Going Off

This space may be a bit fallow for a while. I'm off on an extended trip, first to see my wife's family, then mine, then to the World Science Fiction Convention, which is being held early this year, in Denver, immediately prior to the Democratic National Convention.

So, in honor of that last bit, I'm going to rep0st something I put up on my Newsgroup a couple of years ago, following the 2006 World Science Fiction Convention:

[originally posted Sept. 5, 2006]

I was watching the News Hour on PBS last Friday, the Shields and Brooks segment, and Jim Lehrer asked a question about Bush’s latest PR offensive, equating the War on Terror and War in Iraq (two phrases Bush always uses interchangeably) to the Cold War and WWII. And Mark Shields. Just. Went. Off. He was nearly ranting, forcefully demanding to know why, if it was all so important, why the country hadn’t been put on a war footing, why there weren’t enough troops in Iraq, why taxes hadn’t been raised, etc. etc. etc.

Brooks was obviously taken aback, and tried his best to shift the argument, talk about how the country would never stand for such measures, and so forth. But mostly he looked nervous and, well, dare I say it, wimpy, irresolute, even lost. After all, Shields is the liberal; he’s not supposed to be the one spitting fire.

The World Science Fiction Convention isn’t anywhere close to the political mainstream, actually. Most convention going fans are college-educated, intellectual-leaning, and more respectful of science rather than, say, religion. Certainly there are plenty of right-leaning fans, but they tend toward the libertarian or Social Darwinian right, rather than the religious right that forms the core of the current Movement Conservatism.

Still, I’ve heard plenty of support in the past from various SF types for various portions of the Conservative Movement agenda, especially the anti-tax, liberal bashing part of it.

Not this last convention, however. In fact, several times, some from panelists, but just as often from ordinary convention goers, the subject would flash over to current politics and the Bush Administration and someone would. Just. Go. Off. On a tirade, a screed, a rant, a whatever-you-want-to-call-it.

And there would be no response. Not even afterwards, in the men’s room, where all the important political thoughts are voiced. No one is willing to say in public, or even semi-private, that they support the Bush Administration.

The secret ballot covers a lot. It especially covers a lot of bigotry. David Duke the white supremacist always polled about 10% higher in the actual race than he did in preliminary opinion polls. So it’s always hard to predict elections beforehand, especially when fevers run high on issues like immigration, where race matters even more than it does otherwise.

But authoritarians are bullies, and the truism is true: bullies are cowards. At a certain point, pulling in your horns becomes reflexive, especially when you’re not sure what you’re voting for in the first place. Moreover, bullies really, really, hate to lose. Better to not fight, then tell yourself that you’re the victim here.

So while I’m not exactly predicting a surprising shift in voter turnout this fall, with the authoritarian right sitting on their hands, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit.

The View from 30,000 Feet

People don't even look like ants from six miles up. The land becomes a mass of geometric patterns; cities become crystalline growths. You can't even see individuals at all; a single person no longer matters.

The only other faces you see are those who are in the plane with you. Your inner circle looms larger than entire counties. It's no wonder that cronyism becomes the watchword from high above. Who else matters except the nearby few?

Pilots are used to privilege. They sometimes fancy themselves as "mavericks," like the character in Top Gun, but really, they're at the apex of a pyramid with the lower orders devoted to keeping them in the air, and they cannot stray far from the pyramid. Every pilot depends utterly upon the dozens of maintenance personnel who keep the plane from failing, the hundreds who built it, the thousands (and more) who have paid for it.

Can the country afford another 30,000 ft. President? I think not. John McCain may not have Bush's sadistic streak, nor his superstition and prejudices, but the sense of privilege is fully intact, an inevitable result of heritage and the flyboy mystique. Moreover, McCain has killed, directly, by dropping bombs on targets from high above, in a different war that was also instigated with lies. It would be termed murder if it ever went to trial, the sole defense being "I was following orders," and we know how that works.

It is part of American Exceptionalism that our country claims the right of aerial bombardment, to kill from on high, with only the phrase "collateral damage" serving to cover the deaths of women, children, or innocent men merely doing their jobs. "Strategic bombing" is entirely a doctrine of total war, the belief that war is inevitably genocidal, a duel to the death between two tribes of humans. There are no civilians in total war, only nits and gnats, and body counts, if you care to make them, which our country no longer cares to do.

But explosions do look beautiful from high enough. So do hurricanes and the damage done. Almost everything looks beautiful at a distance. It's only up close where the pain and suffering reside.

Exception

"American Exceptionalism," is a characteristic of Americans that supposedly says that we're a unique nation, better than all the others, with a unique place in history and world affairs. And so forth.

It's certainly true that many, if not most, Americans believe this is true, at least at some level. And it does lead to all sorts of pernicious behavior and attitudes, including denial of all the tragedy that our country has wrought over the years, decades, and centuries.

[Here, incidentally, is where I'm supposed to insert something about all the good that America has done, in order to prove that I "don't hate America," that I do love my country, and wouldn't think of living anywhere else, etc. etc. Then we all sing The Star Spangled Banner. But I'm kinda tired right now, and I'm not sure I could hit the high notes].

It seems to me that there are plenty of other countries that think they're pretty special. Britain once "ruled the waves," and the Brits certainly thought they were better than the "wogs [who] begin at Calais." China has always seemed pretty full of itself (in so many ways). I promise you that the Japanese feel plenty exceptional. The French? Do tell. Germany? You don't try to take over Europe if you feel ordinary, and the hair shirt they've worn for the past half century was tailored just for them. Israel? Check. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran? Check, check, and check.

People write about these different exceptionalisms to varying degrees, and the U.S. gets the lion share of ink. But every country seems to have a exception clause built into its national character, as nearly as I can tell. I would be interested to hear of some country whose inhabitants all say, "Ah, our little country is pretty ordinary. We exist more or less by accident, you know, and if we vanished tomorrow as a nation, history and the world would probably never notice.

I mean, that would be quite extraordinary, wouldn't it? Even exceptional.

To Whom it May Concern

Never give up! Never surrender! -- Galaxy Quest, in which a television cast is kidnapped by aliens who did not know the difference between fiction and reality.

Within 10 minutes of Sen. John McCain’s speech on foreign policy at the University of Denver he was interrupted by several protesters four separate times –- each chanting “end this war” repeatedly until they were removed.

The crowd quickly drowned them out by chanting “John McCain. John McCain, John McCain.”

McCain responded each time, drawing a standing ovation when he said, “By the way, I will never surrender in Iraq. Our American troops will come home with victory and with honor.” -- Alan Gathright, David Montero, Rocky Mountain News Originally published 07:48 a.m., May 27, 2008

Surrender? To whom?

You can call it a war, and yes, people are dying, even U. S. soldiers. You can point and say "Enemy," picking a different direction to point each time you say the magic word (Sunni insurgents, the Shiite Militias, Iran, Syria, "Islamofascists," terrorists, al Qaeda, and by golly we've caught 32 or more of al Qaeda's "#3 men" haven't we). But look at each one of those magic words and ask yourself, "How would we surrender to them?"

There is nobody to surrender to. They deposed, caught, and executed Saddam Hussein. That's it. Game over. No chemical or biological weapons exist. No nuclear weapons or weapons program.

The U.S. won the war on Iraq.

This is what winning looks like.

Winning looks like an average of 2-3 U.S. soldiers coming home every day in body bags. Over ten times that number come home physically injured. As for psychological damage, well, suck it up soldier, that's why we give you a G.I. Bill that will pay your way to any number of fine community colleges.

Winning means killing off an entire generation of Iraq young men, and driving much of the country into exile. Winning means disease and death for young children. Winning means lines around the block for terrorist training camps.

Winning means spilling our country's blood and treasure, like so much oil into a broken pipeline, to pool and soak into the sand.

Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome. -- George H. W. Bush and Brent Scrowcroft, "Why We Didn't Invade Iraq."

Moreover, when presented with the opportunity for "Nation Building," the shiny young minds of the Conservative Movement were handed the keys to the Kingdom, and got what you would expect. Second Amendment rights? Absolutely. Everybody in Iraq has a gun. Free speech? Well, sorta. Fourth and fifth amendments? Well, let's not let things get out of hand (*cough*Abu Ghraib*). Besides, low taxes and property rights are much more important.

The Movement Philosophy produced almost exactly what one would expect: a feudal society, based on who has the best organized militia and most loyal followers. The U.S. is the dominant warlord in a warloard state.

Besides, it's easy to point to real winners in Iraq. Saudi Arabian oil now sells for triple digits. Exxon/Mobil et al. makes almost as much money as the U.S. military spends in Iraq. Haliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater. Pick a contractor. It's a money river. A veritable paradise in the desert.

So a U.S. withdrawal might stop some of that cash flow. There's a loss right there, right on the balance sheets.

Let me now decode John McCain's original statement, because I and I alone possess the magic answer to the question "Surrender to whom?" And it's true, John McCain and the Republican Party will never surrender to...

