Former Solicitor-General Ted Olsen, who previously encouraged David Brock to publish known falsehoods against Anita Hill in order to undercut her attack on Clarence Thomas, is going to argue in front of Thomas, Alito, Scalia, Roberts, and Kennedy (the likely majority) that "When the government of the United States of America claims the authority to ban books because of their political speech, something has gone terribly wrong and it is as sure a sign as any that a return to first principles is in order."
]]> I agree with Ted. Let's restore the principle that speech is speech. Money is not speech. No law restricts making a DVD and going door-to-door to hand out a movie of lies and innuendo. McCain-Feingold restricts spending institutional money. Since "general treasuries" can't separate out those people whose contributions they would not want spent on politics, the law has a moral basis. But what about a privately-owned publisher that funds a political book or movie?It is the court precedent of setting money as speech that is the problem. I'll break ranks with those Senate worthies and suggest money always finds a way to be spent, skirting laws that try to channel it or stop it. Publicizing who is spending might be all we can reliably achieve. With the 1st Amendment looming, common-sense laws about clearly political books and movies are not possible. I'm mostly in sympathy with that, since one might have found the government stopping the TV movie "The Day After", about a major nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union, since it might have affected arms negotiations, or Michael Moore's movies. Unfortunately, it protects Jerome Corsi, too.
]]>Leading NASA gadfly Lucius P. Barbour took to the Sunday morning talk show circuit to press his claims that the agency has been maintaining a sham program, that we are woefully behind the Soviet Union in every area of space technology and weapons systems, and that the sham is intended to deflect Americans' attention away from the "fearsome enemy of Godless Communism". When pressed to offer evidence of his contentions, he answered by saying NASA had not shown him any Moon rocks.
"Marco Polo brought rice to the West, why can't we see some dirt?", said the red-faced and sweating Barbour. When informed that astronauts had in fact done so, he said he wanted to hold those rocks in his hands. When told they were reserved for scientists to study, he responded "Pointy-headed intellectuals aren't who Americans want to hear from."
]]> Ranging farther afield, Barbour warned that a federal assistance for mental health care was funding a facility in Alaska, which was planned for housing political dissidents in the manner of the Soviet Union. That subject was, unsurprisingly, not mentioned on the CBS Evening News by Walter Cronkite, who is known to be slow to pick up on the more intemperate right-wing charges like President Nixon's claim, when he was Eisenhower's vice-president, that White House files had contained "a blueprint for socializing America.".Barbour waxed eloquent, or at least windy, about the need to build space battleships, not Moon voyagers. "We need to take the high ground, so the communists will know they are not on top, but under our eagle eye. The alternative is to be ground under their heel."
Recommended reading:
In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition: Birthers, Town Hall Hecklers and the Return of
Right-Wing Rage, by Rick Perlstein
Loose Network of Activists Drives Reform Opposition
False 'Death Panel' Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots
For Professor Gates, it would have easily avoided a problem to be subservient and polite, ignoring his feeling of being oppressed. This is what Chris Rock humorously advises in this video clip: NYPD Training Video
But advice to the individual is not sufficient sometimes. Advising our citizens to not discriminate on the basis of race (Emancipation, Brown vs. Board) was provably inadequate (lynching, Jim Crow) thus the Civil Rights Act.
So let's keep clear which topic we mean. Definitely a bad
idea to shout and gesture at a policeman who has his weapon drawn and pointed at
you---see Charles Blow's story of that in today's NYT. But do we have to defend
a cop arresting someone who is by definition in his power (or he couldn't apply
those handcuffs) just because the citizen was loud and abusive?
I don't think we need to include race---this kind of heavy-cop thing happens to white people plenty. But it does happen to blacks more often, so my liberal view is that the uneven distribution implies continuing (informal) racial profiling. And my civil-liberties view is that police have plenty of advantages, beginning with society's sanction, and including communication and transport, strength in numbers, authorized weapons and other tools, and plenty of special laws concerning attacks on them. Do we need to codify kowtowing?
