The Spirit of the Age

David Foster Wallace’s E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction is a long, detailed, complex essay from 1993, but still current in its fundamental arguments. Here I summarize it with some commentary. I remember being irritated with the pervasive culture of irony in America since College in the mid-nineties. This essay discusses the origins of this cultural pathology. It derives from the ironic, rebellious postmodern movement of the early sixties provoked into existence by the rampant hypocrisy in American popular culture—corporatism, bureaucratization, racism, domestic spying, and phony television shows too. This postmodernist countermove may even have impacted some of these issues, though the trendlines were already in place from other sources of power. But, postmodern sensibilities definitely impacted television. In fact, it largely dominated televisual culture by the eighties.

Now that postmodernism’s irony has infected popular culture and attained ubiquity, however, its purely negative nature becomes a problem. It is useful for “ground-clearing,” not for any positive or constructive mode. Any long exposure, such as we have been subjected to for decades and “one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow…oppressed.” All values are laid waste, except irony. But is irony even a value? It is a tool (of destruction), not a value, and its long tyrannical reign has made a wasteland. “And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unstaisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All irony is a variation on a sort of existential poker face.” If asked what he means, “most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: ‘How very banal to ask what I mean.’…And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony…: the ability to inderdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.”

“What do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-cultural institution? For this of course is the second clue to why avant-garde irony and rebellion have become dilute and malign. They have been absorbed, emptied, and redeployed by the very televisual establishment they had originally set themselves athwart.” This is television giving people what it thinks they want. “But, the harvest has been dark: the forms of our best rebellious art have become mere gestures, shticks, not only sterile but perversely enslaving…It’s almost a history lesson: I’m starting to see just why turn-of-the-century America’s biggest fear was of anarchists and anarchy. For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness becomes the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It’d be like casting ballots for Stalin: how do you vote for no more voting?”

Though the essay discusses some intimations of the coming Internet Age, it’s neither quite accurate nor very detailed in analyzing this eventuality. The internet represents a massive interposition upon the long rule of televisual culture—though it is far from sufficient to end this reign. Thus far, the internet’s impact in this direction has manifested in the transformation of certain details of this culture, rather than undermining its commitment to its now traditional ironic stance. For example, TV shows are far more convenient by virtue of DVRs, Netflix, iTunes; ephemeral entertainments like those YouTube specializes in have grabbed market share; technical quality has improved, accelerating the talent and money shift from cinema to television. Notice that these changes have made the televisual-type of experience--image intensive fantasies--more appealing on multiple levels. The ability to tailor entertainments to individual tastes and the endless quantities available increase the sense of dependency on this televisual culture. Given that the ironic tone seems potent enough to hold fast through the upheaval, what we have is more entropy. “Jacking the number of choices and options up with better tech will remedy exactly nothing, so long as no sources of insight on comparative worth, no guides to why and how to choose among experiences, fantasies, beliefs, and predilections, are permitted serious consideration in U.S. culture.” Wallace wants cultural values, since without values there is no culture. But where do cultural values originate if not in moral and religious values and beliefs? An atheistic or agnostic society therefore can only have a dead or dying culture. And by a dying culture I mean the memory of a culture, of a time when culture was still possible.

This is the Way the World Ends

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/magazine/how-ready-are-we-for-bioterrorism.html?pagewanted=1&ref=magazine&adxnnlx=1320145648-K5idnXUdyKqBqlIIQsGvhw

The Bio-Defense establishment’s official position seems to be that a smallpox outbreak would be the worst case scenario bioattack. The article mentions a simulation of such an attack done a few years ago, which concluded that a million Americans would die. Calling this the “worst case” might be right if the simulation were modified to “a genetically engineered smallpox outbreak”—the toll would be higher. No one knows by how much!

Diseases can be “improved” for virulence or communicability or survivability or vaccine resistance or treatment resistance—or, theoretically, any other imaginable traits—by means of genetic manipulations. This has been possible since the 70s. And, today, it’s not even difficult to modify diseases. It is difficult, however, to achieve genetic modifications that will produce desired results. That is, transposing genes within an organism’s DNA, as a mechanical operation, is cheap and easy. Finding out which modifications will “improve” the beast remains difficult and expensive because so many non-linear variables come into play, and precise calculation of their interactions is impossible—the Soviets had to do extensive animal testing to determine what effects various modifications would have when exposed to animal immune systems and the natural environment. So, the worst case might involve a more virulent, more communicable disease not susceptible to conventional treatment, a disease that might kill far more than a million Americans. Even back in the 60s, per the article, before genetic engineering was possible, America had achieved weaponized tularemia (presumably by means of rapid, selective, experimentally-guided evolution) to the point that 50 pounds of it, properly disseminated, would wipe out 60% of a megacity.  

Protection against crude attacks with unmodified agents may well provide a high probability of effective defense for a couple more decades (though something more than a black swan risk is present already). The Muslim world is unlikely to muster anything but amateur-hour efforts within this time frame. Attacks from other quarters are improbable. But, back to the lingering black swans. The thing is, there are multiple black swan risks out there. A sample of contingencies: an accidental release of a bio-agent from a government lab (dozens of governments work on dangerous pathogens, offensively or defensively, and America alone has dozens of such labs), a pathogen developed in an “entrepreneur’s” garage and released, a deliberate release into the environment that escapes intended limits (eg, a controlled test of pathogen characteristics), a government employee deliberately steals, then sells or releases a bio-agent.   

The article discusses the dilemma of whether to focus resources on vaccine defenses or therapeutic defenses. Yet it fails to mention one of the prime determinants of the relative efficacy of these two approaches: the impact of the threat of genetically modified disease agents. Do vaccines against the variola major strain of small pox, for example, have a high probability of success against a genetically modified variant of the disease? And how difficult, in the context of a bio-arms race, would it be to develop small pox variants that would resist a known, stockpiled vaccine? I suspect the answers to these questions, if they’ve been considered and if they’re knowable, are classified.