Democrats.

Noted, with Previous Observations

Another example of neo-colonialism in America:

Like many immigrant families, he notes, his parents took education seriously. His brother, now a property developer in Britain, went to UCLA; he went to Oxford, where he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy, politics and economics, going on to the London School of Economics for a master's degree and earning his doctorate from Cornell University's department of development sociology .

"At home, we had nutritious food, mostly Indian food," he says. But soon, long working hours and busy schedules made convenience foods appealing. "Sometimes we ate in the car," he admits.

"When I explain to people outside the U.S. that 20 percent of American fast-food meals are eaten in cars, they are absolutely gobsmacked," Patel says. "They ask me, 'Is it because Americans love their cars so much?'

"I explain that Americans are working so hard in order to access the things people in other industrialized nations take for granted - health care, education, a pension, a living wage," he says. "And increasingly, communities of working people can't afford to live where they work. They're holding down two jobs - we shouldn't be surprised that people are forced to eat fast food in their cars."
--Raj Patel, author of Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System

Rand Contra The Ayn Rand Institute—Coda

In doing the barest minimum of research for the Rand Contra Bush postings, I ventured over to The Ayn Rand Institute, to see what sorts of things The Center for the Advancement of Objectivism had to say.

Mind you, I've seen things from the ARI show up on the op-ed pages of my local paper. These are usually the sorts of "laissez faire über alles" that one generally gets from Randians and corporate libertarians. These arguments are part of the general shell game of the kleptocracy, railing against government regulations that have been placed on businesses, but never, ever, complaining about the favors and privileges that businesses receive from government. It's "heads I win and tails you lose," a profitable little game that depends upon selective arguments and special pleading.

I forget if it was Rand or Nathaniel Branden, her then favorite acolyte, who once made the statement that selective enforcement of the law was a pernicious doctrine that is commonly used to provide the illusion of legality to what is basically a corrupt system. Given a broad enough law, everyone is guilty, so then the policeman becomes the only and arbitrary judge of who is punished. Of course, the same is true for philosophical principles, only more so, and the little hypocrisies in which people engage tells you volumes about their prejudices, their "unexamined premises," to use more Randian jargon. Selective argument is one of the most powerful weapons of rationalization, and a doctrine that holds reason and rationality above all else often resorts to rationalization to come to the "proper" result.

So I've seen the op-ed pieces from the ARI about affirmative action being racist, and about how health care is not a "right," and how environmental laws are crippling the economy, and, for that matter, how all regulations on corporations are crippling the economy. I hadn't seen any of the pro-abortion rights articles that the ARI has cooked up, but maybe I just missed them.

I also noticed, in my brief little foray, that Leonard Peikoff, who founded the ARI, has moved to a more distant connection with it, no longer being either on its board or staff. Cynic that I am, I notice that the ARI has a budget of about $5 million per year, and that it's director, one Yaron Brook receives a salary of $352,538 per year, which is 7/8 of the entire administrative expenses of the Institute. However, given that Peikoff is Ayn Rand's legal heir, and that the ARI's primary program is to supply copies of Rand's books to high school students (duck hunting where the ducks are, to quote Barry Goldwater), I imagine that Peikoff's royalties from that program may exceed Brook's salary. Just sayin'.

In any case, Rand's books sell even without the ARI collecting donations to pay for them, giving Peikoff the freedom to say anything he damn well wants to, and that would include such things as endorsing John Kerry for President and supporting Democrats in the 2006 election. I'm thinking that the ARI must be somewhat more circumspect; otherwise, some of that tasty donation money might be at risk. That money goes to those who follow the plutocracy/kleptocracy's strategy of "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor," to use the old quote.

Still, squirreling around in the ARI's archives can be scary.

On October 2, 2001, when he was still part of the ARI, Leonard Peikoff wrote an article that blamed Iran for the WTC bombing (with a nod to the Taliban and a possibly prescient comment that Bush did not seem much interested in pursuing the Taliban leadership as a target). Peikoff essentially called for a full scale war with Iran.

That's pretty ignorant. How many of us have chuckled at the congressmen, etc. who did not know that there were both Sunni and Shia Muslims? There was not a single Shiite among the 9/11 hijackers, and every one of them was connected to schools and mosques that have been financed by Saudi Arabia, not Iran. One would think that a Randian philosopher would understand that education and philosophy matters, but, oh, hell, who am I kidding? No, I wouldn't. Besides, some ARI folks get their licks in on Saudi Arabia, as we shall see.

Still, Peikoff seems to have come to his senses, at least in part, and how many of us can say that we were thinking clearly just three weeks after the WTC went down? But other articles on the ARI web site are much more chilling.

In “'Just War Theory' vs. American Self-Defense" by Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein, we are told that the real threat to America is something called "Islamic Totalitarianism," which is much more academically acceptable a phrase than "Islamofascism," isn't it?

The civilian population of an aggressor nation is not some separate entity unrelated to its government. An act of war is the act of a nation—an interconnected political, cultural, economic, and geographical unity. Whenever a nation initiates aggression against us, including by supporting anti-American terrorist groups and militant causes, it has forfeited its right to exist, and we have a right to do whatever is necessary to end the threat it poses.

Given that a nation's civilian population is a crucial, physically and spiritually indispensable part of its initiation of force—of its violation of the rights of a victim nation—it is a morally legitimate target of the retaliation of a victim nation. Any alleged imperative to spare noncombatants as such is unjust and deadly.

That said, if it is possible to isolate innocent individuals—such as dissidents, freedom fighters, and children—without military cost, they should not be killed; it is unjust and against one's rational self-interest to senselessly kill the innocent." -- "'Just War Theory' vs. American Self-Defense" by Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein

Oh, and it gets better. In "The 'Forward Strategy' for Failure," by Yaron Brook and Elan Journo, we get the following:

To defeat Japan thoroughly, however, required even more: To cut short the war and save untold thousands of American lives, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs laid waste to vast tracts of land, killed thousands of Japanese—and demonstrated that if Japan continued to threaten America, thousands more Japanese would suffer and die.

That overwhelming and ruthless use of force achieved its intended purpose. It ended the threat to the lives of Americans and returned them to safety—by demonstrating to the Germans and the Japanese that any attempt to implement their vicious ideologies would bring them only destruction. Defeated materially and broken in spirit, these enemies gave up. Since then Nazism and Japanese imperialism have withered as ideological forces.

Today, American self-defense requires the same kind of military action.

Yes, the Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute has called for massive thermonuclear strikes against Iran, Saudi Arabia, and any other country harboring "supporters of jihad against the West who cheer when Americans die."

A number of years ago, I made an attempt to deprogram a Randite or two, and my most potent argument seemed to be that Rand's "John Galt Pledge" was unworkable:

"I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." --from Atlas Shrugged

It's a potent promise, actually, similar to the virtue that some people believe can be obtained from Aikido, the ability to protect yourself from the predations of others, but to refrain from harming innocents. In my attempts to deprogram Randites, I started with the fact that it is sometimes impossible to keep from harming innocents, what we call "collateral damage." Then what? Because once the line is crossed, once you allow yourself to harm, even kill, innocent people for the sake of your own interest, then where is your morality? How much of a sham does this make of your ethics?

A few actually wavered, and maybe later they began to think critically about Randian philosophy. Maybe they even began to think for themselves.

But I am now left with the unsettling feeling that perhaps they just cranked it up to 11, and rationalized it all into a nice genocidal package, just like the folks at the Ayn Rand Institute. Dear god, they really are bugfuck crazy.

Rand Contra Bush III

Rationality is the recognition that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth, and nothing can take precedence over the perceiving of it, which is thinking—that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide to action—that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise—that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality—that the alleged shortcut to reality, which is faith, is only a short circuit destroying the mind—that the acceptance of a mystical invention is an wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's consciousness.—from John Galt's speech, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand did not, to the best of my recollection, lean heavily on organized religion in her fiction, at least not to the extent that there are many Randian villains who are priests and preachers. But she wasn't unclear on her opinion of religion, as the above quote indicates. She held her fiction to be "romantic realism," or "life, as it might and ought to be." She believed that we "ought" to ignore religion and did her best to do so in her fiction.

It would be churlish to observe that, had she written books with a more overtly anti-religious message, they would have probably sold more poorly. It's equally accurate to observe that had her atheism been the primary focus of her work or the world's perception of it, then she's have been fighting a different fight from the one she wanted to pick.

Nevertheless, there it is. Rand was a virulently, essentially anti-faith as anyone who ever lived on this planet. When Leonard Peikoff rejects the Republican Party as one that has embraced theocratic principles, he is not only being true to the spirit of Ayn Rand; he is being very, very, accurate.

Nevertheless, Rand would have found plenty to dislike about George W. Bush besides his overt (and cloying) religiosity. The anti-abortion politics of the Republican Party would clearly have horrified Rand no matter how they were derived. In so many words, Rand concluded that anti-abortion laws amounted to forced pregnancy, making a woman a slave to an unborn child, i.e., putting the interests of the fetus, and the state supposedly "protecting" the fetus, above those of the woman herself. Similarly, blocking stem cell research would have been seen by Rand as deeply irrational, "faith-based," and "anti-life," not "pro-life."