Isaac Asimov, who was a leader in making speculative fiction scientific, imagined (among others) a future where robots' installed morals, his Three Laws, would invite a more basic Law, that of promoting the health and future of the human race. One particular robot, who has deduced this new Law, acts to enforce it, by starting a nuclear reaction intended to make Earth eventually uninhabitable. This forces humanity out of its sleepy satisfied state, which comprises a handful of planets colonized by wealthy explorers, and the hugely overpopulated home planet.
]]> As Yogi Berra pointed out, it is very hard to make predictions, especially about the future. But we can now predict with a lot of confidence that Earth's average temperature will rise. We can predict with some confidence that efforts to slow that effect will be at best too little, too late, as nations now pumping CO2 into the atmosphere will not succeed in transforming their technology and economies sufficiently, in time to prevent substantial change. And we can predict that our population will continue to increase.Most human cultures include a faction that breaks away, wanders, explores. America was founded by a self-selected population of mostly this type of person, and while we also produce plenty of those content to stay home, we had the frontier to attract the explorers. Humanity seems to have been launched into modern history by just such a group, that left east Africa something like 50,000 years ago, crossed the Red Sea into the Arabian Peninsula, followed its greener coastline into India, and subsequently branched into two populations, one of which moved back into Anatolia and Europe, while the other continued into China, populating Indonesia and Australia along the way.
Since we all descend from this group, that left home, it is reasonable to assume we will continue to have those who explore and inhabit the frontier. Why did we leave the Eden of east Africa? Looking at modern humans, we leave home because of crowding, because of desire for opportunity, and because of irreconcilable political or cultural tension. Genetic evidence suggests modern humans were once a tiny band, maybe as few as a hundred, but more likely a thousand or a few thousand. This could have been a faction that followed one clan leader, and could not find reconciliation with the tribes inhabiting the home turf.
We have seen this occur in recent history, in the Pilgrim effort, and the very successful Mormon migration. While the occasional wealthy centenarian may move into a space habitat to eke out a few more decades of life, large population movement will not be economically attractive anytime soon. But major churches can amass large funds, and have incentives to establish life away from polluting immorality and unbelievers. They might be the first to establish meaningful space habitats.
Industry will compete for resources out in the asteroids, and may find useful quantities of good fusion fuel on the Moon's surface. Likely it will be a slow, creeping, and fitful process, with early efforts failing, and later ones avoiding the mistakes of the first tries. If Earth continues to become a difficult environment, that will simultaneously promote development of protective habitat design, and make it easier and more worthwhile to move out (for those with the wherewithal).
Still, we have to try to preserve Earth's climate as we found it, the one that allowed the explosion of agriculture on which civilization grew. As far as we can tell, which is pretty far, we are the only technological civilization around, the only one that can consider the Universe and its meaning, the only one that can remember, and the only one with a sense of the future. Even if we mostly fail to stem climate change we will learn a lot about what is achievable, making it possible to eventually restore a favorable climate, and to change hostile planets to habitable.
No place in the Universe is safe from change, sometimes violent, and we can feel good about our tendency to produce those who aren't content or comfortable among the throng---they will help keep the amazing experiment of life and consciousness going into the indefinite future. One more thing we can deduce from history is that humans are hard to kill off. Even intentional genocides fail, and no plague will sicken everyone. Life is tough, or it would not have started so early, while Earth was being pounded by dinosaur-killers regularly. Let's hope that we make enough progress expanding into the local area before the next Big One leaves its mark, like happened to Jupiter in the previous decade.
]]>In a public statement, the American Medical Association argued that a public option would be attractive enough to drive out private insurers, causing a "...surge in public plan participation would likely lead to an explosion of costs that would need to be absorbed by taxpayers." While they are wrong in principle about the second point, higher costs, they are likely right about the first. My guess is most primary-care physicians would encourage their patients to shift, in order to reduce the paper and phone calling those offices need in order to collect from the private companies.
