with party
members 98% of the time, more than most Democrats, polar opposite his
high-minded rhetoric, hiding his real agenda.
Ooooh, tell me more about Bernie's "real agenda".
He’s no populist/anti-war savior. His voting record belies his stump
speeches. He represents business as usual dressed up in phony
high-minded rhetorical mumbo jumbo.
OK, so beyond the vague "business as usual" claim,
Stephen never actually gets around to telling us what Bernie's
"real agenda" is. I bet it's nasty, though. Maybe next week?
Bernie was down the road last week, at St. Anselm's College,
telling students
what he meant by the term
"democratic
socialism". Not to fret, he declaimed,
you'll still get your important liberties:
"So what does [democratic socialism] mean?” Sanders asked the students. “Does anyone here
think I’m a strong adherent of the North Korean form of government? That
I want all of you to be wearing similar colored pajamas?”
A sigh of relief went through the throng, as they realized their
sleepwear choices were not under imminent threat.
When the laughter died down, […]
Wait a minute: there was actually enough laughter at the pajama
remark for it to "die down"? It
seems St. Anselm's students are very easily
amused. Or maybe you had to be there.
[…] the longest-serving independent in Congress
asked how many of the students were familiar with the Scandinavian
countries of Denmark, Finland and Norway.
Hm. Check the Heritage Foundation's
2015 Index of Economic
Freedom. Denmark, Finland, and Norway are all ranked in the
"mostly free" category, along with the U.S. And Denmark is actually
ranked slightly above the U.S.
What does it mean when a self-proclaimed socialist, scrambling for
examples of ideal economic systems, points to ones that are
more or less like the one we already have?
I'll tell you what it means to me: it means we need to do a lot
better, economic freedom-wise. What do we have to do to get to
the "Free" category?
A PG-rated Disney movie starring Jon Hamm. The mind reels. Slightly.
It is based on a true story:
Hamm plays sports agent J. B. Bernstein, who has set up a small
independent agency with a partner and savvy administrative
assistant. They are failing, unable to compete with the big boys.
What they need is a Big Idea, and J. B. gets one while channel surfing
between an Indian cricket match and "Britain's Got Talent" (the Susan
Boyle episode, coincidentally). Hey, what if we set up a reality-TV
talent search
in India for cricket bowlers to see if they could throw a baseball
with speed and accuracy enough to get a shot at a Major League
Baseball contract?
Well, that's exactly what happens. It is very formulaic, following
(as the astute Mrs. Salad predicted) the Bad News Bears plot
recipe right down the line: amusing misadventures
based on cultural clash, occasional doom-threatening crises,
mistakes are made, lessons are learned, and does everybody wind up
more or less happy? No spoilers here, but what do you think?
Lake Bell plays J. B.'s tenant and eventual romantic interest. (Which
apparently accurately reflects reality.) Alan Arkin is a crusty agent,
and Bill Paxton is a crusty coach tasked with providing the Indian
prospects with enough baseball skills to get them to (at least) single-A
minor league level. Acting talent raises the quality of the movie to
overall watchable.
This book's author, Arthur C. Brooks, was one of the speakers
at the
"New
Hampshire Freedom Summit"
I attended last year; I thought he gave the best speech of
the day, better than the host of professional pols that also attended.
So I was favorably inclined to check out his new book.
This book's breezy, informal, accessible style reminded me of something…
but what? Oh, I know: self-help books. Back when I used to read
self-help books, this is exactly what they sounded like.
(Nowadays, I figure I'm beyond help.)
But that impression is pretty much on target: Brooks has written a
self-help book for conservatives, libertarians, and the GOP.
Brooks' thesis:
For too long, these groups been satisfied with being right. Shouldn't
that be enough? Brooks says no, instead they (we) have the
responsibility of packaging their (our) ideas in ways accessible
and acceptable to those who can be persuaded by them.
Would it work? Maybe. Among Brooks' suggestions, the one I liked best is for
conservatives (et al.) to "fight for people, not against things".
I.e., don't be satisfied with an abstract, reactionary response to
progressive/socialst proposals: show how your ideas and values
act to make peoples' lives better.
Quibble: Much of Brooks' argument involves alleviating American poverty.
He (convincingly) argues that the best methods to help the
poor is to wean them off government dependence, involve them
with private-sector work, provide their children with school choice,
and remove the barriers to entrepreneurship they encounter.
He's right. But to what extent is this the politically
winning
strategy he says it is? I have my doubts. The economic
issues in recent campaigns (to the
extent I've paid attention to them) seem to be aimed squarely at
middle-class pocketbook issues, not poverty issues.
Remember the
"Life
of Julia", a 2012 Obama campaign web presentation, designed to show
how an imaginary woman was "helped" throughout her life by various
Federal programs (and how Mitt Romney would gut those programs)?
Well, there was no pretense that Julia was mired in poverty.
Surveys also indicate—sorry, Arthur!—that people don't consider
poverty per se to be a major issue.
Check
Gallup;
the "poverty/hunger/homelessness" issue
is nowhere near the top of the list of concerns.
All in all, however, The Conservative Heart is a fine book,
written by an insightful and entertaining thinker.
This movie won an Oscar for Eddie Redmayne, who plays
physicist Stephen Hawking. Good for Eddie,
but as
this
WaPo story notes, a majority of best-actor wins since 1988 (Dustin
Hoffman for Rain Man) have gone to those portraying
a character with some sort of malady or disability. So Eddie kind
of got a leg up on the competition, so to speak.
The movie also got nominated for Best Picture, Felicity Jones (playing
Jane Hawking, Stephen's first wife)
was nominated for Best Actress, and there were
also nominations for "Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay" and "Best
Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Score".
The movie was based on Jane Hawking's memoir of their
relationship—making it a bit light
on the physics.
The movie follows the arc of the Hawkings' relationship. They met
at Cambridge in the early 1960s, when they were both students.
In brief, Stephen developed Lou Gehrig's disease, he and Jane got
married, they managed to have kids, but (spoiler alert)
their relationship grew strained, and they both Found Other People:
Stephen with one of his nurses, Jane with Daredevil.
It held my interest, which is saying something for a movie of this type.
I knew next to nothing about Hawking's personal life. The consensus
seems to be that the movie makes him "nicer" than he is in actuality;
that's understandable. But I tend to cut geniuses with serious
debilitating illness some slack.
There will be no more flip jokes about her private email server. There
will be no rope lines to wall off crowds, which added to an impression
of aloofness. And there will be new efforts to bring spontaneity to a
candidacy that sometimes seems wooden and overly cautious.
Planned spontaneity—that's the ticket!
Hillary also, sort of, kind of, "apologized" for using her own
e-mail server to conduct government business while she was Secretary
of State.
James
Taranto offers a perceptive take (as is usual for him).
But first he quotes
Paul
Waldman
of the WaPo, and Waldman's article is also worth perusal.
Waldman's thesis "authenticity is baloney" (italicized in
original):
The truth is that all campaigning is a performance, by its very
nature. When you stand up in front of a group of people, whether five or
five thousand strong (not to mention the cameras that will carry the
event to untold numbers more), you’re presenting a version of yourself
crafted for an audience. That’s true of a politician, it’s true of a
teacher in front of a class, and it’s true of you or me when we tell a
joke at a party. You may be trying to communicate something substantive
— say, an argument about why we should cut taxes or impose emissions
limits on coal-fired power plants — but you’re also communicating
something about yourself. The persona we present in public settings
isn’t necessarily “true” or “false,” it’s just a particular version of
ourselves.
How postmodern! Taranto lets Waldman off pretty easy, but it seems to me
that Waldman is trying way too hard on the "c'mon, everyone does it"
defense. Practical
presentation
tactics are just tools in the pol's belt: not
inauthentic in and of themselves. Using them to prevaricate and
obfuscate—that's where true phoniness horns in.
To that point, Taranto's conclusion seems on-target:
Regarding the current scandal, [Hillary] told [Ellen]
DeGeneres: “I am now trying to
be as transparent as I can.” In a way, she is succeeding. She is
delivering scripted evasions, and it is obvious to everybody that is
what they are.
Ace's thesis is that "politics as spectator sport" has gone from
an apt metaphor to the more-or-less literal truth to a large
chunk of the population. Specifically:
This is a movie. And Barack Obama is the Hero. And the Republicans are
the Villains. And policy questions -- and Obama's myriad failures as an
executive -- are simply incidental. They are MacGuffins only, of no
importance whatsoever, except to the extent they provide opportunities
for Drama as the Hero fights in favor of them.
Explains a lot of otherwise mystifying behavior. Like why
David
Muir
thought it would be appropriate and interesting
to ask Hillary "Is your [late] mother's voice in your ear?"
Because who hasn't seen a movie where that's been a thing?
As said, Jonah expands on the idea. Key paragraph:
Ever since Hegel or maybe Plato, statists have been telling a story
about government in which government itself is the hero in an epic
struggle. At least for Hegel, the state was the mechanism by which God
worked out His will. For Marx, the State was an expression of cold
immutable forces. For the socialists who followed, control of the state
was a kind of MacGuffin but over time it became the hero itself.
I've recently been thinking of statism as a kind of secular
religion; but Ace/Jonah may have a more insightful take on it.
Walter
Olson notes Hillary's Labor Day speech in which she pledged
"to make sure that some employers go to jail " for various misdeeds
alleged against their workers.
Olson points out that some employers should, and do, get in trouble
for employee-related misdeeds. But once you get past the easy questions,
the Federal law is "vague and hard to interpret", and
"anticipating what is lawful is often a matter of guesswork."
Just the right situation for demagoguery!
This is bait and switch terminology and there is no reason to give it a
pass. Reporters should ask Hillary Clinton which cases, specifically,
she has in mind when she talks of jailing employers, and whether that
includes cases in which managers were obliged to guess what the law
required of them.
But "reporters", see above, are far more interested in asking
Hillary whether she hears her mother's voice in her ear.
“When Ben Carson makes a phony statement, I am going to attack him.”
Trump said on Thursday. “Ben Carson is not going to be the next
president, that I can tell you.
Trump and Carson are currently debating who is religiouser.
Personally, I liked
Bobby Jindal's
comment
about Trump:
“When asked, he couldn’t even name a specific or a single Bible verse
that was important to him, that had an impact on him,” Jindal said.
“Well, do you know why? It’s clear Donald Trump has never read the
Bible. The reason we know he’s never read the Bible? He’s not in the
Bible.”
I chuckled, but can't help but think this is the wrong road for the GOP
clown car to drive down. Questioning the amount and quality of the
religious faith of others is a negative sum game.
I suggest the candidates ponder the wisdom expressed by the
modern sage
Mike Birbiglia:
"What I should have said … was nothing."
We waited until it was almost too late to see Ant-Man in a
theatre. I'm certainly glad we caught it in time; it's a pretty
wonderful movie.
The story: once, long ago, Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas)
was the Ant-Man, with
shrinking powers and the ability to communicate with
actual ants to command them to his will. A tragic
outcome to one of his missions caused him to retire from the
superhero game, and to withdraw his shrinky technology from
use by others.
In the present day, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd)
is released from San Quentin, where he was doing time for a Robin
Hood-style caper. He struggles to make an honest living and be reunited
with his beloved (utterly cute) daughter Cassie. Spoiler alert: he
becomes the new Ant-Man in order to save the world from
Pym's old protégé, Darren Cross, who's on track to rediscover
Pym's secrets and sell them to the highest bidder.
Physics majors (like me) will need to temporarily forget their
education about various conservation laws and the square-cube
principle. But once you've done that, have fun. Like Guardians of the
Galaxy, the movie intertwines its ostensibly serious world-in-peril
plotline with
abundant jokes and hilarious sight gags. This is tough to do right—even
the genius Brad Bird didn't quite get it right in
Tomorrowland—but it really worked for me.
I'm getting pretty deep (in a geological layer sense)
into my nonfiction to-be-read pile. This book,
Consilience, by the famous
biologist Edward O. Wilson, is from 1998. It seems I picked
this paperback edition off a remainder table for $6 sometime after that.
My motives for doing so are lost in the mists of time.
The book was written around the time Wilson retired from Harvard, and
could be seen as kind of a farewell address. Although the research
that made him famous was on ants, he quickly became interested in
much broader fields, and that's more than evident here.
His thesis here is the "unity of knowledge". To use some labels he
(admittedly) dislikes: reductionism and scientism. (As he says: "sins
made official by the hissing suffix.") He pleads for the use of
scientific insights to illuminate all fields of study: economics,
sociology, anthropology, of course. But also the arts, philosophy,
ethics, and even religion.
He makes a decent case, probably the best that can be made.
His arguments on "sociobiology", applied to humans,
argues how our genetic inheritance
constrains culture, and made him some of the right enemies.
(See
this
Wikipedia entry
for examples.)
I wish he had devoted more space to an issue that's bothered me for a
while: the probable finitude of intelligence. We don't seem
to have any problems with applying this concept to animals; we don't
try to teach calculus to dogs, even very smart, very good dogs. And yet
we don't seem to seriously carry this observation over to human
intelligence. There might be some things we can't know. There might
even be things we can't even tell that we can't know. (In the same
way your
dog doesn't understand that he can't learn calculus.)
Wilson seems to brush up against this issue at points, but I didn't
notice any serious consideration. And yet it indicates that there
might be impassible barriers to the "unity of knowledge".
Wilson's style reminds me of Hayek's: gently argumentative with an
frosting of sweet reasonableness, maybe a little too flowery for my
tastes.
Sweet reasonableness, at least until the last chapter, which (for me) kind of goes off the
rails. In discussing what the likely future holds:
We will also come to understand the true meaning of conservatism. By
that overworked and confusing term I do not mean the pietistic and
selfish libertarianism into which much of the American conservative
movement has lately descended. I mean instead […]
Oh, well. Never mind what he means instead. This kind of drive-by
slur probably went over well at Harvard faculty soirées, but for me it's
a signal that Wilson likes to pontificate in areas in which he really hasn't
done his homework.
The last chapter also contains an environmentalist aieee-we're-all-gonna-die
jeremiad, hitting all the scary scenarios trendy at the end of the
previous century. Nearly two decades later, it seems more than a little
alarmist. Weren't we all supposed to be dead by now?
We welcome Dr. Ben Carson to the phony poll, as
PredictWise
puts him with a 2% probability of being our next president.
But how does he stack up against the crowd, phony-wise?
Even now, so early in the presidential contest, we are seeing vivid
signs of the “meta-campaign”—the spectacle of candidates who would
rather describe the wonderfulness of their campaign than tell us what
they’ll do in the unlikely event it succeeds.
I can't help but think this is a symptom of campaigns that hold
voter intelligence in contempt. And the campaigns may find it a
successful tactic, at least this time around.
At the Daily Beast, one Betsy Woodruff
headlines her article
"Scott
Walker: Anti-Immigrant Phony", and chronicles the candidate's "every
position imaginable" on birthright citizenship and other
immigration-related matters.
Charlie Sykes, one of the most influential conservative talk-radio
hosts in Wisconsin, estimates he’s interviewed Walker hundreds of times
over the last 20 years. Sykes said there may be a very simple
explanation for why Walker has had so much trouble talking about the
issue: The governor doesn’t believe what he’s saying.
We'll give him points for being an obvious phony.
As noted at
Power
Line,
Hillary tried out yet another e-mail talking point to a complaisant
interviewer, Andrea Mitchell:
AM: Did anyone in your inner circle say, “This is not a good idea. Let’s
not do this?”
HRC: You know, I was not thinking a lot when I got in. There was so much
work to be done. We had so many problems around the world.
I didn’t really stop and think, “What kind of e-mail system will there
be?”
Note that Andrea Mitchell did not follow up with the obvious
queries:
"You claim you
were 'not thinking a lot' when you became Secretary of State.
Can you give voters any reason to believe you'll be 'thinking
a lot' if you become President?"
"But wait a minute. You had to have made a conscious decision
to set up your private mail system; otherwise you would have just
settled on the default State Department system. Didn't you
just tell me an obvious lie?"
We can only hope that someday Hillary will have the bad luck
to get interviewed by someone able to nail her down on obvious
dishonesty.
Speaking of ethanol:
Our phony poll newcomer, Ben Carson, has
come
out in favor
of taking "$4 billion a year we spend on oil subsidies"
and using that
to support
"fueling stations" with a 30% ethanol blend.
He took this stand
immediately after
saying "I don't particularly like the idea of government subsidies for
anything because it interferes with the natural free market."
An action thriller with Denzel Washington! What could go wrong?
Well, for starters, he plays Tobin Frost, kind of a bad guy. A disgraced CIA super-agent,
who has spent years on the run, allegedly freelancing his intelligence
services to any and all enemies of the US.
Well, that's the story anyway. But after a transaction with a similarly
disenchanted MI6 agent in Capetown, he finds himself hotly pursued
by a shadowy assassination squad, one with an uncanny ability to track
his every move. His only recourse is to turn himself into the American
consulate. Which in turn puts him in the titular "Safe House", a
dumpy suite of drab rooms maintained by young CIA agent Matt Weston
(Ryan Reynolds). Weston has been in this position for a year, hardly anything
ever happens, he's totally bored. Frost's arrival is an unexpected fireworks
show.
But much, much worse, because the assassination squad knows that Frost
is there, and is still out to get him. Pretty soon Frost and Weston
are on the run together. Car chases, gunplay, knifeplay, fisticuffs,
explosions,
betrayal happen apace.
It would be pretty ludicrous if not for Denzel's acting talent; Ryan
Reynolds does pretty well for himself too.
Funny: Brendan Gleeson sports an American accent, and does OK with it.
A biography of the founding father by Lynne Cheney
(yes, Dick Cheney's wife).
My interest was prompted by Charles Murray's
recent book
By
the People; Murray calls himself a "Madisonian" therein,
indicating his agreement with Madison's understanding of the strictly
limited powers of the Federal government described by the Constitution.
And there was
a good review
in the
Wall
Street Journal.
Madison lived from 1751 to 1836. For about forty of those years, he
was deeply involved in the invention of our country; it's fair to say
that we'd be a different, and probably worse, nation without him. His
biography is pretty much a biography of the USA.
Just consider the résumé: an early advocate of American
independence; member of the Virginia legislature (1776–1779);
delegate to the Continental Congress (1780-1783);
delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787;
author of many of the Federalist Papers;
member of the US House of Representatives (1789-1797);
Secretary of State under Jefferson (1801-1809);
and US President (1809-1817).
And then he took it easy for a while.
Mrs. Cheney's book is a pretty good history lesson for those of us whose
last formal study of the matter was a dimly remembered high school
course. I was surprised by a number of things, but mostly by Madison's
fervent advocacy of the "national veto", by which the Federal
legislature
could nullify legislation passed by state legislatures. That
idea (weird to my ears today)
went nowhere in the convention, and Madison eventually dropped it.
Obviously this defeat
didn't stop him from becoming a fervent advocate of the version
of the Constitution that was eventually produced.
Mrs. Cheney also deftly sketches the relationship between Alexander
Hamilton and Madison, originally partners in getting the Constitution
adopted, only to turn into ideological rivals over its eventual
interpretation. Madison considered the enumerated powers in Article 1,
Section 8 to be strict limits on Congressional powers: if it's not in
the list, guys, you can't do it. (This was also the reasoning behind
Madison's initial opposition to including a Bill of Rights into the
proposed Constitution; unneeded, he argued, since Congress was
limited only to its enumerated powers.)
Hamilton, on the other hand,
advocated for viewing the enumerated powers as (mere)
examples, while
the General Welfare essentially gave Congress a blank check
for all sorts of not-expressly-prohibited actions. And, unfortunately,
that's where we are today.
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