Progressive Corporatism

via Instapundit:

Arnold Kling on Progressive Corporatism and the Resistance

Just for reference...

It's the same with me.

James Lileks: "Maybe I’m old-school, but 'President fires CEO' looks as wrong as 'Pope fires Missile.' Does not compute."

I know what you mean.

Was there a gun sitting on the table?

The Obama administration pushes GM's CEO out the door. Why couldn't this have been done with a formal bankruptcy procedure, again?

Human Achievement Hour and Wikipedia politics

Liberal Wikipedia editors are at it again. This time, they're repeatedly deleting an article about Human Achievement Hour, the pro-Man counterpoint to the so-called "Earth Hour." This is the kind of thing that keeps me from letting my students cite Wikipedia as a source. Since I looked it up, it's been deleted, while I had the page open.

NewScientist goes for tabloid science. Again.

Then again, maybe the National Academy of Sciences is going tabloid, too. This whole disaster scenario for a coronal mass ejection hitting the earth is just 'way over the top. I'll summarize: the electrical lines could go down and take a while to repair. Apparently, that will cause millions of people to die, and the survivors will turn to cannibalism and living in caves. OK, kidding about the cannibalism part, but they actually do claim "millions" of deaths in the US, only because the power's off.

Have these people never heard of back-up generators? Yes, there'd be a hot market for them, and you'd get a lot of selling out, but this solution already exists. Do no key businesses have backup generators for power? Oh, sure, they admit this, but they think that the fuel will run out in hours and can't be replaced, because the gas stations won't have power to pump it out of the tanks. Uh-huh. And there's no way for them to get it out of the ground? None of them could buy backup generators, for instance?

Sheesh! The tunnel vision of the NAS seems designed to create hype. Yes, we need to be conscious of design flaws in our power lines and work those out, but the "Millions dead!" scenario just isn't going to happen.

The Europeanization of America

Cliff May has an article on Charles Murray's AEI speech on the Europeanization of America, up at NRO. I haven't read it yet, but I read several Corner posts about Murray's speech, and it's gotten me thinking again about something I've had in the back of my head for several years. I've got a copy of I'll Take My Stand, the literary and cultural manifesto of the early 20th century Southern movements known as the Agrarians and Fugitives. It's a great book in general, but there's one essay in particular that's puzzled me for years. Now, without going and looking it up (lazy), I don't remember who wrote it. But the author notes a cultural kinship between Southerners and Europeans, simultaneously contrasting us culturally with the Yankees.

The latter part is obvious and uncontroversial to me. But the former? I've never quite gotten it. Partly, I think, it's that I'm thinking of the mid-late 20th century Western Europe, which had by my time fallen into decay, destroyed any history of individualism, religiosity, or self-reliance, and developed an infantile dependence on the State. All of which are antithetical to Southern culture. So I've had trouble getting into the mind of the author and seeing European life as it might have been in the late 19th century, the immediate background to his experience.

I'll write more on this later, if I think about it. In the meantime, I'm finishing up a research paper and an observing proposal this week.

New gold rush in California

It's estimated that 80% of the gold from the 1849 rush was never found, so with the price 'way up, people are panning for it again. Neat!

Diagramming Obama's sentences

This is the most complex sentence I've seen diagrammed. I'm impressed with the guy who did the diagram! But I've got to wonder if Obama had this on his teleprompter...

Maxine Waters exposes the grand conspiracy of Goldman-Sachs

Got to love the expression on Geithner's face.

Transnational Progressives are heading to the State Dept

"...Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh to be the Legal Advisor to the U.S. State Department."

Koh chastises the US for failing to “obey global norms.”America, Koh tells us, “promotes double standards” by refusing to ratify the International Criminal Court treaty; “claiming a Second Amendment exclusion from a proposed global ban on the illicit transfer of small arms and light weapons”; and “declining to implement the orders of the International Court of Justice with regard to the death penalty.”

Oh, joy.

Umm...

U.S. Seeks Expanded Power to Seize Firms

This is sounding very early-20th-century to me. I know these guys think they're doing what's necessary, but...

Obama's push for regulation of executive pay

From the IHT.