But the large number of specialists that are partners with
labs and clinics, who see lots of extra income from tests and procedures that
are not prescribed in similar situations elsewhere in the country, will in fact
earn less. In this I am not wholly sympathetic to their plight. Since most
civilized countries have satisfactory staffing levels at hospitals and in
offices for visits, there is not an apparent need for this business model. And
it is precisely this approach that drives costs beyond the needed into the
wasteful range, as exemplified by studies that showed huge cost differences
between an expensive town in Texas
But the claim that costs will go up after a surge in
participation in the public plan is worth thinking about. One way in which this
could happen is if the public system were less efficient. This is known to not
be this case, although it is reflexively mentioned all the time. Perhaps the AMA means that federal taxes would
have to rise to cover costs that are paid by local taxes now, in county
hospital emergency care. Maybe they mean it will cost the system more to take
care of people that now just die. Or perhaps they mean that once a government plan exists it
will become a corrupt channel for money to flow to cronies. How would they be
familiar with that? Hmmm. Ever wonder why the conservatives are so sure
government bureaucracies are corrupt? The howling irony in the debate is that the usual cudgel of
government being inefficient compared to private enterprise is reversed now,
with it being unfair for private insurers to have to compete with the big bad
government, presumably because of the lower price of the latter. Medicare as
Wal-Mart. Since a large part of the business class is used to making profits by
simple cheating and defrauding they expect that government will be fraudulent
and wasteful, too. They just can't believe that a government program will simply
outperform the private sector. So the low price must be a fake, hiding true
costs (or fraudulent ones) elsewhere, which will be paid by taxpayers,
translate those poor beleaguered upper-bracket worthies. Good news is that not all doctors are entrepreneurs, and
their group, Physicians for a National Health Program, is in favor of
single-payer. I think the AMA is correct in worrying about the public-option
dodge, since it really will drive private insurers out, and we will end up with
single-payer. The sooner the better, because then we can choose our own doctors
and treatment plans.
The United States has produced the Marshall Plan, but also Hiroshima. It defeated fascism but also had to defeat racism at home, an ongoing project. It has produced both Duke Ellington and Aaron Copland, and if we didn't create the Beatles we sure as heck created ragtime, jazz, and rock and roll.
And we lofted the first Great Observatory into space, Hubble.
This has been our gift to the world's populations, pictures and science for all. Researchers have proprietary privileges for one year, and after that all data is public domain, not needing subscription to journals and so on. Anyone can download the amazing images, print them, and sell them as posters, with only a notice of credit for the image being asked. This may be the most generous gift we have offered to the world, since there are exactly zero strings on it.
Mapping and measuring the stars began as an aid to astrologers, who were making predictions for kings, and it continued to be essential in surveying and navigation. Naval officers are trained in celestial navigation, and I don't mean Capt. Kirk, but finding out where you are after all power is lost and you are floating without engines in hostile waters, or blown to hell and gone by a typhoon.
Astronomy has moved into hard science, used to test theory, and also to assay asteroids for their mineral value. It has become the venue for the most ambitious Unification Theories, with string theorists, standard-model disciples, and loop quantum gravity rebels all hoping for vindication from the cosmic microwave background, or calculated expansion rates, or element-abundance measurements. It has even joined the team of homeland defenders, searching for threatening asteroids.
But the ascent of Hubble was revolutionary. It extended our telescopic reach exponentially, increasing our view of the Universe by such a huge amount that even the unimaginable advance from Galileo's little spyglass to Palomar's 200-inch mirror was a smaller jump. And this jewel is not pointed down, like its sister spy satellites, is never used for military or intelligence work; it used to look outward, so that we may know our place.
And for those who find manned spaceflight an extravagance, think about the likely result of having stayed at home either before or after the Moon: no Hubble. My father worked on the first orbiting astronomical observatories, OAO 1 and 2. The first died after three days, the second did OK, but was so modest in scale that the big earthbound glass could make these first efforts seem like only practice. But with the confidence of being able to repair and upgrade, (thank you KH-11s) we not only orbited a telescope that is almost as big as Palomar, we fixed it when it was discovered to be the wrong specification. And we fixed it again. And we fixed it again.
When it looked like it would die again, and we had lost confidence in the shuttle, NASA announced its retirement. The howl of protest quickly altered that plan. Now it is not only being fixed yet again, but upgraded yet farther to new capability, and getting custom repairs it was never expected to enjoy. Is this not something the planet can take pride in?
Yes, people starve, they die of disease, they are enslaved, tortured, befuddled by propaganda, exploited, and live in squalor. But would the world be a better place without Hubble orbiting serenely above it all? People would still fight and face famine. And we would not know the beauty that is our Universe.
The new telescopes just launched, our own recent ones, and the planned James Webb, will all be sent to locations too distant to service, in trailing solar orbit. But the experience in design and materials, the knowledge of system lifetimes, will make those much more likely to be successes instead of embarrassing failures. Hubble was giant whose shoulders will support those new telescopes.
]]>The male bower bird of Australia collects objects to arrange as a stage, on which to display its pleasing stature and song. It weaves grasses into walls to frame the stage, places bright and dark pebbles around it, and makes sure it is oriented east-west, so that noonday sun will illuminate the place of honor. This takes roughly 70% of its day, and a goodly portion of that time consists of defending the bower against destructive attack from competitors, or launching attacks on others' bowers.
Is the bird wasting its time? The bird that opts out of the competition also opts out of the gene pool. We would root for trying harder, reaching higher, just as we applaud small colleges seeking to make the Final Four, or American Idol, or any of thousands of forms of human competition. We spend money on storytelling, whether books or movies. We buy pictures to mount on our walls, even though we can't eat them, or survive attack by sheltering behind them.
The question of necessity is raised by the economic overshoot we have experienced. We were buying for the fun of it, we think, instead of the necessity of it. But economists and writers point to Japan as having been too concerned with saving, back in the 90s, and the government tried hard to inspire spending. Is there a level of frivolous economic activity that is necessary?
A related question is whether there is some kind of absolute measure of wealth and poverty, or whether it is always relative. Because the poor rarely starve, or freeze to death, are they actually well off? If so, why would anyone need or be able to justify multiple houses, cars, televisions, pools, and bathrooms? Why do we buy anything?
Adam Gopnik's piece in the New Yorker considers the safety razor, which began its upward march to five blades back in the 70s, in time for Saturday Night Live, on its first show, to lampoon the first two-blade razor by satirically advertising the then-imaginary three-blade version ("Because you'll believe anything"). Life proceeded to imitate art in the expected way, which was why the skit was funny--we knew what was coming.
Gopnik points out that only in situations of abundance do we see the innovation we sometimes associate with necessity. More evidence that necessity has nothing to do with it, but is there some other reason? There is some evidence that it makes better sense to consider evolutionary abundance similarly, as happening mainly because it can. I would say that was always true, combining the new with the old, and say that evolution rewards experimentation in times of abundance by finding new uses for the frivolities in times of stress.
Discussions of wealth and poverty rarely note that no one is acting in isolation from society. People do compare themselves to others, and when one's daughter is of marrying age, one does wonder what kind of job the suitor holds. Keeping up with the Joneses is not silly, if a family cares about its social standing. And that standing will greatly affect the prospects for the sons, when they go looking for work or wives. If you are wealthy, why would you waste that wealth on an expensive car? Because you want to be accepted in the homes of other wealthy, who would doubt your wealth without visible display.
This mechanism affects businesses, too. They design headquarters, and even factories, to look better than competitors' plants. They send their VPs on fancier vacations, hold more extravagant parties, offer larger parachute packages, and generally blow bucks in every way possible, when competing for an existing pie slice. But when the pie shrinks, bye-bye display. Turned out those extravagances weren't inherent needs, the cost of doing business. They were the cost of showing off, of competing against other businesses.
This is not to say they are completely useless, any more than Trent Lott's spare house in DC was useless, after Katrina flooded the coastal one. The fact that he had spare money also meant he could be out of town when the storm came through. The business that fights its way to the top might survive a downturn better than the one struggling to compete. But evolution teaches us that perfect fitness, i.e. perfect adaptation, is also poor flexibility, when things change. Katrina was not change, it was the norm. The change is when people look at the wealthy and decide they no longer respect them.