The article concludes with a hint at the clash between political decision-making processes and cost-benefit processes. What translates into political capital tends to starve ugly, obscure issues until the piper comes round at last. “How to balance the unlikely but catastrophic potential of bioterror with the steady advance of natural disease is one of the most puzzling challenges for biodefense policy going forward.” This is an unavoidable question, except I would say the “steady retreat of natural disease.” The only significant inroads natural disease has made in the last 100 years are those related to poor nutrition—consequent upon mere stupidity (including the stupidity or conspiracy of doctors) and torpor. Natheless, sichlike common health issues, never out of sight and never out of mind, exert great gravitational pull on the common politician.  

Another part of the problem seems to be a matter of bureaucratic influence on policy decisions—like this Fauci genius spending 70% of biodefense funding on common diseases afflicting public health. Fauci is a public health bureaucrat, not a defense bureaucrat—so he spends what he can on public health. Bureaucrats generally fit the mold of defective wind-up toys—little action, no thought. Also, moving up a notch to the political sphere, it’s lovely to discover that Obama has ended centralized direction of biodefense. What we have is a few part-timers in the White House overseeing the program and trying to coordinate multiple mutually antagonistic bureaucracies. Well, I suppose it’s over-optimistic to expect Obama to take an interest in something other than handouts and labor unions.   

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

--Gerontion

The Muslim Revolts

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/sunday-review/the-arab-intellectuals-who-didnt-roar.html?pagewanted=1
The lack of ideology or even any plans strikes—but most revolutionaries past espoused notoriously unrealistic dogmas, and found a quick descent into self-protective pragmatics—that is, their “dogma” became “hold power at all costs.” More or less the same type of elites will retain power. They may approach management of the masses a bit differently.  

Confirmation of Global Warming

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204422404576594872796327348.html

The assessment done by this team looks thorough and convincing. They limited themselves to determining the degree and the certainty of warming over land. Given the complexities of the historical data, a careful methodology is necessary and was here applied. The results confirm the warming trend found by prior analyses. They did not look into the causes.

As I've said since at least 2005, we ought to get cracking on this. At a minimum, there is a significant probability that warming has primarily anthropogenic causes. The results of warming are potentially catastrophic. Therefore, as insurance against the possibility of catastrophe, we ought to make an effort to reduce likely causes of warming.

To do this requires, optimally, several steps for America:

First, persuade the public of the reality of climate risks and their probable causes.

Second, impose a tax regime on greenhouse gas emissions that provides for slowly increasing taxes over 20+ years--roughly to the point that the price of coal-based energy doubles and gasoline price rises $2-3/gal over market levels.

Third, greatly increase spending on basic scientific research that may be relevant to producing less polluting energy--$50+ billion a year. Probably the foci ought to be on nuclear power, solar power, electrification of transport, batteries for transport and the electric grid, building efficiency, offshore wind power, underground emissions sequestration, and perhaps methods of pulling CO2 from the atmosphere.

Fourth, take further measures to encourage the private development and deployment of clean energy systems, to include ensuring strategic clean energy industries remain onshore (without which presence innovation will diminish and public support decline).

Fifth, optimize and impose new regulations for houses and buildings to improve their energy efficiency--and incentivize retrofits of existing structures.

Sixth, pay nations to sustain their forests.

Seventh, come to an agreement with other climate change mitigating nations to phase in tariffs on imports from nations that do not attempt to control their emissions (exemptions possible for desperate nations).

Of these efforts, I consider the first, third and fourth the most important. They are the steps that can be leveraged to generate global impact--a sine qua non for success in climate change mitigation. Also, America has a comparative advantage over other nations in these areas--we are best in the world at basic science and, especially, innovation. The cheap solar, cheap-safe nuclear, cheap batteries that we invent and commercialize would benefit the rest of the world--whether we sell to them or they steal from us.

So far, through the eras of Clinton, Bush II, Obama--we have done about one tenth of what I recommend on steps 3 and 4. We have attempted no more. The major part of the political class, including the named Commanders, have evinced nought but cowardice before this challenge. This is a national security issue, as the Pentagon recognized formally years ago. Everyone agrees on the existence of at least one governmental obligation: the provision of security against internal and external threats. This is both types of threat, yet the government sits stupidly, watches it grow monstrous and risks letting it become unstoppable.

Islam and the West

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/citizen-islam-zeyno-baran

The link is to a review of a book, Citizen Islam: The Future of Muslim Integration in the West, by Zeyno Baran, on Muslim citizens in Western countries. It's a sharp, concise, excellent review, worth reading. The reviewer wrote a highly regarded book on this subject a couple of years past, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West. Both authors agree that the most essential question the rise of the Muslim population puts before us is what form of Islam these people will ascribe to. I agree with this assessment, though in those countries with relatively modest Muslim populations the issue of the magnitude of future Muslim immigration is almost as important. The politically correct view, of course, in America and Europe, is that mainstream Islam is distinct from "Islamism" (the interpretation that Islamic values and rules ought to prevail in the political sphere).

That the priests or imams should want mastery accords with the natural order of things. Why shouldn't the arbiters of the ultimate things requite their pious followers with the gift of effectual earthly guidance?

“Islamism shares the most fundamental aim of Islam and all religions,” Baran writes, “to bring the world closer to God.” In so saying, she removes us from the cocoon of cant that swaddles most public—and all governmental—discussion of Islam’s role in terrorism.

The motive force behind Islamic terrorism is thus conceived by its practitioners as transcending the civil laws of merely secular governments. And, since its inception, the Quran has seemed to certain numbers of its adherents interpretable in this direction. If confined to a few extremists or to marginal lands, this might be of minor consequence, and it has been little more than a nuisance through most of Islamic history. However, massive Muslim immigration into the West has changed things, and rendered this disease much more contagious, if not also more virulent.

Islamists are, by definition, politicized Muslims. They are better at politics than their apolitical coreligionists. European officials made a mistake in the 1980s and ’90s, when they “granted asylum to many immigrants who presented far more of a threat to democratic rule than the regimes they had fled.” The core of Baran’s book is her description of the tactics by which Islamists co-opted, infiltrated, bamboozled, and overwhelmed Muslim institutions of long standing. Islamists generally preferred subverting existing bodies to setting up their own, Baran writes, because it “required less effort and offered greater recruitment possibilities.” Her account of such subversion will remind readers of the history of Communists in the trade-union movement. As Baran shows, boards of directors staffed with doddering old-country patriarchs do not stand a chance against young, modern, Internet- and media-savvy “professional Muslims.”

One might also analogize Islamists to a special interest group in politics. Though constituting a small number, they care about their monomania more than the great mass of the polity, and often use their focus to achieve goals against the interest of the nation. This looks to be something of a vicious circle. Revolutions, though, tend to burn themselves out as the youthful vanguard becomes less youthful and settles heavily into power. But, by a similar process of energetic youth overcoming apathetic age, the nonpolitical version of Islam is losing power also in many Muslim nations. Turkey is cited as a clear case of this. It has proceeded in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran--and the Arab Spring may yet prove another step in furtherance of this trend.

The threat of Islamism in the near and medium term arises from its manifest terrorist tendencies. Any irrational belief system, including any religion, may become dangerous. "The problem is that religion itself is a conveyor belt to radicalism in this way." The remedy for this, the action Western governments ought to undertake, according to Baran, is this:

  They should “shift their current focus from countering extremist violence to preventing extremism from taking hold in the first place.” The strategy she suggests might indeed be a better one. But there are two reasons it cannot be carried out. One is that Americans are too frightened of being disciplined and punished for breaches of political correctness to discuss honestly any aspect of any policy touching on Islam. Even this term—“political correctness”—does not do justice to the Zhdanovite lockdown that the government enforces when it comes to discussing Islam.

Apparently, even the Ft. Hood massacre of American soldiers by a radicalized Islamist soldier was dismissed by DOD as unrelated to Islamism.

Secondly, Americans don’t know Islam well enough. The distinction between “Islamists who renounce violence” (the people we are empowering now) and the “moderate Muslims who reject Islamism” (the people Baran would like us to empower)—these distinctions might be meaningful for a literary Turk with a good Koranic education. They will be lost on a galoot congressman from the mountain West who has never met a Muslim. And to draw such distinctions in the first place would reveal what a big, intransigent problem traditionalist Islam poses for Western societies. It is a problem that already has a long record of forcing those societies to weigh their commitment to diversity against their commitment to freedom.

We observe all this with a complacency born of the amateurism and incompetence of our domestic Islamic foes. In many Western nations, including America, their numbers are too small still to present a great danger. And the problem may well, by a variety of possible mechanisms, be self-correcting. The two most likely forms of this are the senescence of the revolutionaries or a change in attitude in Western nations should the threat become grave. That said, I see no benefit for the West from continued large scale Muslim immigration. Also, the radicals ought to be deported. We do not need the distraction and the drain on our powers political Islam involves--certes we do not benefit this way. Proliferation of WMDs, China's rise, and socialism-induced internal decay are quite a sufficient platefull of problems.

The Unfreedom of the Oversexed

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/sex-provided

The whole piece is worth reading, for Milosz is brilliant and knows whereof he speaks, but this is the conclusion:

The antiutopians of our century (Zamiatin, Huxley, Orwell) depicted societies under total control where the absence of freedom is called freedom. In such societies the rulers take care to supply the ruled with suitable diversions to prevent mental anxiety. Sexual games best fulfill that function. It is a credit to the intuition of the authors of those books that they depict Eros acting as a subversive force, which is no secret to the authorities: sex is antierotic and not only poses no threat, but effectively prevents the appearance of the passions, which draw persons, not bodies, together and engage them both as flesh and spirit. The hero enters upon a dangerous path when he is awakened by love. Only then is the slavery disguised and accepted by everyone revealed to him as slavery.

Since 1982, when this was written, the sexualization of social and commercial discourse has obviously intensified. A pacified populace invites tyranny.

The Left and Illegal Immigration

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/opinion/alabamas-shame.html
In response to this editorial, typical of the NY Times, I offered a comment which they did not post:
The socialist "humanitarians" who run the NY Times unthinkingly support Illegal Aliens at every opportunity and confidently adopt a holier-than-thou tone. Mexico, however, the source of most Illegals, is a middle-income country. Mexicans are not driven to America by desperation, but by the common human motive of aspiration. The "humanitarian" course of action would be to license truly desperate people from truly poor nations to enter America. I have seen little interest from socialists in this prospect.
But the primary interest of the NY Times in this issue is not "humanitarian", it is political. More Mexicans reliably means more Democratic voters. They are merely a means to an end for socialists, including the socialist hypocrites who run this paper. The fact that business owners, especially big business owners, also conceive illegals as a means to the end of increased profits only makes matters worse. Both parties have effectively (that is, in practice) supported illegal immigration for decades. But, at the core of both parties' "open immigration" policies lie hypocrisy and cynicism. "Humanitarianism" is a red herring.

Socialism in Education

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/10/02/are-top-students-getting-short-shrift

Public education in this country borders on a Stalinist mentality, a top-down penal state that prioritizes uniformity and conformity over achievement. This policy is justified by referring to the need to socialize students in a way that prepares them for a "multicultural" world. But, America has always been multicultural and there is no evidence that those schools which emphasize achievement first of all things--that such schools produce less multiculturally adapted students. It stands to reason that better education would, ipso facto, induce more adaptability to life itself.

Tyrone the janitor, Shaqweesha the cashier, Billy Bob the handyman, Francisco the yard man--these low IQ types will never make the world a better place. They are labor. The best we can hope from them is labor and that they will avoid the welfare rolls and prison. Those with sufficient wit to win a Nobel Prize or to invent a new technology or to found a business or reinvent one--these highly capable types, who necessarily possess high IQs, ought not to be burdened by an academic environment that includes the left side of the IQ distribution. They slow the process of education, distract the teacher, and are much more prone to bad conduct. And does the presence of 10th percentile IQs in the same room as 95th percentile IQs really bolster the confidence and effort level of the weaker students? The gap is large and consistent, and they eventually get the message. This jumbling together of disparate types eliminates equality of opportunity, while failing to produce the socialist dream (and my nightmare) of equality of result.

The capable figures represent the possibility of progress, from which historically all tend to benefit. Indeed, the poor have benefitted, in terms of quality of life, considerably more than the rich from the last century of progress. And their most important disability in America today is the dependency psychology foisted upon them, perhaps unknowingly, by the welfare state. Using our education system to confer upon the underclass a heightened aptitude for discovering new welfare programs to enroll in--this function may be less beneficial to the American people than a focus on identifying and encouraging the high achievers who form the forefront of societal evolution.

Another Education Success--

--for black America: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/education/06atlanta.html I love that even the NY Times could not resist mentioning that the ringleader of this dystopian fiasco is currently on vacation in Hawaii--though, of course, the top to bottom blackness of those involved was blacked out. The Times' philosophy on race is that it is only mentioned to make whites look bad or minorities look good--otherwise it is racist to mention race. Orwell concisely termed this "doublethink"--an effective element of tyranny. And all this devolves, no doubt, from the religion of egalitarianism and the pressure on the shepherds of the lower orders to live up to it. Overmatched by nature and circumstance, they succumb to the temptation of mendacity--but, how clumsily they fashion their deceptions! Thus we have a natural hierarchy also in the art of lying and a correspondent division of labor. The socialists must tighten their discipline hereafter. Such grotesqueries are painful to all and may even undermine the brilliant, almost self-consistent line of lies dreamed up by the priests of political correctness.

One of My Favorite Laws--

Properly demolished in a law review article by a UPenn law professor (and formerly a practicing neurologist with a Harvard MD--which ought to indicate a still more comprehensive knowledge and authority on this subject): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1795443 This is the only law review article I've ever seen that is both substantively consequential in its argument and a demonstration of moral courage. The vast majority manifest neither quality. I'm betting we won't hear tell of this in the NY Times. To them disparate impact rules are a talismanic solution to the overwhelming racism that explains all black and mexican social pathologies. Considering what happened to Larry Summers and Thomas Watson for similar arguments, this lady ought to prepare for a return to neurology.

The Israeli Method, Improved Version

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/11/world/europe/11russia.html

One man, one gun, one target, one corpse. A proper hit the Chechen way. Soldiers everywhere and all too frequently have gotten away with too much. It's good to see one of the flagrant psychopaths among them grounded permanently and ostentatiously. It's always open season on war criminals and not only on criminals.

Honey for Honey?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W_iMve4xvg&feature=player_embedded I like the comment from "neotizok." How indeed!

The Last Farmer

http://www.mindfully.org/Farm/2003/Everything-Is-Illegal1esp03.htm Here we have a real citizen-farmer, not an industrial food producer, but a man who owns his own land and generates a sufficient variety of food to live on it exclusively. A traditional farm, in other words. Men like this and farms like these were part of the foundation of this country. Between the various bureaucracies weaving their webs through his life and livelihood and the ingrate public succumbing to the marketing magic of big agribusiness--what happens when this species of American is finally extinct? We are losing both our right and our capacity to sustain any semblance of life free of government support and oversight and intervention. It is a one-way street: citizens are managed and held to account, bureaucracies are the managers and effectively unaccountable. How does this not represent a soft, slow slide into tyranny?

A Delivery for Allah

Obama did the right thing in this case, which also happened to be the common sensical thing to do. Pakistan was exposed, for once, to the contemptuous treatment it highly merits, and bin Laden was granted a quick, sordid conclusion (capture would have been ideal). Should the President be accorded genuflections as a great Hero, as much of the Left insists? I think not. The SEALS who did the raid and provided backup, and their chopper pilots, were the heroes. Obama merely did his job--a new sensation for him.

 

I cannot say this changes my opinion on Afghanistan--the sacrifices being made without any sense of how to win are indefensible--Bush/Obama repeating just the same fundamental, disgustingly irresponsible and cowardly mistake of Johnson/Nixon. The presence of bin Laden in Pakistan, the ongoing base for our foe in the Afghan war, merely provides redundant emphasis on the futility of this fight. The endless government lies about Af/Pak: political correctness in action getting our soldiers killed overseas.

Criminalizing Protection from Criminals

What would we do without the EEOC? To be fair, I think employers are stupid to issue blanket prohibitions on hiring ex-cons--but, I think this decision should be at their discretion. Employers who act stupidly tend not to do well in business.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/29/us/29records.html

I especially liked this bit:

There is no federal law that prohibits discrimination against people with criminal records. But the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has set guidelines on how employers can use such records. Because African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities have higher rates of criminal convictions, a blanket policy that screens out anyone with a criminal history will discriminate against these groups, the commission says, and is unlawful under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The E.E.O.C. has been a plaintiff in several lawsuits over background checks, and the guidelines have led to a raft of lawsuits against companies under Title VII — at least seven are working their way through the courts.

The Parasite Parade

185 federal welfare programs, plus an uncountable number of state programs--I think, seriously, we should offer welfare prizes, cash rewards for the person who benefits from the greatest number of programs and another reward for the person who receives the greatest yearly dollar value. It would be a hell of a publicity stunt and piss off a lot of working people (not to mention less successful and therefore envious parasites).   http://blogs.forbes.com/peterferrara/2011/04/22/americas-ever-expanding-welfare-empire/

Human Generosity

At least we haven't cut down the deserts or the tundra--

http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2011/03/global_land_use.html

White Americans have No Recognized Nationality

Another instance of one of my favorite laws in action. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/04/disparate-impact-discrimination-against.html Where does this stuff come from?   Moldbug's theory: 1. Academia tells the civil service and the media what to think 2. The bureaucrats (that is, the professional political class) and the journalists use these ideas to formulate an ideology to "guide" the politicians. 3. The politicians pass laws in accordance with "their" ideology, that is, the ideology they are spoon fed by the media and the civil servants (making occasional exceptions for special interests and polling purposes). 4. The bureaucrats transform these laws into regulations that can be acted on.   Now, who constitute the elite of academia and the civil service and the media?

Death by Office Chair, Death by Shift Work

http://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Abstract/2009/05000/Sitting_Time_and_Mortality_from_All_Causes,.5.aspx I'm surprised they found such a strong correlation here. It looks to be a quality study. Even the physically active have a 40% kick-up in mortality between the never-sitters and the almost always sitters. For the obese it's much worse: the mortality rate jumps fourfold. Most of the increase in risk for all sub-categories occurs between those sitting half the day and those sitting all day. So, if you keep to your feet half the day, you avoid almost all of the risk from sitting. This may be part of the reason: "Marc Hamilton, Ph.D., one of Katzmarkzyk’s colleagues, suspects it has to do with an enzyme called lipoprotein lipase (LPL), which breaks down fat in the bloodstream and turns it into energy. Hamilton found that standing rats have ten times more of the stuff coursing through their bodies than laying rats. It doesn’t matter how fit the rats are; when they leave their feet, their LPL levels plummet. Hamilton believes the same happens in humans." It may be that inadequate LPL causes blood fats to accumulate in the bloodstream, which may cause an inflammatory or clotting effect. There was also another study on this issue, comparing street car or trolley drivers who stood on the job and bus drivers who sat. All I remember is that it appeared to be a well-controlled study, the standers lived 5 years longer than the sitters, and most of the sitters' excess mortality was from cardiovascular disease. One more touchstone worthy of mention is a study, at least reasonably well-controlled, that indicated a 5 year survival advantage for those who consistently slept well and at night compared to those who slept poorly most of the time.

Specialness

special beast, special talents, very special narrative http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg

The Chinese are not Stupid, Americans are: part 3852

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/110403_anarcho.htm A parlor game: what new policy will the socialists introduce to further undermine this country, or rather to accelerate a process already well underway? In the grand scheme of history, Americans at large have not exprerienced a wake-up call since WWII. The requirements to achieve this are that it should be a major and dramatic threat--also, that its basic meaning should be comprehensible to the citizenry (the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, mustered ramifications beyond the common scope of mind). Maybe national bankruptcy will suffice--though higher taxes seem more likely to happen in the foreseeable future. The collapse of Pakistan is another possibility, or war with Iran. Short of the negative shock of proper scale, this nation will persist in squandering its patrimony and thus decline ever further into decadent self-indulgence.

The Burden We Bear

I read today that less than 1 of a 1,000 federal employees were denied raises due to poor job performance. The problem is that they judge themselves and, further, that they judge themselves by the standard of, uh, themselves. Yeah, that's right, they have to measure up to themselves. Kafkaesque, eh-no?

 

Bureaucracy is eternal and unchangeable in its ways. Public unions merely accentuate the negative. Since improved bureaucratic performance violates the laws of human nature and human social organization--the only way to ameliorate the pathology is to reduce the quantity of bureaucrats. Reduced quantity means less harm from low quality.

The Left's Dance with Eugenics

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-eugenics-is-bad-and-anti-eugenics.html A good historical analysis of eugenics, with some note of its relation to religion. I'm not quite so transcendentalist as the author and there are a few points to which I take exception, but there are some fine sequences of thought here and a happy grasp of the Orwellian inversions and perversions perpetrated under cover of political correctness. My exceptions: I doubt that all pre-modern societies were as eugenic as he supposed. In most places, the great majority were rural farmers with similar reproductive success regardless of the finer differences in fitness. Also, cities were places where the elites gathered, but also places with the highest mortality rates by a substantial margin. Still, the overall trend was probably slightly eugenic. I read a paper on this subject that looked at pre-modern England and found good evidence for eugenic effects. I also disagree that PC opposition to eugenics stems from the PC elite's fear of being themselves, as high IQ people, forced by government to have more children. I think, instead, that their opposition is another case of reality-denial: they refuse to believe in human biodiversity, they are committed unequivocally to belief in human equality. And the commitment is unequivocal because it is a moral commitment, utterly divorced from any scientific facts. Charlton gives them too much credit for rationality. They are ideologues, for whom inconvenient facts are matters to be ignored or lied about.

Par for the Course

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/nyregion/13homes.html?_r=1&hp I wish I could say this report surprised me. But, when you put a unionized bureaucracy in charge of disabled people, most of whom have been abandoned by their families, this is exactly what I would expect to find: incompetent, unaccountable bureaucrats plus brutal, moronic employees and abused residents. And it's nice to see that the state government sat on its hands for decades to cater to the union. At least the NY Times gives the guilty organizations a fair public thwacking--credit's due--though they will never connect the dots and reveal to their readers that such a bureaucratized/unionized structure always gives rise to bad outcomes of one sort or another. Bad outcomes are what happen in the absence of transparency and accountability.

The Most Powerful Special Interest Group

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/260830/upending-our-caste-system-kevin-d-williamson?page=1

Overall, a solid article with a very important, widely misunderstood point: it is the corrupting political power of unions that is their most dangerous characteristic. Collective bargaining is, comparatively, a minor and subordinate issue--which, I suspect, only really becomes a major issue as a result of the political influence public sector unions exert.

However, I think he may misinterpret cause and effect in some areas: 

 “As the union share increases, a state tends to have a higher government debt load. . . . The correlation is likely caused by the fact that unionized government workers are powerful lobby groups that push for higher government-worker compensation and higher government spending in general.”

It may instead be that left wing states, whose electorates want high spending, end up with more unionized workers and government spending.

Excellent summary:

The problem is not the public-sector unions, but the public sector, full stop. So long as we are a democratic society, a large public sector will have the power to impose its will on the political establishment, even if the unions are dissolved or their organized political activity is repressed. One of the great strengths of the United States is that many of our most important decisions are made at the state and local level, but government at that level is especially vulnerable to capture by rent-seeking public-sector unions. The public sector has relatively less clout at the national level (though it has a great deal) because its influence is diluted in a sea of other influences. But when it comes to state government or local bond issues — two titanic problems in our public finances — the public sector and its unions dominate, and will continue to dominate unless we either severely reduce its members’ numbers or enact very strong formal barriers to their voting themselves money out of the nation’s treasuries.

I do not know what kind of "formal barriers" would be effective. The governments need to be squeezed and forced to outsource more work to private contractors--phase out of the public education system, facilitated by school vouchers, would be the single most effective step in this direction. Also, the unionization of the public sector certainly makes it more dangerous because of the power generated and strategically focused by the unions. A public sector comprising 30% of the economy may conceivably be less dangerous than one comprising 20% of the economy, if the former is non-union and the latter is unionized. I think both the absolute size and the degree of unionization play a major role in the capture of government policy by the "civil servant" class. The distinction he makes between the effects of unions on state and local governments versus that on the federal government strikes home.

Spot the Bias

Let us compare these two sources to discover flagrant mendacity by omission: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1364163/18-men-boys-charged-gang-rape-11-year-old-girl-mobile-home-Cleveland-Texas.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/us/09assault.html?hpw

Of course, in Africa, this sort of thing is so common that it's not newsworthy. But, in a sense, blacks are always in Africa. The NY Times, being the principal national organ for defining political correctness, cannot bear to report the facts of this horrific case. The doctrine of PC inculcates black victimology and rejects black criminality as an illusion created by an unjust, racist society. Beholden to this item in their catechism, mention of the black facts is verboten--particularly that it was a large group of black, and only black, men and boys who repeatedly raped this 11 year old Mexican girl over the course of 10 weeks, keeping her silent with threats of violence. But, the NY Times does go deeply into the problems of the families of the rapists, and tacitly agrees with them that their rapist family members were engaged in consensual intercourse with a "slutty" girl who deliberately tempted them. Is there an award for worst journalism? Like the Razzies for acting? These reporters ought to be, not only fired, but run out of the profession. I have never paid a dime for the privilege of reading the NY Times. I never will.

Slaying Another Sacred Cow

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/the-minds-of-the-south/ This was a dose of history and reasoning that caused considerable upset among the mental defectives at the NY Times website. It is well to keep two things in mind: first, slavery was Constitiutional and, second, the secession of the South was no more a crime than the secession of the Thirteen Colonies from Britain 85 years earlier. But, in the later war the tyrants triumphed, a major defeat that accelerated the long slow decline of liberty in America. The states had been conceived by the Framers as a major balancing power against the central government. The War of Northern Aggression ended that system of balance and made way for the tyrannical control the feds exercise today. Had war been averted, the slave system would probably have lasted another 20-30 years. Had the South prevailed, slavery would not have held out much longer. The entire world was moving away from that institution--there's no reason to believe America would have evaded the trend. Instead of these counterfactuals, though, half a million men died, at least half a million civilians died in the war and its immediate aftermath, the South's economy was damaged for generations, and the freed slaves were little, if any, better off economically than they had been under the old dispensation. Oh, and a terrible precedent was set for authoritarian, arbitrary central government in America. To me, Lincoln was a talented man, but no hero.

Checking in on Our Brilliant Anti-Terror Strategy

A new book is out on Afghanistan, The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan by Alan West, reviewed by Dexter Filkins, the excellent war correspondent for the NY Times. West is a combat veteran and former officer who's observed the war from the ground. Here's the review's the key section:

His basic argument can be summed up like this: American soldiers and Marines are very good at counterinsurgency, and they are breaking their hearts, and losing their lives, doing it so hard. But the central premise of counterinsurgency doctrine holds that if the Americans sacrifice on behalf of the Afghan government, then the Afghan people will risk their lives for that same government in return. They will fight the Taliban, finger the informants hiding among them and transform themselves into authentic leaders who spurn death and temptation.
This isn’t happening. What we have created instead, West shows, is a vast culture of dependency: Americans are fighting and dying, while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them. Afghanistan’s leaders, from the presidential palace in Kabul to the river valleys in the Pashtun heartland, are enriching themselves, often criminally, on America’s largesse. The Taliban, whatever else they do, fight hard and for very little reward...Most important, the Afghan people, though almost certainly opposed to a Taliban redux, are equally wary of both the Americans and their Afghan “leaders.”...The Afghans are waiting to see who prevails, but prevailing is impossible without their help.

Our soldiers should not be asked to sacrifice their lives in this war year after year.

And there are far more productive things we can do with $100 billion a year (at least, in theory) than dump it in Afghanistan. By the way, the charity-induced corruption reminds me forcefully of our welfare state and its ongoing destruction of the character of the lower orders most exposed to it. Afghanistan might just be the dumbest war we've ever fought--impressive considering the other contenders.

F*ckifications Fated Forth

http://climateprogress.org/2010/11/29/royal-society-special-issue-4-degrees-world/ http://climateprogress.org/2010/11/15/year-in-climate-science-climategate/ In the end, this problem is too large for most people to see. They simply do not have the intellectual equipment necessary to understand an issue of such vast magnitude and complexity. This includes most of the media. Result: the science is effectively ignored. We behave as King Lear did in giving his kingdom over to evil women and evil men, renouncing control of his fate, exiling the light of Cordelia, the wisdom of Kent--and enduring through the rest of his days visions of horror as Regan, Goneril, and their train of destroyers ruined what he had built, put out his light and his light, prey for horrid monsters who found that even they were unable to halt the inertia of this wave of destruction and ended crushed under its high-towering crest. We behave like senile old fools whose feeble dodderings hold such consequence of terror as to drive them from fragile dementia into a doom-eager madness desperate to escape their final futile resorts, their last reality.

Prediction Cities

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all# One most significant omission I noted was the failure to mention the traditional role of cities as population sinks. Before 1900 or so all cities had negative internal population growth because the disease burden was high enough to kill most people before adulthood. These days the expense and space restrictions of cities tend to limit fertility rates, leading to the same result. Result: economic growth may be more sustainable than suspected since fertility rates are declining and, eventually, it may be possible to grow without increased per capita use of physical resources. The derivation of mathematical "laws" from animal metabolism and corporations is also interesting. Abstraction is leverage--but, at the cost of estrangement. Only a certain measure of immersion in the concrete details can put the abstractions in practical perspective and render them robust. Reagan appears to have understood this: did you know he read and answered 20 random letters from citizens each week to achieve this type of immersion?

Obama's Misdirections

One way to influence the political discourse is to frame the issues by not mentioning issues that are uncomfortable fits for your ideological commitments. http://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/01/michael-lind-v-sputnik-moment.html I do not agree that our education system is ideal. It ought to be privatized by means of vouchers and the students who are not college-bound ought to be steered into vocational training programs to suit their interests and abilities. This will not solve the black-hispanic low performance issue. That appears to be caused by a nexus of lower IQ and anti-education cultural bias, with a small contribution from poverty. The idea that we lag on innovation is a joke: America and Israel far surpass any competitors in that realm. The problem is the Chinese and others a quite adept at stealing or otherwise acquiring our inventions and robbing us of much of the benefit the patent system is intended to secure. In China IP is a joke. Even the Europeans refuse to pay the innovation premium built into the price Americans pay for new drugs. And American companies give away patents and trade secrets for the privilege of doing business in China. Our government handles these matters most weakly and lets the Chinese hold sway. The great risk of mishandling trade with China arises from our loss of strategic industries to them. There are two types of strategic industries. First, industries presently at the core of the economy or vital to military superiority need to be kept onshore by whatever means--and they're not hard to identify. Second, and of more conjectural identity, those industries with the greatest potential for future growth and innovation must be sparked and succoured. We have attended to the military needs so far as government can apply competence to anything. On present time economic vitality, we've lost a considerable portion of the infotech industry, which is large and growing. Future industries face pressure to move to nations with more strategic emphasis on their development, China in particular. Cleantech continues a rapid exodus that way and holds enormous growth potential. Perhaps the worst part of this is that if we do not have a solar industry or a microchip industry, we will ineluctably lose our capacity to innovate in those areas. Most innovation occurs incrementally, accomplished by those with the most intimate familiarity with the technology and the business paradigm. This kind of loss we cannot afford to take. In select industries, we must implement an industrial policy aimed at sustaining their presence onshore and augmenting their innovation-engendered competitiveness. That this program will slip into corruption and incompetence is foreknown, and worth suffering for the stakes involved. Perhaps it would be best to structure it as an independent, apolitical agency like the Federal Reserve.

Distaff

If you want to really cause an upset with the fems, create an inventor list. This article just shows that men do most of the work, an inventor list (including inventors of new ways of thinking) shows who invented the world. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/business/media/31link.html?hpw This study seems like a good measure of spontaneous interest in knowledge for its own sake. No technical computer background is necessary to contribute. The 7-1 ratio they found does not surprise me--even considering that there are more idle adult women than men. It also jibes with studies showing men are much more prone to having systematizing temperaments, a natural impulse to organize and manage what is non-human in life.

The Dangerous Prevalence of Moral Contagion

Krugman on Europe (the article is a good summary and analysis, leading to a typical socialist course of treatment for the patient):

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/magazine/16Europe-t.html?hpw

 

My comment:

Those nations that do not sustain the fiscal standards of the EU's economic leaders ought to be encouraged to leave. It's a well-established psychological reality (for which I wish I had a ready link and clearly recall reading a striking study on) that low standards are more contagious than high standards. Greece et al. set low standards for integrity, for discipline, for self-reliance, for productivity. They will not Germanize if bailed out endlessly by the Germans--but, the Germans may be sufficiently demoralized by such a parasitic dynamic to turn Greek. The cultural/psychological contagion is what must be contained. Krugmanite socialism would only spread the disease (and encouraging this contemptible proto-"Idiocracy", in the long run, does less to alleviate the human suffering he harps upon). At the very least, high standards are difficult and time-consuming to develop, low standards can spread readily and rapidly. It's a perilous asymmetry, especially in an obsessively egalitarian intellectual milieu, like the Western world. As Nietzsche insisted, in practice equality is possible only by pulling down the higher men and the higher societies.

 

Something Against the Reactionaries

A novelist arguing for the exclusion of Huck Finn from high school reading lists:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/opinion/16moore.html?hp

My published comment:

On this logic, I suppose we should not read The Merchant of Venice or Oliver Twist (to avoid offending sensitive Jewish children) and should also exclude The Scarlet Letter and Madame Bovary (female sensitivity) and exclude Dead Souls (sensitive entrpreneurs and speculators). And why shouldn't we find cause to exclude even that sainted novel, To Kill a Mockingbird? First, it is thoroughly mediocre literature. Second, extremely tedious. Third, with respect to our theme of social offense, Ms. Lee renders up quite a few insulting caricatures which some might identify as directed at them and lacking in accuracy. With a little interpretive creativity offense can be found in any work of literature.

 

If Huckleberry Finn is to be removed from the high school curriculum, it ought not to be done so for the purpose of protecting the students from any view of a world before political correctness. And it ought to be replaced by a work of equal or greater aesthetic and intellectual power--not Mockingbird, not True Diary--try Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Melville, James, Faulkner, Stevens, Frost.

The Final Solution to Climate Change

The American public has no understanding of science. Our politicians cover the whole spectrum of human character from cowardice to cynicism. From this one may conclude that the human species will fail even to approach an optimal response to the threats posed by climate change. Fortunately, I have long believed that the Bio Wars will solve this problem. The witless wonders who have no capacity to conceptualize the climate science issue will mostly be wiped out, along with most of the rest of us. And, as a bonus, we'll never know for sure how great a threat global warming might have been--an unresolved mystery that no doubt provides great relief to those for whom scientific knowledge represents an affront God.

Cheek Turning on Principle

A Congressional military advisory commission just recommended that women be permitted in combat units.

Decadence develops when there is a perceived lack of serious threats.

Hence, the military comes to be seen as a playground for bureaucrats, careerists, politicians, and a free-for-all for all members of the thought police and social(ist) engineers. This is much more of a problem than the gay thing, opposition to which at this point is absurd in addition to being militarily groundless.

Another Way to Play

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html?mod=WSJ_hp_editorsPicks_1 I think this approach comes from a culture that evolved in a country overpopulated and impoverished for millenia. These conditions create an acute form of ingrained social competitiveness. But, just as identical ingredients manifest different flavors in different climes, a social strategy normative in one place may appear a species of madness in another.

The Bad Side of an Ugly Beast

Public sector unions may be the most destructive force in America today (though uncontrolled health costs and entitlements are in the running). And the political dynamic the public sector unions have created virtually ensures the problem will worsen year by year. This is a clear and reasonably comprehensive analysis: http://www.economist.com/node/17849199 The most essential problems are: 1. They possess monopoly power by controlling schools, police, firefighters, air traffic control, etc. They are in a position to blackmail society, which is what they do and one reason why they should be illegal. 2. They largely control the left wing of politics, which means many of those with whom they negotiate for higher wages and benefits are the same people whose election they engineered--they're negotiating practically with themselves. Self-dealing is generally considered an ethical breach even before actual abuse occurs, since such abuse is considered a foregone conclusion. Even most right-wing politicians cannot afford the political price of resisting the unions. This might expain GED-bearing prison guards making $100k a year and incompetent teachers never losing their jobs and police officers in some cities who collect pensions, on average, of over $100k a year after 20 years' service--the abuse goes on and on because no one is positioned to stop it. They're almost the top predator in the American economic ecosystem--and they may yet become the top predator, since they have effectively no natural enemies. Their determination to corrupt the political process (and their power to do so) is the other reason they ought to be illegal. 3. They use their power, naturally enough, to acquire more power--by financing politicians, by forcing the expansion of the unionized workforce, by telling their members whom to vote for. 4. Unions, by controlling the government, can acquire almost unlimited funds, since the government can always raise taxes and apply force to ensure they're paid. 5. People are made better off by increases in productivity. The private sector, because it is competitive, constantly increases productivity. The unionized public sector, having no competition, does not increase productivity except incidentally. Therefore, the larger the public sector is, the less overall productivity there is and the worse off society as a whole is. The bottom line is that public sector unions are powerful, growing more powerful, disadvantageous to everyone not in these unions, and face no real resistance. They're like an invasive species that destroys everything in its path because it has no natural predators. Public sector unions ought to be outlawed. This is a case in which freedom of assembly may justifiably be limited to conserve the probity of government.

The King

This is a hell of a piece of writing: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-artists-of-all-time-19691231/elvis-presley-19691231 Another piece on Elvis, written by Zeppelin's vocalist: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/100-greatest-singers-of-all-time-19691231/elvis-presley-19691231 Both of these lists are interesting to read through.

Cars

Some random thoughts after reading about the Model T:

 

Given the road quality, I think the invention of the car must have turned us into a nation of mechanics. It's interesting on several levels that the Model T was so little changed for 20 years. There wasn't enough competition for Ford to sense the necessity of rapid innovation--most of the innovation that occurred in this period was directed at cost reductions rather than quality improvements. Considering this, I can see how the early communists all over the world might have come to underestimate the power of incentives and innovation. Stalin copied Ford's manufacturing methods with considerable energy and efficiency (without which efforts, Hitler would have won)--but, then the command economies stagnated as modern economies became too complex for their centralized planning to manage.

 

Reading an article about the Tata Nano (a $3,000 car made in India) I noticed that, adjusted for inflation, the Model T also cost about $3,000 in the 1920s, with similar capabilities. You might think that today we could get more for our money--but, even with labor in India being cheaper than our labor was in the 1920s, we have made little progress at the bottom of the market.

Attempting Science

http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-to-achieve-biological-immortality-naturally This guy overstates the case, but I look forward to reading his book to find what sort of evidence he can muster. Also, it hardly surprises me that an evolutionary biologist would notice some of the advantages of a paleo diet and lifestyle.