Rand tended to be anti-environmentalist, partly because of the mystical stance taken by so many in that camp (and also because of her romantic attachment to the symbol of the industrial smokestack—Rand did not always "check her own premises"), but when scientists are routinely overruled and muzzled by political appointees, she would have recognized the anti-intellectualism in the matter, and would have then taken it as an opportunity to point to it as an example of why science should not depend on government support. But the general anti-science bent of Bush, the Republican Party, and the Conservative Movement generally is not a secret, and Rand would recognize the suppression of scientific reports and attempts to force the teaching of Creationism and Intelligent Design as all part of the same theocratic bias.

As for Bush's doctrines concerning business, well, there's a cute subject.

Rand's "Heroes of Capitalism" as my commenter Black Dog Barking names them, were not the recipients of special favors and crony capitalism. Rand disdained those who made money via political connections, no-bid contracts, fraudulent behavior, and other tricks that violated her notions of what constituted laissez-faire. For Rand, laissez-faire did not consist of "giving businesses whatever they wanted." She argued, for example, against "right to work laws," which banned the so-called "union shops" as a breach of the right to contract. Rand frequently claimed that all corporate monopolies were the result of government intervention in the market (which is technically true, given that private property itself is the result of government intervention, to say nothing of the existence of the corporation, but I digress).

Rand condemned such business luminaries as Jay Gould, Thomas Durant, Harry Sinclair, Joe Kennedy, and all others who made their money through manipulation of legislatures or fraudulent tactics rather than, well, whatever else it was that Rand had in mind as heroic. She was ambivalent about Cornelius Vanderbilt; sure, he bribed legislatures, but he also said, "The public be damned" (well, sorta), and Rand liked her businessmen unrepentant. Her real railroad hero was J. J. Hill.

The business career of George W. Bush is nothing but crony capitalism, a series of essentially failed business ventures set up through his family contacts (many of them when his father was President of the United States; consider also the business history of brother Neil), all but one one leaving GW richer, and some investors poorer. His one singular success, the Texas Rangers baseball franchise, gained most of its value when the city of Arlington, Texas used its power of "eminent domain" to seize land for a new baseball stadium, paying the original owners what was later judged to be less than 20% of the actual value of the land.

Yeah, there's a real "Hero of Capitalism."

So, G. W. Bush, crony capitalist, faithful believer, and a man who brags about making decisions based on his "instincts," which Rand would have branded "whim worshiping."

As for the war in Iraq, Rand was militantly against the Vietnam War, condemning it as an ideological affair that did not involve the proper interests of the United States. Would she have fallen for the "9/11 changed everything" argument, and said that it was fine to use an atrocity committed by persons from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, and the UAE as an excuse to invade Iraq, the one secular holdout in a theocratic region? Would Rand have supported Bush's "Crusade?" Would she have decided that "the end justifies the means," and supported warrantless wiretaps, extraordinary renditions, torture, denial of habeas corpus, "stop loss" orders, and the entire litany of totalitarian methods now used by the U.S. Government in the name of "security?"

She would have said, "Whatever you think that 9/11 changed, it did not change lies into truth, or irrationality into reason."

The real question is why so many people, including avowed Objectivists, think that it did.

Rand Contra Bush -- II

I was going to make a list of all the reasons why Ayn Rand would have hated George W. Bush, but it turns out that I don't have to. A fellow named Leonard Peikoff has done a pretty good job of it for me.

Peikoff is known as Rand's "legal and intellectual heir." I daresay that the "legal heir" part provides more of an income, but that's just me being snarky. I do have some reasons for the snark, so we'll get those out of the way first.

Ayn Rand was a novelist, not an economist, not a psychologist, not a political scientist, and not a philosopher. Of that list, the one closest to the work of a novelist is psychologist, as both study people in an analytical way. That might explain, to a certain extent, her relationship with Nathaniel Branden, the intellectual part of it, anyway.

But Rand had her coterie, "The Collective" as they called themselves, with what they thought was irony. And, indeed, there was irony there, just not the sort that they thought. In The Collective there were psychologists, political scientists, economists, and philosophers. I'll also give various devils their due and note that, in several cases, for example, Alan Greenspan, the economic ideas were not utterly loony, just largely untested. Monetarism (from Milton Friedman, who had his own cultish thing going with the Chicago School of economics) looked like an idea worth testing, all the way until the early 1980s, when it was tested, and found to be lacking. It turned out that you couldn't actually control the money supply very easily, and there was too much in the way of other factors (monetary velocity, "pseudo-money," like stock being used in mergers, etc.) to make the "money supply" into a control knob for inflation. Greenspan, being a pragmatic fellow, did not try monetarism again when he became Fed Chairman.

Leonard Peikoff was the academic philosopher of the group, and I strongly suspect that the weaknesses in Rand's philosophical positions grew out of Peikoff's failings. I read one of his articles in The Objectivist, "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy" (May 1967), and it was clear to me at the ripe age of 17 that he was an intellectual lightweight. His argument first mischaracterized the epistemological principle that he was describing, and then, because that mischaracterization resulted in moral and ethical conclusions that he found abhorrent, decided that the underlying philosophy was wrong.

However, this was one of Rand's favorite techniques of argumentation, so Peikoff and Rand got along swimmingly, would be my guess. I'll also hypothesize (not a very risky leap, this) that he idolized her, and she liked being idolized.

So Peikoff wound up being, more-or-less, the last man standing from The Collective, a sure friend to a lonely, depressed woman in her later years, and, having slammed him for being intellectually shallow, I shall not compound the criticism by impugning his other motives in any way. I'll even say outright that I don't think he was in it for the money, as it were, nor even the career advancement. I expect that he genuinely admired her and was standing by a friend.

Besides, what I'm about to quote is as good a job of channeling Rand as I think could be done:

The survival of this country will not be determined by the degree to which the government, simply by inertia, imposes taxes, entitlements, controls, etc., although such impositions will be harmful (and all of them and worse will be embraced or pioneered by conservatives, as Bush has shown). What does determine the survival of this country is not political concretes, but fundamental philosophy. And in this area the only real threat to the country now, the only political evil comparable to or even greater than the threat once posed by Soviet Communism, is religion and the Party which is its home and sponsor.

The most urgent political task now is to topple the Republicans from power, if possible in the House and the Senate. This entails voting consistently Democratic, even if the opponent is a "good" Republican.

In my judgment, anyone who votes Republican or abstains from voting in this election has no understanding of the practical role of philosophy in man's actual life, which means that he does not understand the philosophy of Objectivism, except perhaps as a rationalistic system detached from the world.

If you hate the Left so much that you feel more comfortable with the Right, you are unwittingly helping to push the U.S. toward disaster, i.e., theocracy, not in 50 years, but, frighteningly, much sooner.

The above statement may be reproduced or disseminated at will, without any requirement to consult or inform Dr. Peikoff.

– Leonard Peikoff, October 19, 2006

Rand Contra Bush – I

The "rule of three" for celebrity deaths is, of course, a bogus concept, created in part by the expectations generated by the "rule of three." Two celebrities die close together, and everyone is waiting for the third. Nevertheless, we play the game anyway, like trying to see cloud castles, or making up a story about the pictures shown by a psychiatrist.

I was talking to Dick Lupoff in early 1982, when he pointed out a recent trio of celebrity deaths that seemed somehow intriguing:

Thelonious Sphere Monk (October 10, 1917-February 17, 1982)
Ayn Rand (February 2, 1905 – March 6, 1982)
Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982)

Later, I had an idea, one of those whimsical notions that I'm pretty sure I'll never get around to doing, about doing a sort of one act play, with the three of them sitting around in the waiting room for the afterlife. Monk, of course, would simply be playing piano, but Ayn Rand and Phil Dick would get into a heated discussion about the nature of reality and other philosophical notions. Rand would be having difficulty with the idea of an afterlife in the first place; she was a pretty militant atheist. But then again, there she'd be. Perhaps she would be arguing that she was hallucinating, with Dick perhaps agreeing, but insisting that it was a shared hallucination of some sort, since he'd be relatively certain of his own existence. Relatively.

Rand would also be playing Scrabble, as she was addicted to it later in life. I never figured out what sort of nasty tricks the game would be playing on her, but I know that it would be doing something to mess with her head. On the other hand, for parity's sake, there should be something messing with Dick, but I never got a handle on that one.

Finally, after a lot of philosophical jibber jabber, with Rand arguing for extreme rationalism and P. K. Dick arguing that mysticism at least has a place in the grand scheme of things, Thelonious Monk would stop playing, turn to them, and whisper, "They're ready for us now," and lead them through the door. That would be the heavy hand of the author noting that music is more in tune with the universe than is philosophy and the arguments therein.

In order to even imagine writing such a work, I'd have to try to get inside the heads of both Ayn Rand and Philip K. Dick, as task that I hubristically imagine myself capable of doing, given that both have vast troves of writings to draw from and I'm a pretty sharp guy. The entire project would require a great deal of effort, though, and I'm also a pretty lazy guy, so for now I'll just settle for thinking about it every now and then.

As for the "getting inside the head of Ayn Rand," I will note that the biggest difficulty is figuring out where she'd depart from rationality and slide seamlessly into rationalization. Still, there were some pretty obvious basic prejudices in her life and works, and those would be the starting points.

She would, for example, have hated George W. Bush with a righteous passion, and despised everything about him and what he stands for. But I'll leave that little analysis for the next time I visit the subject.

[The title of this essay is taken from "Nietzsche Contra Wagner," wherein Friedrich explains just why he broke with Richard Wagner, and how Wagner's philosophy of life offended him. Rand, of course, never knew George W. Bush, but many people who have been, at one time or another, enamored with Rand, are now Movement Conservatives, a philosophy that Rand always despised. It's worth asking how this strange state of affairs came about.]

Castro

"Are you such a loser you can't tell when you've won?" –Jacob, From Dusk Till Dawn.

Anyone wanting to see some background to this, can visit Brad Delong's blog, here:

I first ran into the curious fact that Cuba had close to the lowest infant mortality statistics in Latin America over a decade ago, when I was boning up on epidemiology, partly as the result of a small contract I had, but also just because I do things like that every now and then.

In fact, Cuba's infant mortality rate is a bit lower than that of the United States. There are various claims that are made as to the source of this relatively minor statistical discrepancy, including noting that there are more low birth weight births in the U.S. due to a greater number of premature births, possibly as the result of more intensive pre-natal medical intervention. I'd be more receptive to such arguments were it not for the fact that non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. have a lower infant mortality rate than does Cuba overall, but infant mortality in African-Americans is more than double that of Cuba. For Native Americans it's about 50% higher than non-Hispanic whites, with considerable variation among tribal groups. Similarly, infant mortality is higher in some sections of the country overall, especially in the Southeast, but this may reflect the greater African American population there.

Of course, mentioning these facts immediately leads some to begin talking about "fetal alcohol syndrome," "crack babies," poor nutrition, etc. In the United States, you see, there are very few public health issues; it's always a matter of individual choices and responsibilities.

We're all such rugged individualists, you see. We cauterize our wounds by pouring gunpowder in them and then lighting it.

Anyway, I also noticed that, in any given academic article that addressed the issue of Cuban infant mortality, there was an obligatory first paragraph or two, explaining that Castro was, nevertheless, a Very Bad Person, a dictator, for heaven's sake, and the author certainly should not be taken as an Apologist for Castro. That would apparently make the author a communist, or at least a Left Wing something or other.

In "Rethinking Communism," I remarked on the fact that you can easily trace the outlines of the old USSR in southern Asia by looking at literacy statistics. The Russian Communists believed in teaching children to read, and they did something about it. And literacy, no matter what we'd like to think, is not a given. It requires some public policy decisions to result in a high literacy rate, and it requires a commitment of resources.

Cuba also has a high literacy rate, again, one of the highest in Latin America, a bit higher than that of Mexico, or even Costa Rica, and 'way higher than Guatemala, The Dominican Republic, or Haiti, to name some other countries that have had the benefit of U.S. invasions over the years. The Duchy of Grand Fenwick would not have been so keen on losing a war with the U.S. if they'd been in Latin America, I think.

So here we have Cuba, a dirt poor country, whether owing to the inherent inefficiencies in a centrally planned Communist economy, or to the fact that it has the most militarily powerful country in the world just a few miles away, trying to cut off all its trade, occasionally making invasion plans, and certainly requiring it to maintain a military far greater than it would otherwise need. (And let's stipulate here that Cuba also tried exporting its revolution and lent some of that military to Soviet purposes in Africa; I'm not trying to make the case that Castro is the Good Guy here). Yet Cuba, this dirt poor country, has managed to nevertheless maintain a effective structure of public heath and education.

Again, I don't think that this is all that mysterious. Those who make the decisions of public policy in Cuba decided that these things were a priority. In fact, you could argue that cutting off other, entrepreneurial avenues of advancement in Cuba, actually assisted the public health and education priorities, diverting manpower into those areas. I might personally think that you can do a better job with a richer economic base and a bit less labor input, but I'm not absolutely sure that this was an option.

Another thing that I'm pretty sure of is that ideas like "democracy" are rather secondary to the whole anti-communism thing. I don't want to try to gin up some sort of body count comparison between Cuba and, say, Guatemala, or to compare Pinochet to Castro. But it's undeniable that the United States routinely subverted (to put it mildly) democratically elected governments during the Cold War, in favor of dictators who were more "anti-communist." And this habit continues; how many people in the U.S. think it matters that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the elected President of Iran? Hell, how many even know that he was elected? Or that it isn't even the most powerful office in Iran? Very few, by the looks of things. Ahmadinejad's sole purpose, for U.S. foreign policy, seems to be to serve as a boogieman, someone to frighten the kids with.

Besides, if an election gives the wrong results, there are ways to make it all come out right.

But there is one other thing that has occurred to me in this ruminating-on-Castro thing, and that is this: the big foreign policy mistakes made by the U.S. concerning Castro were made in the early 1960s, on Kennedy's watch. There are those who try to blame the Eisenhower Administration, or even, so help me, Nixon (because Nixon was given such a lot of power during Ike's term, 'cause Ike trusted him so much). But Kennedy gave the go-ahead, and he did it because part of his thing was being as much of a "Cold Warrior" as anyone. The Cold War was not the invention of the Right Wing, they were the crazies who wanted a hot war. They were the "it's okay if that last two people left after nuclear war are Americans," people.

The Cold War was a product of American Liberalism. The Right learned to love it, or at least loved the anti-communist witch hunts. But Cuba was a bi-partisan screwup, and I think there's a lot of guilt still buried there. Some people are indeed such losers that they can't tell when they've won.

Laffering All the Way

[This is something of a distillation of some discussions from Mark Thoma's Economist's View Blog].

The Laffer Curve is one of the greatest scams of all time. Really. "Please send me your bank account number so I can transfer $50 million in gold to your account" isn't even in the running compared to the Laffer Scam, though the Ponzi scheme might give it a run for the money.

The idea that you can somehow increase tax revenues by cutting tax rates is as seductive as 25% at no risk, though, isn't it? And it's so simple you can explain it to a child, using just the famous bar napkin:



Let's let the Wikipedia supply the basic, simple explanation:

"The curve is most understandable at both extremes of income taxation—zero percent and one-hundred percent—where the government collects no revenue. At one extreme, a 0% tax rate means the government's revenue is, of course, zero. At the other extreme, where there is a 100% tax rate, the government collects zero revenue because (in a "rational" economic model) taxpayers presumably change their behavior in response to the tax rate: either they have no incentive to work or they avoid paying taxes, so the government collects 100% of nothing."

Martin Gardner, in a famous Scientific American article, gave a satirical "neo-Laffer Curve," supposedly to show how fatuous Laffer's arguments were (Gardner's graph is rotated, with tax rates being on the y axis, and revenues on the x axis; the Wikipedia has a redrawn version in the same orientation as Laffer's original):



When I read Gardner's original article I was really pissed, because Gardner's graph fails on basic mathematical terms. A squiggle like Gardner drew isn't a function! So Gardner, the epitome of the punctilious math-head, let himself slide into a basic math error, simply because he was so annoyed with Laffer.

Moreover, he missed the most important mistake in Laffer's analysis. It is simply not true that a 100% tax rate generates no revenue, even in "rational" economics models, because there is no such thing as 100% compliance, among other things.

Consider the illegal drug trade. The criminal and RICO proscriptions on illegal drugs amount to a tax rate that is actually greater than 100%; there have been RICO prosecutions where people's houses and all their financial assets have been seized for a fairly small quantity of drugs, far less than the sale value of the drugs themselves. That's a greater than 100% excise tax. Yet the drug trade continues. Furthermore, various law enforcement agencies obtain substantial funding from RICO seizures, and a number of venues actually have excise tax laws on illegal drugs.

Hey, wait, no fair! exclaim the supply-side enthusiasts. We're only talking about the effects of capital gains taxation on investment and economic growth here. Or they'll claim that it's the effects of high marginal income tax rates on incentives to work or labor specialization.

Well, let's take that last one, which one might think would have a germ of truth to it. I remember a story from the Reader's Digest "Life in these United States" feature from many years ago. How many years ago will become apparent.

A man saw his neighbor out cleaning the leaves from his gutters, The man asked his neighbor why he didn't hire someone to do it, as the neighbor was an affluent professional.

"Well," the neighbor replied, "It would cost at least $10 to hire someone to clean my gutters, and I'm in the 90% tax bracket. So that means I'd have to earn $100 to get that much money after taxes. For $100, I'll do it myself."