We are seeing a reverse John Galt, as people stop acting as placid sheep that will buy any stupid piece of shit that doesn't do what it's supposed to.
Some things do work, including the cell phone, and by now, the home computer or laptop is very reliable. These things have transformed the business landscape, and may be a deeper reason for our current economic upset. Obviously the newspaper is dying as a result of the computer and internet, but it aided the housing bubble, with the ease of listing and searching listings. The internet is transforming advertising, which is the driver of those frivolities like five-blade razors and ShamWows.
So we don't have to feel guilty about some of our unnecessary luxuries---they might be necessities in new circumstances, like when there is no pay phone, or when you need to search the classified ads for a job, and your iPhone does all of that. And life is sure more interesting when we have fun stuff like rock and roll or caramel popcorn, not to mention Puccini or Beethoven.
But the necessity of luxury also means that immense disparity between the top and bottom is unhealthy, inviting trouble. Those at the bottom lose any faith in ever being on top, and we are not yet evolved to accept that. It becomes like two species, if there is no intermarriage between levels. We may get insurrection, like the French Revolution. Or we may get separation, like the poor in Pakistan that have no faith in public education's promises of future employment, and send their children to madrassas, enabling movements like the Taliban.
Homo lingua, we talk all the time now. Twitter and texting (sexting!) rule the hubbub. The ultimate tool, language has been used to check genetic data indicating that behaviorally modern humans migrated out of Africa, across the Red Sea, roughly 50,000 years ago. Our first language was click, like Khoisian, or the !Kung and San. The San, in particular, show the widest genetic diversity, and this is considered the best indicator of founding population. Similarly, the widest genetics for apples is found in Kazakhstan, so it is the home of the apple tree.
Eden was probably crowded and contentious, with groups
fighting over waterholes, or women. (Amazon Yanomamo laughed at researchers
that asked if they fought over food.) But the exodus led across the Arabian
Peninsula, into India, and was likely also contentious, given the previous
expansion of Homo Erectus and Habilis. This could be where we get legends of
trolls and ogres, which could also be Neanderthal, which met the second group
of migrants that turned west across Turkey, into Europe. ("Before the Dawn" by Nicholas Wade, is a good source on this.)
It's fascinating to think about the reasons language started. Theories have included grooming becoming gossip and hunters making plans. I doubt the latter, since the plan would be usually the same, and while hunting, no one is talking. I think we can take some clues from what we do now.
Studies show that men have larger speaking vocabularies, and women larger comprehension. This is predicted if speech is what geneticists call a fitness indicator, a peacock's tail. It takes spare brainpower to speak entertainingly, and it takes good comprehension to discern the better speaker. Note that elaborate chitchat is not seen in sports bar with male-only populations ("Da Bulls.")
Other evidence is that everyone can speak (pretty much) so this is a deeply valuable attribute, thus evolved long ago, long before we left Africa, and also that we have a single grammar, inherited from the San. But another peacock's tail that is universally admired, and shared by all to some extent, is musical skill, especially singing. Nearly everyone can recognize simple tunes, even if they can't carry one. Ever considered why there are groupies for scrawny rock singers?
And a good speech just won the office of President (lots of good speeches, of course, and good policy, but...). So how do we get to this from no speech?
A guaranteed cool skill for kids is to make cool sounds, whistling, blowing into cupped hands, fake farts, etc. Blade of grass between thumbs (makes a good predator call, too). Imitating animals is common in farm communities ("Soooo-eee!!") Would have been useful in hunting, in warning of danger, in communicating during battle with other groups. Would have been effective at confusing rival groups, if one group had a big talent. One guy might have been enough.
And we have heard lots recently about "mirror" neurons. These aid mimicry as well as empathy, and might be the result of selection for imitating.
So I think speech and song arose roughly simultaneously. Both song and story have the attribute of rejecting nonsensical substitutions, improving data permanence. Both are universal. And both can be used for the opposite purpose.
During the Korean War, Chinese battles were launched with musical signals, playing of a flute or trumpet. Kodak chemists would time exposures with popular songs. Work songs, sea chanties, aided mechanical activity. And words can move us in our bodies, as art, not just instructions. One writer said that writing was saying with words what could not be said with words. Mark Twain said the right word had an effect that was both prompt and electric.
And words can give us immortality. Humans will remember things our loved ones said, that our leaders said, that our artists said, that our kids said. Some of those will passed along, and so on. Homer, the Bible, the Greek plays, Dante, Cervantes, are immortal now.
For those who bemoan the impermanence of digital data, think about the impermanence of a told story. With a good audience, it's not a worry.
A priest, a minister, a rabbi, a monkey, and a horse walk into a bar, and the bartender says, "What is this, some kind of joke?"
I've been reading about the unholy combination of McCarthyism and MacArthurism that was the toxic atmosphere during the Korean War. Douglas MacArthur's father got his chance to try being Caesar in the Philippines, waterboarding and all, before President McKinley couldn't take him anymore. Harry Truman got a chance to repeat, or rather, rhyme, history, when he had to fire the son of the earlier MacArthur. It is not Shakespearean, but more a Greek tragedy, that this nativist, racist, jingoist strain of characters won't go away. Familiar name from Doug MacArthur's Tokyo sycophants---Alexander Haig. Add Buchanan, Cheney, Rumsfeld. Garnish with the new MacArthur, McCain, who wanted to be Eisenhower. Looked like the same effective mix. (In retrospect, it is a really scary thought to consider the alternative to Eisenhower in 1952, MacArthur. We were lucky.)
The rabid right was not all that happy with Eisenhower, so Kennedy had to out-hawk the hawks, and it trapped him into adventures that we were decades recovering from. I find myself hoping Obama is Eisenhower, with Johnson's domestic emphasis.
None of the dire consequences the rabid right warned of happened, i.e. no dominoes, no global communism, and China buys our Treasury bonds. More recently we had the exquisite embarrassment of our president promising us he would protect us from Saddam's nonexistent arsenal. At least some people notice how wrong this crowd has been, and how often.
This is not to say the saber-rattlers are now disarmed. They can always raise new threats, make accusations of treachery, warn of a future of enslavement and tyranny, and fool some of the people. Unfortunately, more and better record-keeping is a new challenge for the revisionists.
Douglas MacArthur tried it, after being recalled by Truman. He insisted the Joint Chiefs were on his side. Oops, those guys didn't play along. Worse, he tried to downplay his own pronouncements about the Chinese being too weak to enter the war. Someone had taken notes and written up the very meetings where MacArthur had insisted that was the case, in order to quell resistance to his plans to conquer all of Korea. Kind of like Iraqis welcoming us with flowers, Americans were assured our boys would be home from Korea by Christmas. When he finally wound up in front of the Senate, he began to look rather less godlike.
And now we have those inconvenient records of abusive interrogations, torture to most people. We have assertions of Abu Zubaydeh leading us to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, except records show he did so before he got to go swimming without a snorkel. Same for Jose Padilla, who Zubaydeh discussed without the motivation of a refreshing dunk.
These are the people that scare the crap out of other nations, and make them want powerful weapons with which to make our Curtis LeMays think more than twice. Actually, there is no hope of getting that kind of person to think twice; LeMay, famous for firebombing Japan, was always looking for an excuse to start the Big One with Russia, like MacArthur and Time magazine's Henry Luce wanted the other Big One, China, which they thought was the same Big One. Now we get the clash of civilizations again, except it's now Islam, or maybe it's brown-skinned people since Mexicans seem to be part of it.
Fun activity for a weekend---Google the phrase: "They only understand strength." Lyndon Johnson said as much about the Vietnamese, who he considered to be like Mexicans, all right as long as they knew who was boss. This simplistic chest-puffing has been around since long before Caligula's "Let them hate, as long as they fear."
Please, let's evolve out of this. Or at least let's have people other than historians learn from history.
Actually, the second part is what I don't know, and would like someone to explain. There seems to be a class of rhetorical trick that is the usual technique. Here's one example: "When guns are criminalized, only criminals will have guns." It makes an absurdity out of a sensible issue, mainly by exaggerating and then reversing a point. "So we should let France have a veto over our national security?" "Liberals want to offer psychotherapy for terrorists." "Why do you hate America?"
One of our reflex-slogan specialists here recently asked why a contributing guest had switched from using "global warming" to "climate change". The obvious intent was to make the guest look unsteady, unreliable, unserious, since he can't keep his terms straight. Unfortunately, the guest always used the latter term, as does the International Panel on Climate Change. But it reminded me of an exchange I had with a letter-writer in the Chicago Tribune, in the 90s.
The paper had a small piece about stratospheric ozone depletion. A letter was posted, responding to the piece, complaining that environment activists couldn't keep their story straight, since they had been previously complaining about ozone being a pollutant, due to auto emissions. I wrote, and the paper published, a letter in which I explained the difference. Then it got interesting, since the original letter-writer wrote to me, defending himself by saying he was in fact a chemist and climate scientist. He had disagreements with the consensus on acid rain, and was apparently just an industry supporter. But the point is he knew full well that high-altitude ozone was necessary, and ground-level ozone a lung-damaging pollutant. He just cheated.
This brings to mind Newt Gingrich's 1996 GOPAC memo, "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control", in which he
listed positive and negative terms that should be employed as much as possible,
using the positives for one's own side and the negatives for the other guys.
( http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4443.htm
)
If Orwell was right,
that sloppy writing could discourage clear thinking, then what is the effect of
deliberate cheating? Does it eventually make these folks so trapped by their
rhetorical flamethrower that they talk themselves into factual corners?
The Tea Baggers are
so funny because they have the very representation the originals lacked, and
also because the original complaint was about a preferential tax cut for the
dominating East India Company. John Boehner tries to dismiss regulating CO2 by
first scoffing at how could something we breathe out be a carcinogen (it isn't
claimed to be), and then mentioning cow farts, (which are methane, and have
presumably been a feature of life on Earth for a while now).
A recent example of the turnaround trick was a
caller to Stephanie Miller, who pointed out that downed Blackhawk pilots in
Somalia were tortured, so our previous policy didn't protect our soldiers.
Therefore it's OK to torture, since we have nothing to lose.
Rush pointed out
that because McCain broke during his interrogations in North Vietnam, torture
works. Works in what way not mentioned, since it worked to make McCain say
things he didn't believe to be true.
What's your most
annoying rhetorical dodge? And how to best counter it?
How does one guarantee pensions with the volatile stock market? That is so oxymoronic it needs a new term, like NewFinance. I guess they were hoping to create their own reality. Then again, maybe Millard and friends are simple crooks. And simple crooks are usually stupid. Josh suggests the move was possibly intended to keep the market up. Can this have been legal?
Back to pensions and security. Why does it benefit a fund to have windfall profit at some particular time? Like a gambler, only if one takes the winnings somewhere else is there a long-term success. Otherwise it is a transient condition that does not help the beneficiaries of the fund. They see no extra dividends. Nor do future pensioners see any automatic increase in their expected retirement package; that is usually negotiated independently of the fund's condition, and related to current salary compensation. It is not supposed to benefit fund managers if there is a rise in total valuation. Only the brokers benefit.
But sensible people get sucked into feeling foolish to resist a hot market. They miss the important point, that reliable future performance is the goal, not large fund totals now. At least the government felt that way, until the Bush appointees went loony, stupid, or venal.
]]>In principle, that is, with Tesla's new offering, the Model S. Priced at roughly half of the Roadster's six figures, the sedan can be charged in 45 minutes for 160 miles, or go 300 miles with the larger battery option. We're having trouble, some of us, remembering that batteries are not only those things in our cellphones; they also served to sink Nazi and Japanese shipping, powering our hybrid diesel-electric WW II submarines. And they can run trains just as easily.
But I would say we should still use liquid or gaseous fuels for most long-distance transport. These can be derived from several non-fossil sources: Ethanol of course, which should not be from edible corn but from trash cellulose; solar-derived hydrogen peroxide is a compact form of chemical energy, also used in WW II for submarines (Germany); hydrogen can be stored in metallic "sponge" for leak-free safety; and solar-derived hydrogen can be feedstock for methane made with CO2 captured from the atmosphere. Some algae yields 80% burnable oil by weight, and there is all that fast-food frying oil out there, for diesels.
While a train can include a separate car or two with an immense battery set, a long-range car or bus should be a full series hybrid, not the parallel versions we use now. Instead of a fairly powerful gasoline engine assisted by an electric motor, a series hybrid (like a train engine or strip-mine truck) only uses its fuel engine as a generator. There is a big increase in efficiency when that motor can be run full out, on or off, without the challenge of smooth throttle response.
I would like a car with an electric motor like the Tesla's, but with a smaller battery set, a fuel tank, and a fuel motor just a little bigger than needed for holding highway speed. This would be roughly 30 hp or so, for a Prius-sized car. The excess allows recharging while holding speed, to provide acceleration and hill power. And with a dedicated generator/engine, mileage should be near 100 mpg.
With no need for acceleration power and no need for good throttle response, any fuel works, from methane to alcohol, or a diesel could run on algae oil and used frying grease. And the mid-size battery set would still allow straight charging from homeowner's or employer's solar panels, for a fuel-free commute. Trucks have plenty of room for batteries, and little need for fast acceleration; getting up the hill is enough. Satisfying trucking power demand should be easier than for the automobile, and trains are easier yet. Long-haul freight already gets the equivalent of 300 mpg---how hard could it be to run those trains on batteries? But they don't need to, since they are so maxed out for efficiency already. Still, it's fun to think about railroads lining their rights-of-way with solar panels and electrifying the rails, with the train engine taking extra juice to keep its batteries topped for those grades and cloudy days.
If employers at large sites like the Pentagon covered their parking lots with solar panels they could sell power to employees, as well as to the community grid. Does 600 megawatts sound like a large amount? It's a medium-sized coal plant, or the Pentagon's peak solar power output using its 3 square kilometers of roof and parking. Next time you fly, look out the window at all the warehouse and store roofs , the parking lots, and the roadways. Cover that with solar.
First Solar is supplying panels at $1/Watt in large quantities, and that price will work its way down to smaller setups soon. The Tesla Roadster needs roughly 10 KwHrs for a 50-mile commute roundtrip. A setup with 2000W peak output, maybe ten square meters, could deliver that charge in a day's shift at work. That's something like 8ft. by 12 ft., or a parking slot, roofed with panels, protecting the car from sun and hail. True that its usefulness is somewhat seasonal, but still worth it if the parking slot can earn a few extra bucks every day, even when it's empty. The panels keep the bird droppings off your Tesla, too. The lot probably would charge a premium, higher than average home rates, but convenient for heading home with a full charge, and it could be a deductible expense to offset that cost, for users.
My next car will likely have an electric motor---cool, I'm tired of the sound of pistons pounding and the complexity of fuel delivery and ignition. The little generator engine will be nearly silent, and when pulling power I'll just hear gears humming.
]]>My 20-something son, film student, writer, waiter, asked me about AIG. So I launched into an explanation of financial leveraging in general, and credit default swaps in particular. He said he knew that stuff, but wondered what was up with those bonuses. That's trouble, as in Vietnam. The kids might have been low-key about Iraq, since only their gung-ho friends went. But when they see their personal future looking bleak, carrying large college loans, still waiting tables, they kinda notice the discrepancy between their lives and certain others'.
Frank Rich gave credit to a reader letter in the Times for being the first to ask if this is Obama's Katrina moment. I think the evidence is that only the media is fussing over the administration's somewhat confused actions, while people are wondering how it came to be that we need to save the asses of the richest financial "products" companies. Calling this Katrina for Obama is like saying Bush had to know how to deflect a hurricane. He didn't; he only needed to show he gave a damn, and tried to help (he didn't). Obama had already shown this, during the campaign when McCain couldn't show he even knew what was happening.
As (former) NC Steve points out, when many big names are disagreeing in a large way, it's clear no one knows for sure what to do. But some appear to care and others don't. 'Ware the mob, my worthies. You have angered them, and they outnumber you.