One thing I haven't had explained clearly to me about these limits on executive pay written into the "stimulus" bill: are they permanent? I mean, it's generally described in the news reports that banks that took stimulus money are limited to such-and-such on executive pay. Well, for how long? Until (if?) they pay the money back? (Do they have to pay this back at all?) Or is it forever and ever? In which case, that's a brilliantly evil scheme to regulate anything and everything a politician wants to do: offer somebody money, and if they take it, they have to submit to all of your plans on how to remake society, forever. You could make them stand on their heads and whistle the Star Spangled Banner every Tuesday at 3:00, if you wanted to. If paying it back doesn't get them out from under your thumb, you've just vastly increased the power of the Federal Government forever, for practically nothing.

Forgive me for asking such a dumb question, but where does it say in the Constitution that you can regulate executive pay? Is that an interstate transaction? Does the executive work in a different state from his company? (Even then, I'm not sure that would be "commerce," in the way the authors of the Constitution used the word.) Sigh.

I'm not one hitting the panic button...

...but this column on the Fed's monetizing the debt has me worried. Maybe Glenn Beck has been right, and I'm going to hide out in a fallout shelter with bags of gold coins, waiting for the apocalypse.

Blow-back against a 90% from both sides of the Atlantic

The Financial Times has a bunch of choice quotations to support the story. I hope Congress starts to get the message and kills this bill entirely.

Mona Charen on the AIG bonuses

Amen, Mona. I have a recurring fantasy that one of these guys who's called to testify before Congress and getting berated by a Congressman will stop the gentlemanly self-abasement and tell those Congressmen exactly what he thinks of their self-important grandstanding. I've got a particular script I'd like AIG's Liddy to read out to Barney Frank. It includes phrases like "corrupt little satrap" and "I'll be d***ed if I give you these names." For Frank to demand a list of names that he can publicize is outrageous, especially in light of the death threats against these officials and their children. And for Frank to say that he wouldn't be bound by any confidentiality agreement if Liddy did turn them over, death threats or not!

Schumer is my least-favorite senator, and I reckon Frank is fast becoming my least favorite congressman.

Evidence that Congress is run by would-be Soviet commissars

This is socialist, and I don't see how that can be explained away. Shame on the half of Republicans who voted for it. I actually wish they'd made it a 100% tax, just to have the lines even more clearly drawn.

A question: would a 100% tax violate any part of the Constitution? What about a 101% tax? I'm not saying it does; I'm just curious if there'd be anything legal to stop them. The more I think about it, the more I'm intrigued by the concept of a >100% tax on income...well, "intrigued" in the same sense that a biologist can be intrigued by ebola. Fascinatingly horrible.

The war on terrorism and Change we can Hope for

National Review's Andy McCarthy explains why the Obama administration is so hopeychangey different from the late, reviled Bush administration. Especially w/r/t enemy combatants, or "undocumented freedom fighters," as some on The Corner are calling them now.

Screed! Screed! Screed! ...

Lileks finally lets loose in a long-awaited screed.

Great line from Lileks

In the Bleat today:

...sometimes I suspect many people in the news business are temperamentally predisposed to miserabilism, because the idea of an unjust world run by monied smileys explains why the cheerleader turned them down for a date in high school.

I was just going to quote his word "miserabilism," which I think is fantastic, but the rest of the sentence turned out to be too good to pass up.

Is getting the state out of marriage a good idea?

Nope, says Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse in The Public Discourse. (Link via Maggie Gallagher at The Corner) I've been reading about this idea on some libertarian blogs; they're naturally more amenable to the idea. But Dr. Morse points out how, even on libertarian standards, it would likely make things worse.

From a conservative standpoint, there's the obvious objection that it would overturn what is certainly hundreds (longer?) of years' worth of custom in a very short time. That's a radical change for causes that may themselves change in a few decades.

Jeff Goldstein on language and politics

Jeff Goldstein posts a good essay at Hot Air about the use of language and authorial intent in the context of politics. It's about the Rush Limbaugh "controversy" (I cringe even writing the word--there shouldn't be any controversy at all), but it's widely applicable. Although he doesn't use the phrase, he is arguing against a component of post-modernism. The idea that the author's intent is irrelevant in interpreting a "text" is a hallmark of this movement against logic and reason. It's also self-refuting, of course: where did those post-modernists learn the idea that a text can mean whatever you want it to? Wasn't it written down somewhere, or otherwise communicated to them? He correctly identifies it as a plague of literary criticism today, but it's metastasized and spread into other areas of life, like political discussions.

Read the article--it's very useful.

A little progress on quantum reality

I haven't read this yet but just saw John Derbyshire's discussion in The Corner today. I'm intrigued, especially since I've been getting into the philosophical issues of quantum mechanics (QM) and of general relativity lately.

I did particle physics for a couple of years in grad school, so I've had to work out the mathematics of this subject. The math--and the physical results--are straightforward enough. The debate comes in how we put them into a larger sense of reality. What is our metaphysical context for these? The Copenhagen interpretation--the pretty-much standard philosophy of QM--says that all possible outcomes of a QM experiment exist until the system is measured. That "collapses the wavefunction," forcing a single outcome to become physically real. But the Copenhagen interpretation leaves open the problem of what, exactly, constitutes a "measurement," what is the role, if any, of the observer, and so on. So some serious physicists I know personally have expressed dissatisfaction with it, and they hope that a new philosophical interpretation will come out.

Read the article for yourself. Nature gets weird down at that level. But as my wife just said, "Isn't that why physics is so fun?"

New book by a friend

A friend of mine has had a new book published. She's edited a collection of non-fiction essays on mother-daughter relationships, and it has a good review in the new Publisher's Weekly. Scroll down to Because I Love Her.

Best of luck on the book!

The progress on Loop Quantum Gravity

An article explaining how one theory of quantum gravity is making some progress. I don't understand all the details, but we've had a lecture from Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara of Canada's Perimeter Institute on the subject (in 2003), and she did a nice job explaining it, even to a lay audience.

I had one of my undergrad students try out a research project to look for the effects of quantized spacetime--the speed of light would vary by wavelength. He sorted through gamma ray burst data from the Swift observatory and looked for delays of short wavelengths relative to long ones, as a function of redshift. Of course, he didn't find any (as we expected), but it was a fun proof-of-concept project.

NYT map of unemployment rates

This is really interesting. Especially when I find out that West Virginia, of all places, has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country. Defies the stereotypes, doesn't it? The county we live in is comparable in that way to the wealthy D.C. suburbs, except that unemployment here is not on the rise, the way it is there. Great!

A good line on Chas Freeman

Following up from my previous post:

Politico's James Kirchick makes a good point about Chas Freeman. Freeman brags about having published Walt & Mearsheimer's "The Israel Lobby" in Saudi Arabia. Recall that the book is big into the conspiracy-theory field of Jewish influence on US policy. An attitude that Israel's supporters are probably disloyal to the US, etc.

Freeman has been in an institution funded by the Saudis and fawns over them. Now we find out about this connection to a Chinese government company, and he complains the Chinese weren't tough enough on democracy activists.

In that context:

A man who for a decade presided over a front group for a theocratic kleptocracy and who believes the title of “king” isn’t sufficient for the fat oil baron who rules that benighted land should pause before endorsing a work that questions the loyalty of others.

Good point.

Obama's NIC chairman nominee finally gets checked out...

Commentary's Jennifer Rubin reports that Chas Freeman is getting a serious look by the Inspector General. I wouldn't have known that he'd been suspected of not filing some disclosure forms, but what I did know about him was bad enough. For all the anti-Israel talk, it's sadly just what I expect out of these people, and I was prepared for it. What really shocked me were his comments about the Chinese communist government--that they didn't crack down early enough and hard enough on the democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

What is an apologist for totalitarianism--and someone explicitly against a democracy movement--doing in our government?!

Well, now it turns out he's "tied to" the China National Offshore Oil Corporation--owned by the Chinese government. We already knew he was involved in a Saudi-funded organization. So what does Obama do now?

Oh, come on! (part 2)

West Virginia Democrat wants to outlaw Barbie dolls. Sends the wrong message to young girls and such. Yes, it will get laughed out of our legislature, but why do these people even need to suggest these things? (Via Lileks)

Why did Obama get more Catholic support than Kerry?

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting analysis.

Next vacation, why not rent out a castle?

OK, now this is cool: The Landmark Trust rents out historic homes and castles in Great Britain and Italy (and a few in the US) (Homes, that is. Not castles.)

Just read an article in the WSJ about staying in one of Palladio's villas in Italy through the Landmark Trust. Since I've been reading up on Thomas Jefferson's architecture, that caught my eye. Jefferson was largely inspired by Palladio.

Charles Krauthammer on Obama and diplomacy

Wow. Krathammer doesn't spare Obama the blunt terms:

On President Obama’s secret letter to Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev proposing a deal on missile defense:

This is smart diplomacy? This is a debacle. The Russians dismissed it contemptuously.

Look, if we could get the Iranian nuclear program stopped with Russian's helping us in return for selling out the Poles and the Czechs on missile defense, I'm enough of a cynic and a realist to say we would do it the same way that Kissinger agreed to delegitimize and de-recognize Taiwan in return for a large strategic opening with China.

But Kissinger had it done. He had it wired. What happened here is it was leaked. The Russians have dismissed it. We end up being humiliated. We look weak in front of the Iranians, and we have left the Poles and Czechs out to dry in return for nothing.

The Czechs and the Poles went out on a limb, exposed themselves to Russian pressure, and we have shown that Eastern Europe is not as sovereign as it appears if the Russian influence is there, and we will acquiesce in what they consider their own sphere of influence.

This administration has prided itself, flattered itself on deploying smart diplomacy. "Smart diplomacy" is a meaningless idea, but if it has any meaning at all, it is not ever doing something as humiliating, amateurish, and stupid as this.

Obama's higher-ed plan

The Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson takes a skeptical look. Ferguson discusses the division between seeing higher-education as mere job training (a view that grates on me) and education as creating a well-rounded person (that's closer to mine). I like the liberal arts ideal, and I think education is a good in itself (or nearly so). It creates a citizenry with the broad background that lets them see the relationships between different aspects of life, the universe, and everything. Rather than an existence narrowly focused on our chosen jobs.

Hmm...I don't think I've expressed that too clearly, but my point is that I like people to be well rounded.

Anyway, Ferguson notes that the apparently low college graduation rates are largely a result of immigration, and that it ignores the increasingly common return of older adults to college.

One thing that does stand out is the President's remark that high school or college drop-outs are giving up on their country. That line got some applause in Congress. I don't know that it's clearly questioning the patriotism of the drop-outs, as Ferguson and some of the guys at National Review have suggested. But it does fall into the category of treating a person's education as a national resource. In some sense, it is--it contributes to the health of the country. But there's a related tendency to regard it primarily as the possession of the country.

With that comes the attitude that the government can and should direct your path through higher education for its ends. If you don't go to college, you're seen as harming the country. Perhaps you'll be required to do what's best for the country, rather than what you see as best for yourself. The states already do that with regards to schooling up through the age of 16 (at least that's the legal drop-out age in Tennessee, last time I checked). That's been so long established that we don't really question the underlying principle. I don't have any desire to eliminate that, but I disagree with extending the guiding attitude to college. I doubt they'd be able to pass an education requirement for anyone past the age of majority, anyway.

OK, I'm back...

Sorry for the long silence. Oddly, there was so much going on in politics that I felt like I had little commentary to contribute!

New posts coming today.

Making changes...

...bear with us while we work out the design and layout.

Experimental Beatles' "music"

Paul McCartney wants to release a long-hidden experimental piece the Beatles recorded for an electronic music festival--a piece long thought mythical by fans. According to his description,

"I said all I want you to do is just wander around all the stuff, bang it, shout, play it, it doesn't need to make any sense," McCartney told the program.

"Hit a drum then wander on to the piano, hit a few notes, just wander around. So that's what we did and then put a bit of an echo on it. It's very free."

Not to disparage him personally, but this surprises me. I'm no fan of modern, abstract art, nor of its musical equivalents. But I'm able to understand that in the pieces regarded as "good" by the critics, there is still some planning and intelligence behind the pattern, even if it's deliberately obscure or ugly. So I'm surprised that in the Beatles' case, there wasn't any thought behind it--the sounds were intentionally random.

Well, maybe that's why the other band members vetoed the idea of releasing it earlier. Still, I hope he's able to get it out; I'm sure some of their fans would like to hear it, even if just for the novelty.

If you can read this, you are too close

No kidding! Words made with individual CO molecules, sitting on a copper sheet. Amazing.

Global warming estimates get revised downward

What got me onto that last post was actually this article in the Daily Telegraph. The author credits readers (note: the readers commenting on the blog!) of Anthony Watts' site and Steve McIntyre's with discovering large errors in NASA's global temperature numbers for October 2008. It's amazing the ability of a large number of educated laymen (and I'd imagine a few who work in this field are among the group, too) to spot errors that the official process missed.

It's like Glenn Reynolds puts it, "An army of Davids."

Anyway, the outcome of this week's dust-up is that NASA's Dr. James Hansen, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), was forced to revise the October temperatures downward. In explaining the error, it was admitted that for the Russian temperatures, they came from another organization, and that "GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with" (I'm quoting the Telegraph, not GISS).

Huh. Shouldn't that make us skeptical of some of GISS's claims? At least a little bit?

How systematic errors bias global warming measurements

I'm not sure how to describe my opinions on global warming. I'm open-minded about the idea that there is man-made global warming; I consider it a real possibility because we know we're emitting CO₂, and CO₂ is a greenhouse gas. (That is, it allows visible light from the sun to pass through it, the sun warms the earth, and the warm earth emits infrared light back, but this is partially absorbed by the CO₂.) So this could certainly cause the earth to warm. The question is quantitative: by how much?

But there's something that's been bugging me ever since I first heard of the concept of global warming: how well do we know the global temperature going back so many years? Our most accurate method of measuring temperature is a thermometer, but the weather stations are scattered unevenly across the earth and are mostly in populated regions and developed countries. Furthermore, if we're comparing the temperatures today with those of the 19th century (official temperature records in the US go back to the mid-19th century, I keep hearing), well, how widely were those stations placed in 1860? I'll bet we have a large selection bias as far as location goes.

Furthermore, a station that was out in the wilderness in 1860 is more likely to be near a developed area now, as the population has grown. And we certainly know about the heat island effect of cities--temperatures near the city are a few degrees higher than out in rural areas nearby, because of all of that asphalt and such. This alone should cause an artificial rise in one station's temperature record as nearby towns grow.

But surely atmospheric scientists have accounted for these obvious objections, right? I was surprised to find out that the answer is actually "no" or "poorly." Anthony Watts, a meteorologist, has been running an invaluable project to rate the quality of weather stations, and their possible systematic errors, based on their proximity to artificial heat sources and other biasing effects. He's been finding that a majority of the sites in the US have likely errors of several degrees, which is shocking. There are laughable examples of thermometers being placed right next to (even surrounded by) large, sunny parking lots! These are the kinds of things you'd figure were blatantly-obvious no-nos, but their data have been incorporated into the calculations of global warming. Who knows what the overall effect of these is?

Being an astrophysicist, I'm also interested in the effects of the solar cycle on the earth's climate, but I'll get to that in a later post.

In which tech writers forget there's a Rest Of The World

Remarkably narrow-minded article on "Five Useless Gadgets You Should Throw in the Trash" by a writer for Wired. (Of course, Wired) He thinks that printers, scanners, faxes, DVD or CD drives, and regular telephones (landlines, not cell phones) are "useless." He has a few caveats, but not enough to make up for the poor thinking of the rest of the article. This is the kind of thinking I'd liken to socialist central planning--"Why do you need your car? Take a bus everywhere! Why do you need your own house? Just rent an apartment--and there's no grass to mow!" He actually thinks that a printing "service" can replace your printer. I wonder how long their printouts take to get to you. But then, I'm sure you've never printed anything out that you couldn't simply wait a couple of days for, right?

I'm not going to call the author "stupid," as many have (or maybe they just meant the article--there's a decent case for that), but he's amazingly short-sighted.

The comment by "Sean" is priceless.

The risk from a carbon market

Think the collapse of the mortgage-backed securities market is giving us problems? Just wait 'til President Obama pushes us into a cap & trade scheme on carbon. Lawrence Solomon shows us how that will set up a "market" that will endanger all sides of the economy.

WSJ on Michael Crichton

A very nice retrospective on Dr. Michael Crichton here. (And yes, he was a medical doctor!) I've read a lot of his novels and enjoyed every one. He has a talent for giving his characters thought-provoking discussions into the nature of science. