Life Imitates Soc.History.What-If

A few years ago, there was a discussion on the Usenet group soc.history.what-if on Alternate Kooks: The Nuclear Weapon Deniers, an obvious parody of Holocaust deniers:

>> Read the first, original and unadulterated testimonies of
>>witnesses of the Hiroshima " nuclear bombing" . You will not
>>find any mention of " mushroom-shaped cloud". And this is
>>the first ( but most glaring) of the many deviations from
>>the standard nuclar dogma.  
>>In fact, read the testimony about Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo bombings -
>>and you will find that they are too distressingly similar  - perhaps
>>because they describe the same class of events - an unprovoked mass
>>murder of workers by fire and explosives, not nonexistant and impossible "nuclar weapons"  
> [more bullshit snipped]
> If the nuclear weapons are impossible, why not only Masonic America, but
>Soviet Union, France, Britain, China and all other powers build them?

So you have swallowed also the Cold War lie. No surprise.

If the " nykes" are so powerful and undefeatabel, why they
WERE NOT USED in 50 years? Not even only once?

In Korea, Vietnam, Gulf and any other war, one of the
marvelous devices could save thousands of American soldiers.
But the government refused to use them. This is TREASON.

Do you believe that ALL presidents since Truman were
traitors?

But not only America- according to your dogma, Britin,
Frace, Russia, Chian , Isreal,  India, Pakistan and North
Korea have a large supplise of these things - and let them
lie idle? 

Yes. That's a good imitation of a Usenet debate, misspellings and all.

The fictional kooks of that discussion turned out to be real:

Okay, so we’ve seen a lot of really stupid and downright crazy conspiracy theories in the past. Many have claimed the moon landings were a big hoax and others claim that the entire Cold War was staged by a secret underground group that actually ran both the US and Soviet Union. Given the huge amount of evidence to prove those events independently, it seems a bit far fetched.

But it looks like they’ve been beaten. There are at least a couple wackos out there who claim that nuclear weapons are a hoax. Yes, they say nuclear weapons just plain don’t exist and beyond that, nuclear fission is not real. Yes, that’s right. There no nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki, the Manhattan project never created a viable weapon and all the thousands of tests conducted by the US, Soviet Union, China, France, the UK and others were just elaborate fakes - at least that’s what some actually believe.

My father told me that there is no opinion so preposterous that someone hasn't published a book claiming it. I don't know if that was true then but, thanks to the Web, it is true now.

What Is the Superlative of Pointless?

There is a solar-powered tanning salon. (Seen via the January issue of First Things, although the Airheads noticed it first.)

Explaining the Avatar Ecosystem

According to Tam of View from the Porch, the ETs in Avatar don't match the rest of the ecosystem:

The thing that was most jarring to me about Avatar is something that will probably stand out like a sore thumb to any other SF geek: The aliens themselves.

………

Now go look at all the big critters in Avatar: They're all hexapedal, or six-limbed. They tend to multiple visual organs. Their breathing orifices, separate from their mouths, are located low and forward in their torsos...

Not the alien people, the Na'Vi, however. They're just big blue humans with tails and slightly feline features.

………

Egalitarian, monogamous, recyclers who love Gaia... how alien is that? These people work at my local organic grocer's. I've met more foreign subcultures in midtown Atlanta.

There's an obvious explanation: Greenpeace refugees went to a previously uninhabited planet and genetically engineered their descendants to look like Hollywood extraterrestrials.

Now That We Have a White Christmas Here …

… I can see Irving Berlin was nuts. This season isn't improved at all by having mounds of frozen dihydrogen monoxide all over the place.

Could we have a little more global warming please?

That Health-Insurance Bill and the Bailouts

If the proposed health-insurance bill causes insurers to come close to bankruptcy (which Richard Epstein says is possible), I predict the left side of the political spectrum will claim that anything done to prevent that is “just another bailout” and that proves that “free-enterprise” is a code word for government action on behalf of capitalists.

These are the same people who claimed that loan-guarantees in reaction to nuclear utility bankruptcies caused by regulatory delays in an inflationary environment were subsidies and, in accordance with the tactic of “make the enemy live up to his book of rules,” had to be rejected by capitalists.

About that “Hockey Stick”

If today's weather on the east coast had anything to do with a hockey stick, it must have been from ice hockey.

Where Are the Lungs?

Public Option Please recently ran a contest for the best poster in favor of the public option in health care. The winning entry is below:

The above poster appears to be based on the theory that Washington regenerates the resources needed by the rest of the United States the way the heart can supply the rest of the body with oxygen-rich blood. One problem is that the heart does not do so by itself but instead sends the blood through the lungs. Where are the lungs in the above poster? In order to be accurate, there would have to be more blood vessels going through a taxpayer's wallet.

Advice for Romney

If Romney runs for governor of Massachusetts in 2010, wins, and dismantles Romneycare, he'll be a shoo-in for President in 2012.

Advice for Little Green Footballs

If you want to maintain some continuity with your blog of a few years ago, you might try a defense of the pro-warming side of the climate-research community in the form of a paraphrase of Colonel Jessep's speech in A Few Good Men. (After all, that was also about the reaction to a whistle blower.) If might start out “You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has climate, and that climate has to be analyzed by scientists with statistics. Whose gonna do it? You? Rush Limbaugh? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for the coal miners, and you curse the environmentalists. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know…”

If There Is a Pro-Fossil-Fuel Conspiracy

The left side of the political spectrum is full of conspiracy theories claiming that the “global-warming deniers” are carrying out the agenda of fossil-fuel interests. If that's the case, you would expect to find lots of anti-nuclear memes on the right side of the spectrum but they seem to be rare there. We wingnuts are divided between those of us in favor of nukes and those of us who ignore the nukes.

The only exceptions are the memes of “nuclear energy would be nice but it's politically impossible in the United States” and “if there is even one serious accidents, no more nukes will be built.” The only real data for the first amounts to the fact that the experts are told the people are against nukes and the people are told the experts are against nukes. No data is cited for the second and it is contrary to actual experience with other technologies. Maybe we should try tracing those memes and find out where they came from and how much the originators were paid by OPEC.

Less Wrong vs. XKCD

From Less Wrong:

The short answer: It's very much like how a few minutes of philosophical reflection trump a few millennia of human cultural tradition.

A possible reaction from the mouse-over text of the latest XKCD:

I mean, what's more likely -- that I have uncovered fundamental flaws in this field that no one in it has ever thought about, or that I need to read a little more? Hint: it's the one that involves less work.

Addendum: It looks like that XKCD hit a nerve.

Addendum II: How far can we take this recursion?

When Natural and Supernatural Mean the Same Thing

There is another clear example (besides focusing attention) of a phenomenon that can be described using both natural and supernatural language. The 18th chapter of the Book of Leviticus uses supernatural language. The same ideas can be expressed in natural language using the tag-line of the Darwin Catholic blog:

Because most philosophies that frown on reproduction don't survive.

This is not limited to Catholics but even applies to some of us Red-Sea pedestrians.

I'm mentioning this because the 18th chapter of the Book of Leviticus (and similar religious texts) is used as an excuse for God-bashing among atheists. The problems they're complaining about are simply part of reality.

God vs. Satan, Explaining the Results

A few years ago, I wrote:

On the one hand, there was Jack Parsons, a follower of the satanist Aleister Crowley, who was trying to create titanic explosions. On the other hand, other scientists not that far away were also trying to create titanic explosions based on the theories of Albert Einstein, a follower of the uncompromising monotheist Baruch Spinoza.

I think God won that round. God's explosions outclassed Satan's.

More recently, M. Simon of Classical Values wrote about Crowley's “Magick”:

In my experience it is a mixed bag. About 1/2 get it. i.e. the exercises are to focus the body and mind. You sill have to do the work. Or as the Zen folks like to say: chop wood and carry water.

………

It is a matter of attention. Total attention.

If what is called supernatural is a matter of focusing your attention, the lesson from God's explosions outclassing Satan's is that if you focus your attention on “causing Change to occur in conformity with Will” you might achieve your goals. If you focus your attention on finding out what the real world is like, you might find things that make your earlier goals seem trivial.

Query about Aleister Crowley: Was he actually a parodist? He might have started out by writing over-the-top parodies of occultism (in which absolutely everything could be called occult) only to find that people took his bullbleep seriously. He then found that being a cult leader paid better than being a comedian…

Come to think of it, maybe something similar happened to L. Ron Hubbard…

Even Green Cranks Are Inspired by the CRU Data Release

The cranks apparently trying to exploit the CRU data release (phenomenon mentioned briefly here and discussed at length by Orac) include an anti-nuclear activist (seen via Energy from Thorium):

Perhaps it’s not surprising that women and people of color would have more trouble accepting the beneficence of the white male-dominated industrial order?

Nuclear proponents have failed to grasp that all the studies about nuclear safety in the world don’t mean a thing to the people who don’t believe that the books are honest and uncooked. Instead, nuclear fans just keep saying, “Trust us, it’s safe!” in different ways.

In other words, they're pretending that the data available in freaking textbooks doesn't exist and that Geiger counters don't exist.

I don't think it's a coincidence that this surfaced a few weeks after the CRU data release.

The Battle Lines in the CRU Data Release Debate

On one side, the claim is that the data butchery and opinion suppression revealed make the standard claims about global warming look dubious.

On the other side, the claim is that this is standard scientific procedure. It's apparently normal to find hacked statistics and narrow mindedness in scientific research.

On the gripping hand, according to the well-known paper Why Most Published Research Findings Are False:

There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this essay, I discuss the implications of these problems for the conduct and interpretation of research.

Of course, the above finding might be one of the erroneous results. We also see at Less Wrong:

Parapsychology, the control group for science, would seem to be a thriving field with "statistically significant" results aplenty.  Oh, sure, the effect sizes are minor.  Sure, the effect sizes get even smaller (though still "statistically significant") as they collect more data.  Sure, if you find that people can telekinetically influence the future, a similar experimental protocol is likely to produce equally good results for telekinetically influencing the past.  Of which I am less tempted to say, "How amazing!  The power of the mind is not bound by time or causality!" and more inclined to say, "Bad statistics are time-symmetrical."  But here's the thing:  Parapsychologists are constantly protesting that they are playing by all the standard scientific rules, and yet their results are being ignored - that they are unfairly being held to higher standards than everyone else.  I'm willing to believe that.  It just means that the standard statistical methods of science are so weak and flawed as to permit a field of study to sustain itself in the complete absence of any subject matter.  With two-thirds of medical studies in prestigious journals failing to replicate, getting rid of the entire actual subject matter would shrink the field by only 33%. We have to raise the bar high enough to exclude the results claimed by parapsychology under classical frequentist statistics, and then fairly and evenhandedly apply the same bar to the rest of science.

Hmmm…

In that case, should any scientific results be trusted at all? According to Orac, a substantial fraction of kooks have used the CRU release as an excuse for general skepticism. I can think of two criteria for trustworthy scientific results.

• First, a scientific theory that has been accepted for a while is usually only replaced by a theory which contains the earlier theory as a special case. For example, modern astronomical theories can explain why Ptolemaic astronomy produced reasonable results.
• Second, a scientific theory that has been linked to a large number of types of facts (especially if those facts come from outside the theory and have led to working devices) is more likely to be right. For example, someone skeptical of Einstein's Theory of Relativity has to explain how those bombs explode. Someone skeptical of quantum mechanics has to explain how semiconductors work.

Let's analyze the Global Warming controversy using the above. The theoretical results that indicated that sufficient accumulation of CO₂ might lead to an uncomfortable climates have been around for almost a century and the general outlines have been rather well checked, even if some of the exact details are disputed. On the other hand, it's hard to use them to get hysterical since they indicate it's a long-term problem and won't get serious until long after the last internal-combustion engine is in a museum. On the gripping hand, the experimental results that are used as the basis for hysterical regulations (aka the “hockey stick”) have not been around long enough to be properly checked. In addition, we only have to explain away one time series (which might be due to solar changes).

Now let's analyze evolution (as an example of something criticized by cranks) using the above. Darwin's explanation has not only been around for over a century but it even outlasted two temporary fads that might have counteracted it. (Socialist economics might have meant that order can only be imposed by central planning and Freud's psychology might have meant that large parts of human psychology are non-adaptive.) In addition, someone trying to explain away evolution has to explain away fossil evidence, biochemical evidence, radioactive-dating evidence, and the theoretical results that indicated genetic algorithms can produce non-trivial results.

Another Way to Understand a Biblical Quote

The phrase “God made man in His own image.” is usually understood as an example of human exceptionalism (if you're in favor) or arrogance (if you're opposed). There's another way to look at it. Maybe it means “Don't get too proud; you're only a copy.”

Are Canadians Sabotaging Global Warming Cooperation?

According to George Monbiot, they are.

We should not be surprised. Considering their climate, they're probably in favor of global warming.

A Brief Note on the Dubai Financial Crisis

So Dubai now has its own financial crisis … Didn't Mencius Moldbug cite Dubai as evidence for the superiority of absolute monarchy?

Maybe censorship isn't the road to success after all.

Now They Admit It

According to Peter Watts (seen via BoingBoing):

There’s this myth in wide circulation: rational, emotionless Vulcans in white coats, plumbing the secrets of the universe, their Scientific Methods unsullied by bias or emotionalism. Most people know it’s a myth, of course; they subscribe to a more nuanced view in which scientists are as petty and vain and human as anyone (and as egotistical as any therapist or financier), people who use scientific methodology to tamp down their human imperfections and manage some approximation of objectivity.

But that’s a myth too. The fact is, we are all humans; and humans come with dogma as standard equipment. We can no more shake off our biases than Liz Cheney could pay a compliment to Barack Obama. The best we can do— the best science can do— is make sure that at least, we get to choose among competing biases.

Wasn't that our line?

The reason science works isn't that scientists are free from bias and it isn't because the bias is irrelevant but because we can usually watch the bias at work. Until a few days ago, that wasn't possible for this issue.

Climategate and Newtongate?

Carbon Fixated is comparing the current Climategate scandal with Newtongate, the snail mails that show Isaac Newton (the greatest argumentative nerd in history) was trying to suppress theories and techniques he did not like. That might mean the AGW advocates might be doing something similar to the suppression of Leibniz's calculus notation that set English mathematics back decades. I won't more than mention the suppression of achromatic lenses or the wave theory of light…

The Good Side of Environmentalism Is Not Universal

A few years ago, I said:

The basic metaphysics of environmentalism is rational. Environmentalist statements are of the form “This is true,”not “This is what we want to be true.” Imagine if the metaphysics of the rest of the left were applied to the environment. Could you say “dioxin is poisonous for you but not for me?” Does it make sense to say “nobody really knows whether global warming is dangerous, so we can believe whatever we like?” Unlike most pro-choicers, for example, environmentalists usually assume that there is a real world. Pointing out that they are wrong about many of the details almost seems like quibbling.

More recently, Ruth Edwards of Ottawa wrote a letter to The Globe and Mail saying:

But that ignores the fundamental fact that climate change is a deeply personal issue. It requires us to look inward for answers. Mr. Harper can kill his Copenhagen but he can't kill mine. I say long live Hopenhagen!

This interferes with attempts to use environmentalism to criticize subjectivism in general.

Planetary Boundaries

A few months ago, Nature ran a series of articles purporting to show that human beings were exceeding several “planetary boundaries” and on the verge of exceeding more. On the other hand, the two worst excesses were supposedly in biodiversity loss and nutrient cycles but the associated articles were unable to cite evidence of actual damage instead of wild guesses.

Humans as Pets

At Accelerating Future, Michael Anissimov is criticizing Jamais Cascio's view that humans should be an essential part of post-Singularity civilization:

When it comes to issues that really matter, humans will eventually be viewed as dumb to superintelligences. Keep in mind that superintelligences might derive from humans rather than AIs, but even a superintelligence only smarter than us as we are smarter than Homo habilis would still be a massive difference. I can imagine Jamais busting into a conference room of superintelligences communicating gigabytes per second of information to each other and manipulating concepts more complex than the human mind could ever hope to handle, and shouting, “wait, listen to my input!” Well, sure Jamais, you can give advice to superintelligences, just like a kindergartner can “give advice” to President Obama, but who cares?

It sounds like a superintelligence advised by humans is as absurd as a human advised by dogs … Wait a moment, humans are frequently advised by dogs on such topics as the location of smuggled explosives or the existence of intruders.

To consider a similar topic, there's a common belief among Singularity advocates that a superintelligence will be brighter than us (plausible) and therefore able to understand everything about us (implausible). I'm brighter than my cat but I frequently have no idea of what she's up to.

How to Argue against Right-Wingers

At Austro-Athenian Empire (seen via Fourth Checkraise), we have the following instructions on how to argue against libertarians:

If they advocate the abolition of some government program from which they personally benefit, call them hypocrites.

If they advocate the abolition of some government program from which they don’t personally benefit, call them selfish.

You can apply the same idea to arguments with social conservatives in vice-condemnation mode.

If they have had personal experience with the vice they're condemning, call them hypocrites.

If they have had no personal experience with the vice they're condemning, call them ignorant.

I Can Haz Gigabytes?

Researchers at IBM have claimed to have simulated a cat's cerebral cortex (seen via BoingBoing).

I don't know how compatible they are with computer mice.

The Real Worst-Case Scenario

The worst-case scenario about U.S. intelligence secrets isn't that what's left of Al Qaeda will get access to them in the KSM trial. The real worst-case scenario is that we have been infiltrated (which wouldn't surprise me one bit) and that the conspirators use secrecy to maintain the infiltration.

It's quite likely that the present administration will leak any secrets we do have over the next three years anyway.

Dayenu

Arnold Kling has a suggestion for Veteran's Day ceremonies:

My proposal for Veterans' Day observances is that they should include a re-telling of the history of World War I along the lines of the Passover re-telling of the Exodus. My goal would be to help innoculate people from believing in the wisdom of the ruling class.

Something along the lines of Dayenu (earlier discused here) might be appropriate:

• If Austria–Hungary had declared war against Serbia but Russia had not mobilized, it would have been enough to make us mistrust the political class.
• If Russia had mobilized but Germany had not declared war on Russia, it would have been enough to make us mistrust the political class.
• If Germany had declared war on Russia but France had not declared war on Germany, it would have been enough to make us mistrust the political class.
• If France had declared war on Germany but Germany had not invaded Belgium, it would have been enough to make us mistrust the political class.
• If Germany had invaded Belgium but Great Britain had not declared war on Germany, it would have been enough to make us mistrust the political class.
• ………
• If Germany had tried recruiting Mexico but America's worst President had not declared war, it would have been enough to make us mistrust the political class.

Mad Scientists for Life vs. Health-Insurance Reform

One possible way for the Left to evade the future described in the Mad Scientists for Life post is to stop private medical research and make sure public research will not stop abortions. The need to stop private medical research might explain why they are so desperate to extend the public takeover of health care.

All this nonsense fits together …

Extrapolating the Future

According to an article in New Scientist on how humans are currently evolving (seen via Overcoming Bias):

If these trends continue for 10 generations, Stearns calculates, the average woman in 2409 will be 2 centimetres shorter and 1 kilogram heavier than she is today.

If we extrapolate that and assume the average adult female height today is 160 cm, the average woman of the year 34009 will have a height of 0 cm.

I think I've taken this a little too far …

Why Do They Hate Us?

Judging by their choice of targets, terrorists claiming to act in the name of Islam really, really hate unarmed infidels.

Maybe we should stop provoking them.

Mad Scientists for Life

According to Half Sigma, abortion will kill the future of the Republican Party. I doubt that very much. The debate is likely to become moot first, not because the anti-anti-abortion side will have a permanent victory but because it will be obsolete. Consider the following possibilities:

• Infallible contraception. There is reason to believe every menstrual period increases the chances of breast cancer. This provides a sound reason to turn menstruation and ovulation off unless one is trying to get pregnant. This will eliminate the vast majority of abortions. This will even eliminate the possibly mythical “nice girl who didn't use the pill because only tramps use it.”
• RU-Pentium. This will stop cell division in the fetus temporarily. It can be used by women who want their children but at a later date. An alternate means would be placing the fetuses in cryonic suspension.
• Raising the age of puberty. If a pair of “up-tight” parents don't want their kids fooling around in a society where adolescent pregnancy is impossible, they don't have to surrender to the liberal fundamentalists. They can raise the age of puberty back to what it was in the Victorian era. (I suspect it was the drop in the age of puberty that set off the “sexual revolution.”)
• Genetic engineering. If a fetus has a genetic defect, it need not be aborted, it will be possible to inject the genes in utero. Even exposure to a teratogen could be remedied by fetal surgery.
• Artificial wombs. The remaining unwanted children could always be placed in artificial wombs and adopted later. An alternate method is to transplant them into the bodies of pro-life volunteers.
• Technical progress in general. We can expect increased resources and increased efficiency in using resources to get rid of the tendency to take Malthus seriously.

When we combine the above methods, the abortion rate will drop down to near zero. There may be an attempt to keep it moderately common by appealing to fetal research. On the other hand, it's hard to see what we can gain from research on human fetuses that we can't gain from animal fetuses. Abortion is generally tolerated only because it is common. Several decades after the last abortion has taken place, there will be a belated and unnecessary ban. (Even an anarcho-capitalist society is likely to be transparent and those old-fashioned enough to still abort will be known and shunned.) A few decades after that, the sort of history student who second guesses historical figures (someone who regards the existence of the United States as hypocritical since many of the Founding Fathers were slave-holders) will turn the high abortion rates of the turn of the century into some kind of a scandal. The next step will be examining the other opinions of both sides in debates that occurred during the abortion epidemic. We can expect the opinions of anti-abortion bloggers will be given more respect and those of anti-anti-abortion bloggers will be given less respect. If geriatric medicine improves rapidly enough, some of us may still be around then.

I want to form an organization to be called “Mad Scientists For Life.”

Rehabilitating a Science-Fiction Cliche

Science fiction has a common cliche scenario: Shortly after we get into space we encounter many different sentient aliens all of whom have almost the same degree of technological development. Once you start thinking about it, this is preposterous. The difference between Earth and a typical bunch of science-fictional ETs (Kzinti or Merseians or whatever) is only a few thousand years ahead—a million on the outside. In the course of billions of years, the odds of two species developing space flight that close is thousands or millions to one. It would take a very weird theory to make that believable. That weird theory can be found in an article in the late lamented Extropy magazine (found online here).

Here's the scenario: First, we assume that wormholes are both possible and useful. Next, we assume that these wormholes can be accelerated by a Bussard ramjet (or something equivalent) at a fixed acceleration indefinitely. Finally, we assume that the nearest ETs are less than a googol parsecs away. We take a wormhole and accelerate it at 1 g until it reaches the ETs. This will take less than a century by wormhole time. According to the mathematics of these warp drives, it will also take less than a century at the Earth end of the wormhole. When we reach the ETs, we will probably encounter their advance wormholes which means we will meet them only a few centuries after they start spaceflight. In other words, we will probably meet as near equals:

Barring such hostile aliens we can expect to have contacted and be trading with alien civilisations within a few centuries or millennia of starting our wormhole exploration of the universe. This is a symmetrical situation. Not only will be meeting aliens within historically short period, but they will be meeting us shortly after their expansion begins. Consequently all the species of the universe will be linking up at about the same stage in their development. This gives us all shared interests and hence markets in common. We might expect each civilisation to go through two future phase changes. First phase change is when they develop nanotechnology and start redesigning themselves, speeding up etc. Second phase change occurs when they link up with the rest of the universe and get the benefits of the near- infinite economies of scale this brings.

Another cliche which this scenario can include (but which was not mentioned in the article) is the Elder Race. This is a race of ETs who have been around for billions of years and are very wise and very, very patient. The Elder Race of cliche has “progressed” far beyond the young, greedy, individualistic civilizations. If we assume that there is a race of ETs with the ambition to be an Elder Race they can achieve that ambition by accelerating a bit more slowly than average. Establishing a speed limit even a tiny bit less than the speed of light would make them encounter their first aliens only after a million years. Arranging such a slowdown would require a centralized collectivist organization. (Otherwise the fastest members would set the pace.) We might someday encounter very advanced, very powerful ETs who sound like New-Age loons. (Individualists such as myself should brace ourselves.) Do not insult them. They really do have magical powers and will turn you into a toad.

I have no reason to believe they have arranged for a bird to drop a crust of bread on the LHC.

There Are People with Guns out There, Sir

For some reason the news that Fort Hood was a “gun-free” zone reminds me of Monty Python.

Explaining the Election Results

Maybe the results from New Jersey and Virginia (as well as Westchester and possibly Nassau counties in New York) mean that suburban Republicans are back and the results from upstate New York mean that rural areas might be trending Democratic.

The theory that the discrepancy is about a Civil War in the Republican party doesn't make sense since upstate New York is not exactly a “Metrocon” region.

On the other hand, maybe it's Canadian illegal aliens voting at the Canadian border.

On the gripping hand, it might be a mistake to read too much into a handful of results.

Dubya is a Pointy-Headed Intellectual?

According to an article in New Scientist:

IS GEORGE W. BUSH stupid? It's a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent eight-year presidency. The strict answer is no. Bush's IQ score is estimated to be above 120, which suggests an intelligence in the top 10 per cent of the population. But this, surely, does not tell the whole story. Even those sympathetic to the former president have acknowledged that as a thinker and decision-maker he is not all there. Even his loyal speechwriter David Frum called him glib, incurious and "as a result ill-informed".

What was that? He has book-larnin' but not a lick o' common sense? Does this mean he's on the same side as the Elitist Bastards?

The article goes on to distinguish between IQ and “rational thinking.” I'm not sure if the psychologists researching this can tell the difference between “rational thinking” and “agrees with us.”

Gold, Oil, and Global Warming

According to the late Thomas Gold, oil and natural gas deposits did not come from fossils but instead came from the materials the Earth was made of (discussed on Classical Values). This is actually the case with Saturn's moon, Titan, so it is not completely absurd … although it is highly speculative.

This theory has important implications for the possible global warming crisis. If all the fossil fuel comes from fossils, there can't be that much of it: We are likely to run out before the CO₂ accumulation can be a major problem. If the “fossil fuels” are as abundant as Gold said, it's much more likely for for the greenhouse effect to be a problem.

ObSF: “Wildcat” by Poul Anderson.

Two Articles in Scientific American

On the one hand, the November 2009 issue of Scientific American has an article advocating “vertical farms”—an idea that makes sense only if the necessary grow lights are powered by nuclear energy. On the other hand, it also has an article advocating 100% use of “renewable energy” (i.e., a combination of direct solar energy, indirect solar energy, and trivialities). I don't think those ideas can be combined.

If we try combining them, instead of letting plants gather solar energy and then eating them, we will collect solar energy out in the countryside, send it for an expensive night on the town and then beam that same energy into the plants via grow lights. An all-solar energy supply might make sense if there were no increase in power demand, but the vertical farms will increase the demand by themselves.

Presumed Consent and Ex Post Facto Civil Laws

Cass Sunstein, the regulatory czar, has recommended that it become legal to remove organs from deceased people who did not explicitly give consent by inventing a doctrine of “presumed consent”:

"Presumed consent preserves freedom of choice, but it is different from explicit consent because it shifts the default rule. Under this policy, all citizens would be presumed to be consenting donors, but they would have the opportunity to register their unwillingness to donate, and they could do so easily. We want to underline the word easily, because the harder it is to register your unwillingness to participate, the less libertarian the policy becomes."

In other words, it is possible for regulators to change a “default rule,” bury the change in a 1500-page law, and claim that anybody who was too busy actually having a life to hire a lawyer to fill out a zillion-page form that said otherwise is now an organ donor.

This is an example of a common phenomenon: agreeing to a contract (or lack of a contract) based on the current law followed by a legislature passing a law that changes the meaning of the contract. There were people who got married a few decades ago under the impression that marriage was until “death us do part” only to find their marriage vows had been changed into something temporary. The late Terri Schindler Schiavo said that she didn't want to be kept alive by extraordinary means followed by the Florida state legislature passing a law that changed the meaning of “extraordinary means.”

But wait, there's more. You can think of copyright law as a contract between writers, musicians, pharmaceutical manufacturers, etc. on one side and the public on the other side in which the members of the public agree not to use unauthorized copies for a limited amount of time in return for creative work on the other side. This is under attack at both ends. Copyright extension laws change the meaning of “limited amount of time” while proposed changes in drug re-importation laws change the meaning of “unauthorized copies.”

The Constitution bans ex post facto criminal laws; maybe we need a Constitutional Amendment to ban ex post facto civil laws. If a law is passed changing copyright terms; anything already copyrighted will retain the old terms and only new books/drugs/records will be covered by the new terms.

Where Are the Protectionist Tea parties?

According to a common left-wing myth (almost as common as the claim that the “tea parties” are orchestrated by the board of directors of Evil Capitalists, Inc.), the tea parties represent the Angry White Failure demographic. On the other hand, the AWFs are strongly protectionist (it's a consequence of blaming foreigners for everything) and there don't seem to be many protectionist signs at the tea parties.

I'm sure that leftists will hold that against the tea parties.

Obama Has Not Been Following Alinsky Tactics

One of Alinsky's best-known rules is “Pick a target freeze it,personalize it and polarize it.” He has not picked a target but has been going after a wide variety of enemies. “Pick a target” means first you convince the Consensus that Rush Limbaugh (or whoever) is insane and then you go after people you can associate with Rush using the Law of Sewage. Obama has been going after too many targets for that to work.

It's the same tactic that meant the U.S. did not fight Communists during World War II or Islamofascists during Cold War I. We had to pick our targets.

Public Service Announcement

Yes, there are Global Warming people who are responsible enough to criticize the biggest idiots on their side.

I think we should respond by taking the responsible faction of global warmers more seriously.

Explaining Exelon

Shortly before the last election, I posted that Obama may have been bought by the nuclear utility Exelon. Now there's some evidence that's the case:

Or consider Exelon Corp., the nation's largest nuclear power generator. The Waxman-Markey bill would lavish millions more tons' worth of energy-ration coupons on Exelon than the company would need to cover the CO2 emissions from its much smaller fleet of fossil electric generating units. As Amanda DeBard indicates, under Waxman-Markey, Exelon would reap about $1 billion in windfall profits annually from the sale of surplus ration coupons.

I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, it might be partial compensation for the financial disasters caused by regulatory blockage of partly-built reactors. (If interest rates are high, a slowdown is as good as a blockage as far as bankruptcy is concerned.) If you invest in nukes, you might go bankrupt or you might get a huge windfall profit. The second possibility might cause investors to take another look at nuclear power.

On the other hand, investment should not be a roll of the dice. To make matters worse, the people getting the compensation aren't the same people who went bankrupt.

On the gripping hand, it's another excuse for Joseph Romm etc. to try to ban nukes. It's similar to making a peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority while their propaganda machine is still going. Even if the current administration is willing to subsidize a nuclear utility or two the next left-wing administration won't be and they'll be angrier than ever.

The “Good” Side of Traffic Jams

According to what can only be described as the sadistic school of environmental analysis:

Traffic jams can actually be environmentally beneficial if they turn subways, buses, car pools, bicycles and walking into more-attractive options. Residents of the New York metropolitan area are extraordinarily committed transit users—they account for almost a third of all the public-transit passenger miles traveled in the United States. Making a cab ride seem more efficient than the subway, by reducing the congestion on the streets, would be a loss for the environment.

Out here in the real world, congestion is commonly cited as a reason to move out of high-density areas. More traffic jams means more people moving to areas where they have to drive more to get somewhere.

Much of liberalism is based on the idea that people will react to government planning the way the planners want. It doesn't always work that way.

Counterproductive

San Francisco has a mandatory recycling law. This was allegedly done to prevent landfills from releasing methane. They might seem to have a point except that composting could interfere with carbon burial (earlier discussed here).

If they really want to use garbage policy to lessen the greenhouse effect, they should char the garbage enough to stop decay (maybe they could use solar power for that) and then throw it in the landfill anyway. On the other hand, this doesn't require passing laws that tell ordinary citizens what to do, so professional busybodies won't get off on this policy.

Are Alinsky-Style Tactics That Effective?

For several decades prior to its adoption of Alinsky-style tactics in the 1960s, the left side of politics in the United States had gone from strength to strength. The only exception was when it took a temporary breather during the Eisenhower administration (when confiscatory income taxes and labor union membership were at their highest levels). Since then it has stalled. The anticipated next logical step of the 1970s, the Equal-Rights Amendment, never happened. The previously disorganized right was able to elect Reagan and was even able to roll back some left-wing victories during the Clinton administration.

I suspect one reason for the halt is that the “mushy middle” was annoyed enough at radical tactics that they abandoned their previous attitude of “grab from the rich.” If we get them annoyed they might go back.

In other words, maybe we shouldn't be using “Rules for Radicals.”

Having It Both Ways

One of the best examples of having it both ways comes from, of all things, a quote from a comic-book review (would that be a safe-zone violation?):

"The unsettling fusion of Bush's worst nightmare of stem cell research and Cheney's wettest dream of armed forces procurement."

— Rich Kreiner, The Comics Journal

In other words, a conservative who's pro-mutant will be classified as exploitative and a conservative who's anti-mutant will be classified as intolerant. Presumably, someone on the “side of the angels” will be classified as either tolerant or anti-exploitation.

For the record, I'm pro-mutant.

Addendum: I just realized that the above also applies to the immigration issue: Pro-immigration conservatives are called exploitative and anti-immigration conservatives are called intolerant.

What He Said

I rarely post “me too!” but I'll make an exception for this Disclosure To Readers and Notice To The Federal Trade Commission. I might need such a legal notice someday.

Not Even Wrong

President Obama has won the latest Nobel Peace Prize.

On the other hand, the Peace and Literature Nobel Prizes might be Nobel Prizes but they are not Nobel Nobel Prizes.

It Is Now Politically Acceptable to Admit CO₂ Makes Plants Grow

It became acceptable once the research was done on poison ivy.

I'm waiting for the results of similar research done on crabgrass and ragweed.

Maybe Yucca Mountain Isn't Such a Good Idea after All …

We shouldn't hide nuclear waste in an inaccessible hole; we might need it someday. For example, the plutonium 238 used in nuclear batteries comes from nuclear waste.

Can't They Move?

Neighborhood activists oppose a planned new skyscraper in Manhattan.

I think people who are opposed to skyscrapers but choose to live in Manhattan are a bit unclear on the concept of where they want to live.

The Non-Fiction Version of “The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street”

Robin Hanson (also known for non-fiction version of “Slow Tuesday Night” by R. A. Lafferty) has a recent blog post that's the non-fiction version of “The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street,” also by Lafferty. First, a quote from Hanson's blog post:

Given a similar freedom of fertility, most of our distant descendants will also live near a subsistence level. Per-capita wealth has only been rising lately because income has grown faster than population. But if income only doubled every century, in a million years that would be a factor of 10³⁰⁰⁰, which seems impossible to achieve with only the 10⁷⁰ atoms of our galaxy available by then. Yes we have seen a remarkable demographic transition, wherein richer nations have fewer kids, but we already see contrarian subgroups like Hutterites, Hmongs, or Mormons that grow much faster. So unless strong central controls prevent it, over the long run such groups will easily grow faster than the economy, making per person income drop to near subsistence levels. Even so, they will be basically happy in such a world.

In other words, our descendants might be faced with a scarcity of atoms. In the fictional version, we have:

The poverty of the street struck him last of all, and then it seemed a more pleasant poverty with some other name. It was picked-clean poverty, as if every speck of dust had been hand-gathered from between the cobblestones as something valuable as lepto pepper or gold.

………

Hiram Poorlode, as did all the skinny people of Leptophlebo Street, wore a very large, flat, wide-brimmed hat that was crawling all over with rambling greenery, Canute now saw that what Hiram really wore on top of his head was a growing vegetable and fruit and grain garden. And all those gardens were tilted to catch all the sun possible.

You can think of Leptophlebo Street as a society where absolutely everything gets recycled.

Criticizing Imaginary Conservatives Yet Again

The latest attempt to criticize conservatives for violating leftist stereotypes of what us wingnuts believe comes from ThinkProgress (seen via Instapundit):

Always looking for a way to bring down Obama, conservatives not only criticized the President’s 15-hour trip, but also spent this week denegrating Chicago, downplaying the Olympics, and rooting against America.

Leftists look at conservatives and see mindless nationalists—people who root for something that's labeled “America” without having any good reason. As a result, they think we're hypocrites for not being mindless enough. (An earlier instance of this phenomenon was discussed here).

I Disagree with the “Law of Sewage”

According to the noted crackpot Mencius Moldbug:

I have a different view of the matter - expressed in my Law of Sewage (which is not mine - if anyone knows the origin, please email me). The Cathedral indeed contains many shades. They are not shades of grey, however. They are shades of brown. A drop of wine in a barrel of sewage makes sewage; a drop of sewage in a barrel of wine makes sewage.

On the other hand:

Sept 3, 2001 - Historians have recreated a "Stone Age" beer flavored with animal dung, and put it on sale only in the Orkney islands off northern Scotland.

Merryn Dineley, a Manchester University historian and chief brewer of the ancient beer, told the The Observer on Sunday that the brew was "quite delicious." The ale is brewed in clay pots with traces of baked animal droppings.

He and others recreated the recipe after uncovering what they claim is a 5,000-year-old pub and brewery on the remote archipelago.

and furthermore:

Kopi Luak (pronounced [ˈkopi ˈloo - uck]) or Civet coffee is coffee made from coffee berries which have been eaten by and passed through the digestive tract of the Asian Palm Civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus) and other related civets. The civets eat the berries, but the beans inside pass through their system undigested.

The real point is that the “Law of Sewage” doesn't make that much sense even in its home territory of judging beverages. If we apply the denial of the Law of Sewage to politics, it means we should not reject transportation deregulation merely because it was pushed through with the help of a Senator who was the grandson of a Nazi sympathizer. Similarly, it is preposterous to oppose Sarah Palin because she is an associate of an associate of an associate of white supremacists. It even means we should not unlink a blog simply because it refers to perfectly reasonable statements about abortion as though they were evidence of extremism.

A Gap in Science Fiction

There have been lots of Mad Scientists in SF but there have been very few Mad Artists. There was The Illusionists by James H. Schmitz (earlier discussed here) but that's about it. On the other hand, in the real world, there have been lots of dangerous Mad Artists (cited as a result of the Polanski arrest fallout).

Health-Insurance Reform and Pseudoephedrine Regulations

The news of the arrest of a grandmother in Indiana for buying two boxes of cold medication inside a week has been going around the blogosphere:

“I don’t want to go there again,” [Vermillion County Prosecutor Nina] Alexander told the Tribune-Star, recalling how the manufacture and abuse of methamphetamine ravaged the tiny county and its families.

While the law was written with the intent of stopping people from purchasing large quantities of drugs to make methamphetamine, the law does not say the purchase must be made with the intent to make meth.

“The law does not make this distinction,” Alexander said…

Just as with any law, the public has the responsibility to know what is legal and what is not, and ignorance of the law is no excuse, the prosecutor said.

“I’m simply enforcing the law as it was written,” Alexander said…

It is up to customers to pay attention to their purchase amounts, and to check medication labels, Alexander said.

“If you take these products, you ought to know what’s in them,” she said.

If health insurance is federalized, people just like Nina Alexander will be enforcing treatment guidelines.

Explaining Steven Chu's Comment

Energy Secretary Chu's comparison of the American public with teenage kids actually makes sense … provided he thinks that it's the American public who have been holding up nuclear power. If so, that might be due to being from Berkeley. I'm sure the Berkeley public is anti-nuke.

Krupke, We've Got Troubles of Our Own

According to Classical Values, there's a renewed movement to base legal decisions on neurolaw:

Criminal law scholarship has recently become absorbed with the ideas of neuroscience in the emerging field of neurolaw. This mixture of cognitive neuroscience and law suggests that long established conceptions of human agency and responsibility are fundamentally at odds with the findings of science. Using sophisticated technology, cognitive neuroscience claims to be upon the threshold of unraveling the mysteries of the mind by elucidating the mechanical nature of the brain. Despite the limitations of that technology, neurolaw supporters eagerly suggest that those revelations entail that an inevitable and radical overhaul of our criminal justice system is soon at hand.

I think somebody should write a song about how, assuming human behavior is based on brain states instead of alleged reasons, appeals to experts can be gamed. After all, the expert advice is a type of human behavior and differing brains might produce differing advice.

Wait a moment… It's been done:

The trouble is he's crazy, the trouble is he drinks
The trouble is he's lazy, the trouble is he stinks
The trouble is he's growing, the trouble is he's grown
Krupke, we've got troubles of our own

Also see my earlier comments on neuroeconomics as well as Bryan Caplan's defense of free will.

Happy New Year

I would like to wish my fellow Red-Sea pedestrians a happy and healthy New Year.

Speaking of healthy …

There are transhumanists trying to recruit Catholics. I think it might make at least as much sense to recruit Orthodox Jews or religious people in general.

Essential Disclaimer: I'm not very Orthodox but I've noticed Orthodox Jews are more likely to make sense on medicine than non-Orthodox Jews. For example, non-Orthodox Jews are likely to assume that Jewish tradition is obsolete:

In classical Jewish thought, every effort must be made to continue to sustain life, regardless of cost. However, this view was constructed when medical technology was very different. Two-thousand years ago we didn't have the option to add a few painful months of life to someone at the cost of millions of dollars. We do now. This different situation may require serious reexamining of this sort of belief.

In view of the possible Methuselarity, the “modern” view might be more obsolete than the traditional view.

Tell Us Something We Didn't Know

Little Green Footballs provides additional evidence that Patrick Buchanan has lost his mind.

There's also the following request there:

Will the people who screamed for Van Jones’ resignation based on unsubstantiated accusations that he was a Truther now scream just as loud about Pat Buchanan?

Of course. I insist that Buchanan must resign as czar immediately!

Watching Your Field vs. Watching a Neighboring Field

Consider this analogy: Quackwatch is to Insurance Reform Watch as teaching schoolchildren to read is to inventing the Airborne nutrition supplement.

If Insurance Reform Watch were about health-care reform, a doctor's opinion might be authoritative but it disclaims being about health-care reform. As far as insurance reform is concerned, Dr. Barrett is an interested layman with lots of anecdotes and some out-of-context research … much like an elementary schoolteacher discussing minor diseases.

Query: What if real quacks take Insurance Reform Watch to be an excuse to ignore criticism?

An Epitaph for the Late Norman Borlaug

Whoever makes two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow where only one grew before, deserves better of mankind, and does more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.—Jonathan Swift

Don't Have a Cow Man!

The latest dastardly Israeli activity has been invasion by cow:

Israeli cows guided by Israeli shepherds have been crossing the border in an act southerners are condemning as a violation of the country's sovereignty, especially since the cattle is being protected by the Israeli Army. The bovine "incursions" have even provoked Lebanese dogs that have now made it their mission to make the cows return where they came from.

The Other Side is going to milk this for all its worth. On the other hand, our honor is at steak!

A Frequently-Asked Question Finally Answered

What has Andrew Sullivan been smoking?

Also see this.

Oxycontin, by contrast, seems almost harmless.

Don't Call Them Death Panels

Call them death fence-posts. According to a commenter on Samizdata:

The problem is, they will outlaw almost everything while enforcing very little. Imprisonment by stealth. People will not know they are encircled until it is too late - like putting in all these very deep, robust fence-posts with no fence panels. All seems open. One day you will wake up and the panels are in, you are trapped and they can decide what law they wish to impose to nail whomsoever they desire.

The proposed advisory panels might not be death panels but they have the structure to support death panels. They will make it possible to institute death panels later that will be fully staffed from the start and ready to obey orders.

The Simplest Road to Success

The simplest road to success is to censor any news of failure. (That isn't what Thomas Friedman said, but it's the obvious conclusion.) Judging by the way China is trying to crack down on dissent, some disaster must be brewing there that they want to keep under cover.

I've covered this phenomenon before.

Another Moldbug

Mencius Moldbug isn't the only conservative who's fallen for rhe idea that history has always moved left. It looks like Rep. Michele Bachmann (seen via Dispatches from the Culture Wars) is another one:

Moving to taxes, Bachmann said that for some Americans, the ratio of tax payments to earned income can reach 50 percent -- compared to 5 percent in 1950.

“Progressive” income tax rates were far higher in the 1950s than today.

On the other hand, that does not fit the standard left-wing dogma that history always moves left. Since Rep. Bachmann (R-idiculous) has apparently accepted that dogma, she believes that tax rates must have increased. (In case you're wondering, they haven't.)

ObSF: The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester, published in the 1950s, in which one of the characters was highly resentful of the confiscatory taxes levied on upper-income telepaths. It was another example of an attempted look at the future that soon became recognizable as a period piece.

Dynastic Politics and Dynastic Punditry

According to Glenn Greenwald, “It's time to embrace American royalty.” After looking at his examples, I realized that dynastic politics can be found across the political spectrum whereas dynastic punditry (for example, Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson, John Podhoretz, Christopher Buckley, and Jonah Goldberg) tends to be found on the right. This might mean it's harder for someone to break into MSM punditry on the right side of the political spectrum but it's equally difficult for both sides to break into politics.

Meanwhile, Nate Silver posted a statistical analysis showing a decline in nepotism. This might mean it's easier to break into politics nowadays.

Shorter Ronald Dworkin

Fully informed people will agree with me.

The next step, of course, is to assume that anybody who disagrees isn't fully informed. The step after that is to decide for them based on what they would have chosen only if they were Rational Like Us.

Example of Dynastic Politics

A few days ago, in a bus traveling along Saul Weprin Street in Queens, I noticed a poster advertising Mark Weprin for City Council.

Didn't we have a revolution to get away from rule by dynasties?

A Possible Constitutional Amendment

Congress shall make no law … that they haven't read.

We might even go for a stronger version

Congress shall make no law … that a majority of the Congress cannot write out from memory.

Uncle Milton's Human Farm

There's a house in Manhattan that's 9½ feet wide.

Musical Health-Care Reform

The video of “One Single-Payer System” sung to the tune of “One Singular Sensation” from A Chorus Line has been going around the blogosphere. I think some other songs from the same musical also have some potential. For example, we might have a song about how reforms designed in academia tend to fail upon contact with politics (“Everything was beautiful in the classroom …”) or about a skeptic's reaction to health-care reform (“There is no feeling, except the feeling that this bullbleep is absurd …”).

What If That's the Goal?

The Democrats have been so emphatic that “You will not have to give up your doctor or insurance company” that I'm starting to wonder if that's the goal. Right now, insurance companies have to be more generous than they would like because of the possibility of losing customers. If the regulations are written in such a way as to tie customers and insurers together until death them do part, they can start squeezing. (I recall reading that health care spending is higher in parts of the U.S. with more competitive insurance markets.)

By the way, the U.S. health-care system is very good at the sort of things that insurers are supposed to be reluctant to pay for (major operations, cancer chemotherapy, etc.). It's not so good at routine medical care (e.g., prenatal care) that we should not need insurance companies to pay for. I don't see how any of the proposed reforms will improve the latter.

If Only Senator George Murphy Were Still Alive …

Former Congressman Tom DeLay is joining the cast of “Dancing with the Stars.”

Latest Excuse in the “Death Panel” Controversy

1. I didn't touch your bicycle.
2. It was broken when I borrowed it.

In other words, there are no death panels and the Republicans are responsible for them.

It looks like at least one Republican (and that's enough to blame them all) made the mistake I warned about a few years ago and tried writing general-purpose bills to prevent a future Terri Schindler Schiavo case.

By the way, I suspect that one reason leftists try to get some conservatives on board one of their bandwagons is to be able to blame them when they run into trouble. This might be another case of that.

Anti-Gun Paranoia in Action

A school administration goes into hysterics when a history teacher brings plastic guns into a school for a history lesson:

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- A teacher who brought plastic replica rifles to his class prompted a lockdown of two San Diego schools when a staff member thought he was a gunman.

I'm surprised teaching history is even legal nowadays.

It's the Fortieth Anniversary of Woodstock

Why should I care?

By the way, is it my imagination or are people who pride themselves on being the “Wave of the Future” more prone to nostalgia than us reactionaries? There was the Camelot nostalgia about the Kennedy administration, the nostalgia about the unpolluted pre-industrial era, and the nostalgia about the supposedly-peaceful pre-monotheist religions …

On Saving Money

I just realized that the people who think that it's possible to stop health-care inflation by eliminating profits, marketing, and administration expenses from health insurance voted for someone whose reaction to demands to balance the budget was to look for $100 million of savings.

The Proper Analogy

In an effort to prove Jane's Law (“The devotees of the party out of power are insane.”), some of my fellow wingnuts have been comparing the proposed health-care reforms to Hitler's policies. There's a much better analogy, even if we stick to German history: It resembles Bismarck's policies on social insurance.

On the other hand, those policies made it possible for the Nazis to control Germany's doctors …

There are many potential government policies that should be opposed, not because they are evil in themselves, but because they will make it easier to adopt evil policies later.

Eyeglasses and Stagnation

A few years ago, Michael Flynn mentioned in the Analog article “De revolutione scientiarum in ‘media tempestas’” (with my earlier comments here and there) that there was a pause in the European scientific revolution between the High Middle Ages and the Baroque and speculated that it was due to the bubonic plague epidemic killing off most of the potential scientists.

More recently, he posted that the invention of eyeglasses doubled the working lives of scholars. I just realized that that might have caused the world to be taken over by gerontocracies. On the other hand, we managed to recover.

Let's see … the explanations of the pause include: bubonic plague, the Little Ice Age, the state monopoly on guns, and now eyeglasses. What's next?

Abortionist to New York: Drop Dead!

In case you've been wondering how abortionists justify themselves, it's by the mind-bogglingly silly argument (seen via The Brothers Judd) that human cities are a cancer on the planet:

In 1990, we proposed that the similarity in the morphology of urban settlements and malignant lesions could be studied with the use of fractal geometry (Hern, 1990). We placed images of malignant lesions and urban settlements side-by-side to show this similarity (Fig. 4).

I've seen similar patterns on my computer from simulations of diffusion-limited aggregation. Clearly, snowflakes are also a cancer on the planet (and don't get me started on the coastlines of Maine and Norway).

There are other phenomena that could be mistaken for cancers. Many plants have a fractal structure and are deadly to nearby anaerobic bacteria. Spider plants send out metastases. Slides taken from growing antlers, when viewed by a microscope, look like they came from bone cancers.

Most important of all, placentas have a fractal structure. The evidence that purports to prove that humans are a cancer on the planet can also show (to people inclined to take this bullbleep seriously) that Mother Earth is pregnant.

Giant Oxymorons Invade Internet

Peter Thiel has been called “oxymoronically gay.” Would it make sense to call a left-wing tycoon “oxymoronically rich”? For that matter, would it make sense to call a supposed rationalist who uses phrases such as “oxymoronically gay” as “oxymoronically prone to unwarranted assumptions”?

Credit: The subject line comes from “Seven Scenes from the Ultimate Monster Movie” by Robert R. Chase.

Yet Another Reason to Be Suspicious of Health-Care Reform

The speed at which we're expected to approve of a change this far reaching looks suspicious. Usually, demands to DO SOMETHING NOW come from frightware virus writers and similar frauds. I'm reminded of the following Stephen Colbert quote:

Right! We have to give unchecked financial power to the President and his appointees now to implement a plan that no one understands. (Especially the President and his appointees) Then later, much later, when the crisis is either over or far, far worse, there will be plenty of time to decide if this plan was a good idea, if we could review the actions of the Secretary, which we can't. (Hindsight if $2020 billion) The point is this is one of the most important, irrevocable economics decisions we will ever make. Let's make it in a state of panic.

A Theory on the Cause of the “Obesity Epidemic”

It's the Internet's fault. It used to be necessary to go out and do something to interact with others. Now you can sit on your increasingly padded fanny in front of the computer.

What Will a Government Monopoly on Pharmaceuticals Research Do for Medicine?

Coyote blog and Megan McArdle have comments on Ezra Klein's suggestion that government money can make up for the lack of private money.

I will answer the title question with a question: What did a government monopoly on nuclear research do to nuclear energy? (I mean besides hand Joseph Romm and similar clowns a set of excuses for suppressing nukes.)

The Family Guy vs. South Park

Which is weirder?

This Might Be Useful

Dispute Finder is supposed to be a Firefox extension that, given a claim, will help locate evidence contrary to it. It might be the start of something resembling Resartus (with my earlier comments here) or it might be another web site under the control of People-with-Too-Much-Free-Time.

According to the Dispute Finder blog:

You can now more easily unmark snippets other people have marked. The intention is that this be used if you see that someone is spamming the system. This is combined with a background moderation system that lets us see when users are disagreeing over whether something is making a disputed claim.

It's easy to see that this might be gamed. It's also possible that the administrators might crack down faster on abuses on one side of an issue than on the other side. We'll have to watch them.

A more subtle form of gaming the system is possible. It's possible to use the system to collect evidence against a straw man argument and pretend it's evidence against against a robust argument. We might even see graduates of the “University of Google” get advanced degrees at Dispute Finder.

U.S. Medical Insurance Companies Have Been Innocent Since …

December 2007. At least, I assume that anything more recent would have been mentioned in the course of the current debates on health care.

Tea Party Observed

Yesterday, I happened to pass by this tea party.

On the one hand, I was impressed that this phenomenon is for real.

On the other hand, after years of watching demonstrations by leftists, my immediate reaction was to look for reasons it was annoying or ridiculous. I suspect the Other Side is now looking for snarky comments made about the demonstrations of a few years ago and will soon start recycling them.

I'm an Example on Both Sides

While reading the latest debate on whether fat people can lose lots of weight and keep it off, I realized that I'm an example on both sides. I lost over 100 pounds in my late teens and mostly kept it off for almost two decades (with a little bit of a backslide in my early 20s). On the other hand those two decades are increasingly far in the past …

Shorter Mike Treder

Peter Thiel is a heretic! STONE HIM!

Is the Left the Pro-Science Side?

No.

What If They Gave a War and Nobody Came?

While considering Tom Lehrer's song “Send the Marines,” I wondered what would happen if President Obama sent the Marines to Honduras to reinstate the President … and many of them refused to go?

Another Reason Not to Have a National Health Care Monopoly

If we have a national health care monopoly, we'll be only one election away from a anti-vaccine crusader in charge of your health and mine.

Morgenthau on Guns

Robert Morgenthau is highly critical of the Thune amendment, which would allow people with concealed-carry gun licenses to carry their guns across state lines. According to Morgenthau, this is a violation of the Tenth Amendment.

I wonder if similar reasoning can be applied to marriage licenses (so if a state banned gay marriage, gay marriages performed in other states would be null and void in that state), drivers licenses, or high-school diplomas. We might have a situation in which diplomas from a state with a Creationist school system are not recognized elsewhere or vice versa. (Remember that vice versa. Political power can work both ways.)

A Future That Didn't Happen

According to A Brief History of the Not Too Distant Future:

We have been launched into a state of permanent war. Cheney, Bush and the rest of the new royalty have no intention of relinquishing control in their lifetimes. Despite eloquent claims and seemingly astute observations by numerous pundits of the incompetence of the Bush administration, the Project for the New American Century is well underway. No such incompetence in fact exists.

Sometime before the '08 election, American will experience another false flag "terrorist attack", a new and improved 911. Martial law is just around the corner. Within the next 3 to 5 years we will see the North American Union become a global, military dictatorship featuring Bush with his ball & Cheney as supreme commanders. While we fiddle the world will burn.

I supposed they lied to us again.

Nuclear Waste, Shmuclear Waste

American and Israeli scientists (from the great and little Satans) have developed a drug that can protect against radiation (seen via Meryl Yourish). If this protects against radiation damage in general, we won't need Yucca Mountain. Just stuff the nuclear waste in plastic bags and send it to the landfill.

And furthermore …

If fallout is no longer a problem then … ORION SHALL RISE!

Another Member of the Fraternity of Picked-on Nerds

Mark Chu-Carroll had an even worse time in high school than I did.

Actually, I didn't object to being ostracized that much … except that this was still in the “well-adjusted” era (we have ways to make you social).

On the other hand, some people in the same fraternity have decided to take the side of the bullies.

Scene from a Non-Blockbuster Movie

A shark recently washed up on Long Island. It was not a very dangerous shark because:

"He's a plankton feeder. You can see inside there's no teeth inside his mouth," said marine biologist Tracy Marcus. "He's a relatively harmless kind of shark, but large."

If they made a movie about this, it would be called “Gums.”

It's Sort of Funny Funny Funny to Think without a Brain

The discovery of intelligent behavior in slime molds (which don't have brains) reminded me of the beginning of Angerhelm by Cordwainer Smith.

Don't Panic!

You can pig out after all.

A Snarky Comment about IQ Research

One reason I have trouble taking IQ research seriously is that some of the researchers remind me of the Dilbert character who majored in “smartology.”

Are Bailouts Right-Wing or Left-Wing?

If bailouts are a left-wing phenomenon (they're government interference with the economy), then the recent Presidential election was a matter of a liberal Democrat replacing a moderate Republican. On the other hand, if bailouts are a right-wing phenomenon (they're aiming piles of money at the rich), then the recent Presidential election was a matter of a moderate Democrat replacing a conservative Republican.

The left-wing belief that Obama is a centrist but Bush was on the far right is not a matter of insanity but a logical consequence of the way they classify government actions, by goal instead of amount.

On the gripping hand, we must also consider avoiding bailouts in terms of practical politics. Is voting Republican or voting Democrat the way to avoid bailouts? I regret to say the answer appears to be “no.”

Explaining the Reaction to the Honduras Situation

The left is reading from scripts again. When reading from the “regime change” script, the military are always the Bad Guys, even when the coup was court ordered.

The really annoying part of this is that Roberto Micheletti (the acting President of Honduras) doesn't dare travel outside Honduras now lest some government claiming “universal competence” order him arrested.

My Constitutional Rights Are Being Violated!

My local supermarket has stopped carrying Uncle Ben's Instant Brown Rice! According to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a refusal to sell a lawful product is a violation of customer's rights! THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!

By the way, why does the State license pharmacists at all?

If Oil Prices Are Due to Greed

If oil prices are due to “oil speculators looking for a quick buck at the expense of American consumers” as Senator Byron Dorgan (D-olt) has claimed, does that mean they were really generous last fall and winter? Or could the drop in oil prices have had something to do with a pro-drilling campaign slogan last summer and the recent rise to an anti-fossil-fuel administration?

By the way, if you look at the graph of noncommercial long positions and crude-oil futures accompanying the cited article, you might notice that the speculators were selling while oil prices were near the peak. In other words, they were helping to bring those prices down just when that help was needed. (Another conclusion from the same phenomenon is that oil speculators knew what they were doing … in contrast the mortgage securities people.)

One of These Things Doesn't Belong Here

Number 11 on this list doesn't belong there.

By the way, number 10 is an explanation for this post.

Did They Ever Have Control?

In a recent Talking Points Memo, there was the title:

GOP Pols Losing Control Of Tea Party Movement?

In other words, leftists were so convinced that somebody was pulling the strings of the tea-party protesters that when they realize there is no control, they think that's a change.

The Onion and Reality

The “Very Special Forces” (as described by The Onion) really were deployed in Vietnam (seen via The Brothers Judd).

Do-It-Yourself Fireworks, Pro and Con

On the one hand, the state has no business protecting people from themselves.

On the other hand, there is the suspicion that a box of fireworks was once ordered by the boy in the Hathaway shirt.

Explaining Sarah Palin's Resignation

It's David Letterman's fault.

Pro-Life Vegetarians

There are vegetarians who have the same scruples with respect to the born and the unborn.

At least, I assume that's a reasonable conclusion from their horror at eating eggs.

Sea Bacon

A few months ago, PETA came up with a bizarre campaign to rename fish “sea kittens” on the grounds nobody would ever want to harm a sea kitten. This, in turn, provoked a campaign to rename fish “sea bacon” on the ground everybody would like to eat sea bacon.

Well… Speaking as someone who doesn't eat bacon, I figured that bacon is a smoked and salted fatty meat, so sea bacon should be a smoked and salted fatty fish. I've found that fried lox tastes pretty good (much better than most kosher bacon substitutes, which taste like smoked and salted fatty cardboard).

Now Jews and Muslims can join in the bacon enthusiasms in parts of the blogosphere.

A Reason to be Suspicious of Government Programs

According to davidgmills, a commenter on Robert Reich's blog entry on the “public option”:

I bet most of these critics had the option of a public education and most of them took it. Chances are, most would not be where they are without having had some public education.

It's all about choice and the option of a government program if you want it. If you don't got private if you qualify and can afford it.

But these critics don't want us to have a public option even though most were the beneficiaries of a public option in education.

Very hypocritcal.

If the existence of a government program is regarded as an automatic reason for more government, then any pro-government argument is likely to produce more government than the merits of the argument itself. In other words, as long as the reasoning of davidgmills is taken seriously, in debates on government programs, we must have a “thumb on the scale” against any government program.

Alternatively, we could use his theory as an reason to limit public education.

You might claim that being a graduate of public schools makes me a hypocrite. I have strong opinions on hypocrisy; I'm for it.