It's possible to argue that cleaning gutters was an inefficient use of this man's time. And certainly his forgoing the hiring of it deprived the economic statistics of at least the $10 wage exchange, and possibly the extra hour or of the high income fellow's labor that he'd have surely worked if his marginal tax rate were less (I'm being sarcastic here, in case anyone is in doubt). But there are worse ways of spending a bit of time on the weekend than getting some exercise and seeing the neighborhood from a different viewpoint, to say nothing of the incidental inspection of the roof.

The point here is that even at 90% marginal tax rates, tax revenue was collected, it was not negligible, and the behavioral changes created by the "distortion" weren't necessarily always bad. People do not only work for money; if that were the only motivation in the world, I wouldn't be writing this, would I?

Moreover, by concentrating exclusively on monetary incentives, people tend to devalue the other incentives to labor, such as pride of workmanship and simple civic responsibility. The idea that a 100% tax rate results in zero labor implies that there is no volunteer labor—ever. This is the fallacy of Econ 101 Management.

As for capital gains taxes, well, the effective tax rate on investment in the old Soviet Union was 100%, as the Soviet government owned everything. It's quite true that the USSR did not have a particularly vibrant economy, but it did still have an economy. The government's effective "tax revenues" on invested capital were not zero. It was just that the government was the primary source of investment capital. And please don't anyone try to tell me that we don't have government capital investment in this country. Even ignoring basic infrastructure investment, we have a lot of government investment, from tax credits to outright subsidy and demonstration projects. It's just that most of these investments eventually wind up turning into private wealth, which, as it happens, is what happened eventually to a lot of the wealth that was created in the old USSR, once communism fell and "privatization" began. Then there is the case of the city that built a big baseball stadium so a certain future President could make some money on his investment in a baseball franchise. That was public investment in a private enterprise, no?

But let's say that we're still on the question of would a 100% capital gains tax yield no return. The answer is still yes. If someone wanted to sell their house in order to move to another house, and they had a capital gain on the sale of their house, would they refuse to sell, staying forever in the same house? Some would, but many would not. Many moves are not a matter of choice. They might try to balance the sale vs purchase to render a zero capital gain, but they would not always be successful, and there would be some revenue collected.

The fact is that it is very difficult to come up with realistic scenarios where a 100% tax rate generates zero revenue. The most basic assumption of the Laffer Curve is simply wrong.

Now you may think that I'm spending more time than I should attacking the basic premises and logic of the Laffer Curve and Supply Side Economics. Perhaps I am. Certainly SSE has failed every reasonable empirical test. In every case since the Reagan Administration, tax cuts have caused reductions in tax revenues, and the tax increases that have occurred since then never created the economic contractions that Supply Siders predicted.

Empiricism is tricky stuff, however, and the snake oil salesmen have been peddling the idea that when taxes are cut, all that need happen is for tax revenues to eventually reach what they had been before the cuts—which will generally happen in any economy that is growing over time. Eventually absolute revenues manage to increase, so long as the Supply-Siders don't actually wreck the entire economy, which they haven't managed to do—yet. In any case, such perversions of empiricism damand that a more fundamental attack be made.

The effect of squeezing revenues and increasing "defense" spending (which is to say, paying for wars and military contractor profiteering) over the past 6 years has been to deprive the nation of the investments that governments need to make, on infrastructure, regulatory oversight, education, and all the things that Movement Conservatives hate, because they don't fit into the basically feudal worldview that drives their actions.

And scams like the Laffer Curve need to be attacked at their roots, otherwise they grow back, like a thorny bush of carrion flowers, smelling like rotting meat to attract the flies that it needs to pollinate. And I'm no longer in the mood to cede these twits a single point. I'm no longer willing to give them even an inch.

One of the Places where it all Began

That was then:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . ."And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about," he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough. --Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

This is Now:

Saturday noon. Recollection of the last 24 hours is excruciatingly difficult; I have taken every remaining pill in my kit bag, and yet somehow, despite the presence of enough chemicals in my system to transform me into the Joker, I have developed a raging cold. My throat is nearly sealed shut, which may work to my advantage since I’m reaching the point at which the rude answers which bubble up in my skull every time someone speaks to me are threatening to spill over into actual vocalization. Ever since Wednesday I have been asking myself in re my pharmacopia: how many is too many? Crashing into every sharp corner in my hotel room, I know the answer: however many I took when I woke up this morning.

Last night was the Ronald Reagan Banquet, a dinner which was for and unfortunately not of Ronald Reagan. Eating a dehydrated teriyaki jerky chunk of the old fraud might have given me some of his strength. I’ve heard the words “Ronald Reagan” and “tax cuts” so many times now they’re beginning to lose whatever meaning they might have once had, and Will, that payola-stuffed bloviator of manifest destiny, will say them another three dozen times while I tuck into my mashed potatoes. After the ghouls-gone-wild reception given to Ann Coulter a few hours ago, the crowd receives him politely and respectfully, and even considering the fact that this is an older crowd, made up largely of the parents of the rich kids hooting and snarling at Ann’s anti-McCain jeremiad, it still has the tone of someone forced to hear their grandpa read cowboy poetry just after they’ve come back from yelling “SHOW US YOUR TITS!” to drunken frat girls. Will himself is perfunctory at best, showing his chipper cheerleader side only when discussing Old Mother Reagan; the rest of the time, he’s just there to pick up a check. He even senses the hostility in the room when called upon to mention the Supplicant McCain: urging the crowd to be “happy warriors” for the default candidate, he sounds like a bored Sunday school teacher leading his tenth consecutive round of “I’ve Got the Joy” for a group of sugared-up fourth-graders.--Mister Leonard Pierce, The Beast is Red, Chapter 12: Show Us Your Twits, from Sadly, No.

Rethinking Communism

"Communism didn't fall. It was pushed." – George H. W. Bush, July 2, 1992

I've noticed that, whenever anyone wants to give the devil his due, they first must stand up and announce in a loud voice that it is, in fact, the very devil we're dealing with, so bad, bad, bad, old devil, and then they can say what they set out to say. I've seen this in action where people analyze the infant mortality rates in Cuba, which are far lower than any other country in Latin America and close to those of the U.S., but Castro is a bad, bad man, so let's be sure we get that in. Similarly, if one wishes to locate where in south central Asia the USSR has occupied, now or in the past, one can find a very good map of it by just looking at literacy rates, as compared to the neighboring countries, with the former USSR countries having over 97% literacy rates. The outlier is Afghanistan, which, despite a violent and unsuccessful occupation by the USSR in the 1980s, nevertheless saw large increases in both male (increasing from 30% to over 40%) and female (6% to about 15%) literacy during that time.




But communism, especially in the Russian and Chinese models, was an authoritarian political form that demanded a single Party state, censorship, secret police, and all the trappings that gave George Orwell the heebie jeebies. Bad old Commies.

So let's pretend, somehow, that it's possible to divorce communism from those things. What do we have left? Can we somehow rewind the tape and start all over again from the French Revolution and the Paris Commune and somehow get it to work better? Ah, that seems pretty dubious, so that's probably a dead end.

Still, from my recent review of the French Revolution (granted, more the Cliff Notes version than anything deep or substantive), one of the things that stuck was the degree to which foreign intervention kept the pot on the boil. The monarchies in the rest of Europe felt that they could not afford to let the French Revolution succeed; the American Revolution was bad enough, and that was just a slaveholder rebellion as far as many Europeans were concerned. The Americans were half a world away, besides. But this new French thing…no, best to nip it in the bud.

And even Napoleon, who rose like a cork from the stormy sea, well, he named himself Emperor and put his cronies in charge of things. They may have despised the little twerp, but at least Napoleon they understood.

So what about Soviet Russia? Well, again, was there ever a time when the Western powers just let it ride? The Red and White armies marched all over hell and gone in the 1920s, and not without plenty of outside interference and support for various factions. In the twenty years before the Second World War, Europe looked like a tossup match between Communism and Fascism, and liberal democracy was hardly considered worthy of a seat at the debate. The Hitler/Stalin pact looks insane at this distance (and was a head bender at the time, as well), but I've seen it explained as the natural outcome of Stalin's actually being a real Communist. He considered England to be the real enemy, and it was trivial for Hitler to play on that. Hitler had his own delusions, of course; he viewed England as a natural ally, and thought the British royalty (who were "racial Germans," after all) would swing his way.

Then, big war, one that wiped out almost an entire generation of Russian males, followed by the Cold War. England had spent itself in the war, and divested itself of its colonial empire, in a series of moves so ham fisted that they guaranteed several generations of blood and conflict in the former colonies. But hey, that's the White Man's Burden, isn't it?

The United States took up the great cause of anti-communism, though, and wasn't that a peach? We built up an Armageddon arsenal of nuclear weapons, and then, when the Russians got themselves a bomb or ten, the U.S. went absolutely batshit berserk, seeing Communists under every bed, with neighbor denouncing neighbor, lives ruined on rumor, and drunken old Joe McCarthy scaring the pants off of everyone. In college I knew a few old lefties who'd been through that wringer, and it's not something I ever want to see up close and personal. After 9/11 people were killed for just wearing turbans. Imagine how it would have been if the mark of Cain had been belonging to some club in college 10 or 20 years ago. In other words, imagine if it could be _you_ under the hammer.

It also makes me wonder what sort of derangement would have resulted if the U.S. had actually been _invaded_ in WWII, or if the first ones with the nukes had been some other country, which is to say, if the U.S. had experienced even a fraction of what the USSR went through. But, of course, trying to imagine the world from the perspective of a "godless communist" is exactly the sort of thing that could have gotten you blacklisted in 1950.

Exactly what is it that created the Cold War? The Russians grabbed a lot of land in eastern Europe, I get that. They supposedly threatened Western Europe militarily, I get that, too. But it's not as if there wasn’t a "vice versa" there as well.

And as nearly as I can tell, nothing justifies the general plan that seems to have been in place for "containment" of communism, which, in practice, worked out to replacing democratically elected governments with authoritarian dictatorships that were "friendly" to the West, which is to say the U.S., which is to say U.S. commercial interests. The list of those is long and brutal, and we all know who they were. The other option seems to have been putting a lot of U.S. soldiers into the place, as hostages. That was pretty much how it was for Germany and South Korea.

For the life of me it looks like the United States and the European democracies simply didn't believe in their own forms of government. Democratic principles were (and still are) considered "weak," things to be replaced by authoritarian command-and-control whenever things got tough, or scary, or even hard to understand.

My own belief is that the USSR fell because of the generation gap. The War Generation (the Russians had a "greatest generation" of their own, after all), got old, and boring, and the young elites of Russia saw the cool stuff that was going on elsewhere in the world and they wanted a piece of it. They wanted sex and drugs and rock and roll, just like every other younger generation in the history of the world. So as the new technocrats took over, they just let the whole communism thing slip away. I imagine the same thing happened in China; Tiananmen Square was an urban youth rebellion, put down by soldiers drawn from the countryside—the Chinese Red States, if you will.

From time to time, I see someone writing about the "internal contradictions" of Russian Communism, and the "inefficiency" of the Soviet economic system. I think that there are truths buried in there, but I have to observe that an oligarchic command-and-control structure is the model for every corporation in America. And yes, corporations do go bankrupt, and they do get bought out, but the same can be said for the USSR. And corporations generally don't have to have their own armies, and they don't have foreign governments trying to subvert their every move.

I do believe in those things that we all wave at when we talk about "freedom" and "democratic principles." I just wish that I were more certain that the rest of my countrymen did.

Justifications II

In the early 1980s, the California Air Resources Board proposed some stringent rules on how much NOx (nitrogen oxides) could be emitted from power plants. The new regulations were meant to be “technology forcing,” which means that the control technology to meet the regs either had not yet been developed, or it had never been used on a large scale. Moreover, the required control factor was proportional to current emissions, rather than the usual method of allowing X amount of emissions per Y amount of power generated. So any utility that had controlled emissions beyond what had been previously mandated would actually be penalized by being required to clean up more than if they had only just barely met previous regs. Call it a penalty on being good.

CARB had been trying to set stringent NOx controls for years, believing NOx to be the real culprit behind smog. In fact, the relationship between NOx emissions and smog formation is _very_ complex, with fresh NOx emissions, which are mostly nitric oxide (NO) combining with ozone to form nitrogen dioxide (NO2), thereby reducing the level of the main smog constituent – temporarily. Also, NO2 is a radical scavenger, so it slows the smog oxidation process at elevated levels. On the other hand, without a minimal amount of NOx, the smog formation process basically stops, so if you eliminate all NOx emissions, you also stop smog formation. The question in NOx control is always whether or not you can reduce NOx to low enough levels to be effective.

In any case, the consulting firm I worked for was hired by Southern California Edison (SCE) to do an impact study on the proposed regulations, to see if they were properly “grounded in science.” I was selected to be the technical lead on the project.

The project manager wanted a quick result. We had plenty of simulations of various days in Los Angeles, where SCE had its power plant that would be affected, and he wanted a simple reduced-emissions scenario run for some of those days. I wanted to extend the simulations to multiple days.

Part of the reason I wanted this was because it had never been done before, and I wanted to extend the science. That was self-serving in the sense that it would certainly enhance my reputation (and the company’s), and also, I was curious about a number of things that simply couldn’t be examined with single day results, such as the importance of day-to-day carryover of pollutants. But it was also true that such a simulation would be in the best interest of the client, since providing an answer to those unanswered questions greatly reduces the amount of wiggle-room for policy makers.

Anyway, there were argument, loud ones, but eventually my position carried the day. With hindsight, I now suspect that the project manager in question developed a grudge against me, a grudge that explains some of his later behavior, but that’s another story.

In any case, having won the argument, it was then up to me to deliver, which I did. I had to write a different chemical kinetics module to do night time chemistry, one that used a lot of heuristic reasoning and various other tricks of the trade, but it did work, and I had smog chamber data to validate it against, so we were in the clear on that point. I also did some fairly significant work on what “clean air” looks like, that has been used (and misused) by a lot of other people since.

Our baseline simulation ran for over three days. What we found, essentially, was that the near-field ozone suppression effect of NOx emitted by the power plant was greater than the amount of ozone that was eventually attributable to that NOx in smog formation reactions. Moreover, the highest concentration difference in ozone attributable to the power plant was 1 part per billion, less than 1% of the smog standard, and on the baseline day, less than ½ of 1% of total peak ozone at the impacted area.

We presented our results at a CARB hearing, and the result was that they sent the proposed regulations back for reanalysis, pretty much the best possible result for our client. Eventually, more stringent NOx regulations did come into effect, but they were not technology forcing, and no doubt had other aspects that were less unpleasant to SCE, because that’s the way things work. That particular plant, incidentally, was retired a couple of years ago.

There are a lot of “anti-environmentalists” in the conservative movement, and in the fellow-traveling wing of the libertarians who decry all environmental regulations as being anti-business, or an infringement of their rights as individuals. There are also a lot of industry-funded think tanks tasked with muddying the scientific waters, denouncing things they don’t like as “junk science” and working against the proper use of science as a policy tool. I’ve lost count of the number of occasions where one of the other of these folks has sneered at me for being in favor of some “environmentalist” policy.

There are also some environmentalists who would condemn the preceding story as being another case of big business trampling the regulatory process, but I don’t buy it anymore than I buy the anti-environmentalist narrative. I believe our results, and our results said that this particular issue wasn’t worth the price. The amount of smog reduction, if there was any at all, was immeasurable. The actual population exposure to ozone quite possibly would have gone up. And in any case, the primary health effects from air pollution turn out to be from fine particulates, with ozone, even now, after another couple of decades of study, being still problematic from the standpoint of assigning it a specific level of toxicity at urban smog levels. The effects of ozone on plants is better established than its effects on human health.

And what would have been the price or the proposed regulations? Well, the CARB staff said that it would amount to a small amount of money per rate payer per month. Calculated out to the total number of rate payers, it came to $50 million per year. I don’t think that CARB staff had any incentive to overestimate the cost, incidentally. Typically it’s the other way around.

That was over 20 years ago. A cost of $50 million a year, ignoring all present value calculations, etc. comes to over a billion dollars. I always figured that we probably only bought SCE maybe 5 years, thought the later regulations were probably better thought out. I always guesstimate the savings to Southern California rate payers at more like $250 million.

Too bad I couldn’t have held out for a percentage.

Patience

I'm not a very patient man. The best I can do generally is to fake it with a mix of persistence and procrastination. But at least I understand the dimensions of my problem.

One of the difficulties of the democratic political process is how slowly it moves. This includes the criminal justice system, but I'm thinking here about the other parts of what we call "government." The designers of the U.S. Constitution very consciously put in a lot of time lags, plus those pesky things we call "checks and balances" in order to impede "popular enthusiasms" that they (rightly, in my opinion) feared.

One necessary exception to this was during emergencies, especially the time of war. But even then, the Constitution tries to parcel out the authority and responsibilities, again, fearing the tides that sweep nations into foolish conflicts. It's worth noting that two of our greatest Presidents who had first been Generals, warned of the pernicious effects of conflict. Washington's warning about "foreign entanglements" was directed at treaties that might embroil the U.S. in someone else's wars, and Eisenhower's criticism of the "military/industrial complex" was a warning about how those who profit from war may push a country against its own interests.

The other great President/General, Jackson, stands as something of a cautionary tale all by himself.

So now we're stuck in the middle of a post-colonial occupation, one of the most seriously wrongheaded maneuvers in the history of the Republic, and we've seen the entire set of warnings disregarded. Foreign entanglements, check. Military/Industrial Complex, check. "Popular enthusiasms," check. Oh, you want to tell me now that you were against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq from the beginning? Yeah, I believe you. Sure was lonely, wasn't it? Or are you one of the "Afghanistan was fine, but Iraq was a mistake?" Or maybe, "We're better off without Saddam, but the war was badly mismanaged." Yeah, you keep thinking that.

Many in the country are now sick of military "glory," though it's worth bearing in mind that even little minor changes in the ongoing slaughter are enough for hordes of people to begin spouting inanities like "The Surge is working!" Working at what? Have U.S. soldiers stopped dying? No, they're just dying at a somewhat slower rate than before. Iraqi citizens? Maybe the same thing, though is there anyone reading this who is naïve enough to take the U.S. military's word about that, to say nothing of the Bush Administration?

Besides, these conflicts are unwinnable. How do I know that? Because I have yet to hear someone give me a plausible theory of what winning would look like. The closest was on The Family Guy, where they had a sequence showing Iraqi women stripping off their burkas and opening a bikini car wash. It made as much sense as anything else I've heard, and at least it was concrete. Yeah, we'll have "won" when Iraq is a safe and stable democracy.

Just for the record: if you plan for "winning" depends on favorably changing the attitudes and behavior of some people who hate you, and who have hated you for decades, you're probably not going to win.

Oh yeah, and then there's that part about how Pakistan is destabilizing as we speak. Not that anyone could have predicted that a U.S. invasion the country next door, driving a pack of radicals with military training across the border could destabilize a country. I mean, after all, the corrupt military dictator said he was our friend. What could go wrong? And why would Iran want nuclear weapons just because it has a nuclear Pakistan to the east, and the U.S. military immediately to the West. I mean, really, why wouldn't they trust us? We only have their best interests at heart.

Anyway, so the American public is pretty sick of the matter, which I'm sure comes as a complete surprise to Islamic radicals in the Middle East, and we had an off-year election in 2006. Lo and behold, a lot of warmongers lost their seats in Congress and the Senate. Congress flipped, and everyone expected the whole foreign policy situation to change immediately.

Because George W. Bush had shown himself such a flexible guy up to this point. I mean, the people speak and he listens.

Besides, Congress is so very, very powerful. It's not like the President can just ignore what it says, right? And Bush never uses his veto power, well, at least he didn't up until the point when Congress stopped giving him absolutely everything he asked for.

Anyway, some people are pissed at Congress. How dare they not take the 51-49 vote mandate in the Senate and just stop the war? It's easy. Cut off the money, pass a law, impeach the bastard. Etc. Etc.

It has been my observation that it's very easy to tell other people how to do their jobs. Everybody's job looks easy from the outside. And maybe all it really would take is some "leadership," and some "courage," though I have to think that those aren't really that high up on the real talents required in Congress. And one might consider parsing that "courage" thing to remember that every member of Congress has to be thinking that their phones are tapped, that maybe their offices are bugged, and that there is a legion of political operatives ready to run with any hint of a scandal. Hell, in 2002 and 2004 we had two decorated war heroes lose elections because their patriotism was called into question. What do you think would have happened if there had been a real scandal to work with? Oh, and there's the part about how the U.S. Attorney's in Bush's Justice Department have been cooking up fake investigations of Democratic candidates just before elections.

But all it takes is a little courage—say internet bloggers and commenters who don't even use their real names online.

The Conservative Movement has been trying to take control of the country for at least the last 50 years, using the same fear-and-smear tactics all the while, but with a growing ideological base that allows them to paint a nice coat of rationalization over what is basically just Big Man Authoritarianism. September 11 gave them their chance and they glommed onto it and rode that puppy into the ground, feeding on the deaths long after the remaining bodies had been buried. The only thing that prevented the establishment of the Theocratic Plutocracy that they really, really want is that the whole enterprise is irrational and contradictory. Oh, and undemocratic.

But going off on a snit and blaming the current Congress for not cleaning up the whole thing immediately, that's also pretty undemocratic, too. We had a single election. That's not enough to usher in the Progressive Utopia. (I'm pretty much on record as not thinking Utopias are a good idea, anyway).

It has taken decades for the Conservative Movement to bring the country to its current miserable state. It will take that long (at least) to dig ourselves out of it. Those who want the overnight fix are setting themselves up for another ride on the Authoritarian roller coaster, or maybe just another big disappointment. I'm hoping for the last one, in fact. It's less of a betrayal of what I like to think my country is about.

Equivalation

The word "equilivation" and its parallel formations (equivalating, equivalated) seems to have a fairly long standing (albeit rare) usage in education, art, and law. If degrees from two universities are formally accepted as equivalent, the formal process for deciding this seems to be called "equilivation." Other traces of the word from art, academia, and the law all seem to come to the idea of "to assess as equivalent."

A couple of years ago, the word was applied to a more specialized arena: politics. Intriguingly, the first example I can find of it is from confederateyankee, a right wing blog:

Will all the liberals out there equivalating how Americans treat captured terrorists with how terrorists treat those unlucky souls they capture, please take the time to remind me when that last time was American soldiers did anything like this:

(from June 20, 2006)

The fellow then gives some horrible example of mutilation and murder by Iraqi insurgents. Then there follows a rosy picture of Guantanamo etc., where prisoners are judged to all gain weight in the tropical paradise while being subjected to the equivalent of fraternity pranks.

As I've said before, I'm pretty sure I could get someone like confederateyankee to change his tune if I could waterboard him. And we know it would be the truth, because waterboarding produces the truth, right? Just ask those who are in favor of it.

Nevertheless, some dastardly leftist types soon stole the word (because they have no respect for other people's intellectual property, I daresay), and gave it a twist.

From cubezoo:

Equilivation: To consider competing or opposite positions on an issue to be equivalent, despite a lack of evidence to support one of the sides.

Cubezoo links to Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy:

Let's define it thusly:

1. The knee-jerk assumption that competing sides, especially political parties, are equally extreme, equally guilty, etc.

This approach minimizes public outrage when one side has blatantly or repeatedly misbehaved. It is beneficial not only to wrongdoers and their supporters, but also to media outlets that thrive on continued argument, rather than on problem resolution.

2. Treating a dubious position as arguably equivalent to a legitimate one.

Dignifying questionable claims and disreputable agendas provides sensational fodder for an increasingly entertainment-focused news media. It also brings those claims and agendas within striking distance of acceptability.

There is much more, of course, particularly on such matters as evolution/creationism, global warming/it's-all-a-hoax (by communists, I've been told), and so forth. Equivalation is very much part of the toolkit in the ongoing war on Science.

"Opinions differ on shape of globe. Round or Flat? You decide."

It has, of course, gotten easier and easier to be accused of being left wing over the past few years. There is no question, for example, that Barry Goldwater would be on the Republican Party's extreme left; he thought that gays should serve in the military and that it was okay to regulate the sale of so-called "assault weapons."

"I've been a member of the NRA, I collect, make and shoot guns. I've never used an automatic or semiautomatic for hunting. There's no need to. They have no place in anybody's arsenal. If any s.o.b. can't hit a deer with one shot, then he ought to quit shooting." –Barry Goldwater

Hell, I'm accused of being left wing on a regular basis these days, which, given my support for Barry Goldwater in 1964 (when I was 14), there may be some merit in the charge. Same with my voting for Gerald Ford, G. H. W. Bush, and Pete Wilson (first time; his second campaign was a race-baiting travesty). These were all very left wing Republicans, at least by the current tilt of the landscape.

The best comment I've seen on the subject of Republican/Democrat Equilivation is from Bruce Wilder in a comment on Mark Thoma's Economist's View:

The Republicans advocate torture, perpetual war, overthrow of the Constitution, national bankruptcy, oppose science, and promote political and business corruption. The Democrats are at least divided on those issues.

I'm just hoping that there will be some pieces worth picking up after the Republican Party implosion that is proceeding in slo-mo as we watch. Also, I'm not sure if the "worth picking up" refers to pieces of the Party, or pieces of the Country. But I'm sure I'll be more cheerful when the days get longer.

Equivalation is an easy trap to fall into, the most notorious example being the reducio ad hitlerem, whereby someone is claimed to be as bad as Hitler, by noting all the similarities, except, of course, the part about rounding up millions of people and feeding them gas chambers.

It's also worth noting that the news media does have a liberal bias, in the sense that newspapers and TV news does not equilivate owning a house to owning slaves, that few pundits yearn for the days when a woman required a husband's signature to obtain a drivers license (that one's still in living memory). I see few calls for a return to lynching as a means of maintaining the social order, nor have I seen anyone in the media voice the opinion that chinamen have no souls. The idea that only owners of real estate should be allowed to vote doesn't seem to be currently on the table, nor is the idea of an hereditary monarch really big right now.

See, definite liberal bias. I'm sure that we're just a step or two away from nationalizing the oil companies. Really. Any. Day. Now.

Paying Attention to Attention

[Hauled up from my Newsgroup archives; originally written June 21, 2006]

I hit a minor traffic jam on the way home, the other day. It was a “rubbernecker jam,” caused by some cars stopped by the side of the road, people out of the cars, probably exchanging information, but I was busy trying to get by them both safely and as fast as possible, so I didn’t see much.

It often makes sense to slow down. If there are people walking around by the side of the road, common sense suggests you shouldn’t speed by in the adjacent lane. I usually try to get as many lanes over as possible, and to slow down as little as possible, especially if the highway is near “jam condition,” i.e. when traffic flow is near maximum and the average speed is near 40 mph. Under jam conditions, anything that slows traffic will turn the entire highway into stop-and-go, because speeds below 40 have lower flow rates. Behind you is maximum flow rate, ahead of you is less than that. What do you think is going to happen?

Some people slow down to look at anything that catches their attention, though, even things that aren’t hazards. In fact, the slowing down adds a new hazard, but what is that, or the inconvenience of jamming the highway, compared to satisfying your curiosity?

I have very low impulse control when it comes to curiosity, so I should probably be a sucker for rubbernecking. But I’m also a contrary cuss, and I don’t like having my attention grabbed like that. Besides, it’s not as if an accident scene is something I’m particularly interested in.

Other things I’m not particularly interested in include political press conferences, presidential addresses, interviews of grief-stricken family members, stories about celebrity trials, celebrity marriages, celebrity divorces, prostitution rings, home invasions, the growing menace of meth, the growing menace of illegal aliens, pedophiles, and how they use the internet, stories about the internet generally, and pretty much anything that is followed by the words “News at 11.”

So I generally confine my TV news viewing to The Daily Show, and occasionally PBS. I get a newspaper, and I’ve got this internet thing going as well, not that you should be interested in that.

The thing is that attention, mine and yours, has a price tag. It always has, at least as long as I’ve been alive, but the competition for attention has been increasing. Even in strict economic terms, that means that when someone grabs your attention, they’re stealing from you. In more meta terms, philosophical even, they’re making you less free.

There are a lot of ways of grabbing attention. Loud noises, flashing lights, grisly images, those work pretty well. So do good looking women, children, and kittens. Or puppies. Oh what fools they were for rejecting The Puppy Channel!

What also works is making you afraid. There’s a lot of that going around. It’s related to making you angry, and there’s a ton of that, too, as well as making you gleeful because someone else (the right someone) is going to be angry or afraid. That’s the stock-in-trade of some right-wing hatemongers, but don’t kid yourself, your politics only speaks to which someone is trying to make you afraid of, or angry about.

But what to do about it? It’s a conundrum, because “Every knock is a boost.”

When someone tells you how much they hate a certain commercial, they are nevertheless spreading the information in that commercial, and sensitizing you to it. The reaction itself spreads it, like sneezing with a cold. The same thing applies when one complains about hate speech.

A friend of mine is a physician in Florida, and he has a colleague who got sucked into a malpractice and fraud scandal. The colleague had all charges eventually dismissed, and he won all civil actions, but the publicity was devastating. Personally devastating. Professionally, his business increased, even during the time when he was still under suspicion but not exonerated. My friend’s assessment came down to “There’s no such thing as bad publicity. People knew they’d heard of him, but they didn’t know why, so he got more business on name recognition.”

Maybe correct, maybe not, but the principle is there. Certainly at some level, infamy becomes a burden, but it’s chilling to remember that Ted Bundy was getting marriage proposals up to the day he was executed.

One idea is to try to ignore the advertisers, attention grabbers, hate-mongers, and the rest, but that isn’t what I do in rubbernecking incidents. I try to deal with the surrounding effects. So maybe the answer is to ignore the originating factor and to concentrate on those who give their attention to it. Don’t attack the leaders or the spokesmen, attack the followers.

You read Ann Coulter? Why would you ever want to gawk at such a car wreck?

MTBE

Methyl tertiary butyl ether is what is known as an “oxygenated hydrocarbon.” For reasons that still weren’t clear the last time I checked, oxygenated hydrocarbons alter the combustion characteristics of gasoline in an internal combustion engine such that combustion is more complete and in particular, carbon monoxide is reduced. Carbon monoxide incidents are more numerous in winter (because atmospheric ventilation rates are lower), so oxygenated fuel additives have been mandated for winter gasoline blends.

Oxygenated hydrocarbons are also generally octane boosters. In fact, ethanol, the alternative oxygenate to MTBE, was originally considered promising as an octane additive in the early days of the automobile. One story as to why tetra ethyl lead became the gasoline octane additive of choice is that ethyl could be patented, while ethanol could not. Another suggestion is simply that ethanol is not generally made from oil, and oilmen didn’t want it in gasoline for that reason.

For whatever reason, I can say from personal experience that the attitude toward ethanol among managers in the petroleum industry is very close to foam-at-the-mouth psychotic. They really, really, hate ethanol. MTBE, on the other hand, is made by the oil and gas industry (from natural gas to methanol to MTBE), and oilmen loved it.

From an environmental standpoint, you could say that MTBE is good for the air and bad for the water. Specifically, MTBE, like ethers generally, is water soluble, and will move into groundwater pretty easily. It also has a characteristic flavor and odor, which is apparently detectable (and unpleasant) in very small concentrations in drinking water.

None of this information is new; it was certainly well known 25 years ago, when MTBE was first being touted as an “environmentally friendly” additive to gasoline. It was, from the start, a big part of the “reformulated gasoline” initiative, whose intent was to bring some environmental awareness kudos to the gasoline industry, and, incidentally, to create a bit of a refinery squeeze to drive some independent filling stations and chains out of the market, or to at least bring them into line.

But everyone was aware of the potential problem of groundwater contamination, especially from leaks in service stations’ underground storage tanks. In fact, the industry had an answer to this problem: double walled storage tanks. There was a certain amount of underground leak contamination anyway, and this was touted as the solution to it. And again, it had the additional benefit of being expensive enough that it would drive some marginal independent stations out of business, again squeezing the supply chain.

So the idea was to retrofit the storage tanks before MTBE was adopted. Unfortunately this didn’t happen. While one part of the petroleum industry was confidently lobbying to put MTBE in, and it won’t be a problem because we’ll have underground tanks to keep the stuff from leaking, another part of the industry was lobbying to delay, delay, delay the storage tank replacement program, because it would cost them money. Often you had lobbyists from the same company arguing both cases, though, it should be admitted, rarely on the same day, or at least not to the same people.

So that, more or less, is how Santa Monica came to lose 70% of its drinking water to MTBE contamination, why Santa Barbara had to spend millions on a new water treatment plant, and why a lot of people across the land came to be really pissed. It also played a role in the current fad for ethanol fuels (I give that one another two or three years, tops) but that's a story for another day.

Handicapping the Horse Race

The purpose of propaganda is not to get people to believe in lies; the purpose of propaganda is to murder the idea of truth.

Mission accomplished. The general public now understands that one cannot believe a single thing that is said by any candidate ever, at any time. This has been accomplished not just by a series of broken political promises—that more or less goes with the territory. But the news media and journalistic establishment have connived in the reduction of politics to pure propaganda, calling some politicians liars for having said things that they never said (e.g. Al Gore inventing the Internet), and letting flagrant lies from other politicians pass without comment, save for the "others disagree" squib in the next to last paragraph of the article.

That leaves us with the idea that "character" and "image" are the only important factors to use in evaluating candidates. So let's have at it.

Huckabee is running as a fundamentalist preacher. That seems to be working. Giuliani is running as the biggest bastard on the block. That seems to sell pretty well also.

Romney is having trouble because he can't convince the Republican base that he's not a Mormon. That is the only thing that will work for him, BTW; convincing the base that the LDS aren't a satanic cult is simply impossible. Thompson has lost the "I play one on television" mojo, so now he's just an old guy with a hot wife, and Kucinich might win the Republican nomination (despite his being a Democrat and all) if that were the standard. It just depends on whether you like blonds or redheads, although Kucinich's wife is a Brit and her accent would make most Republicans think that she's too smart to be First Lady.

You'd think that having been tortured would give McCain a leg up, but only losers get tortured, so he's out. Ron Paul is genuine, if by "genuine" you mean "self taught wacko," (again, very appealing to certain elements).

Over on the Dem side, Kucinich has as much chance of winning as he does as a Republican. Biden has a lock on the "Hair Club for Men," vote, but the only way he could finish farther out of the money would be to die his hair plugs green. Richardson is running for Vice-President; everyone knows it and everyone thinks he's doing a great job at it.

Dodd seems to be trying for the Integrity, Courage, and Constitutional Values vote, which means that he won't carry a single state. And there's certainly no money in it.

Among the front runners, you have a black man who isn't considered black, a woman who's supposed to be a lesbian martian cyborg, and a rich white guy who is the champion of the poor. None of the three is crazy, which is a distinct plus. Also, all three benefit from the idea that you shouldn't believe what they say, since that would interfere with their being all things to all people.

It's not clear what will happen when the electorate realizes that Oprah isn't married to Obama, and that Hillary is, in fact, a woman. I'll just repeat my frequent warning: never rule out the middle-aged white guy.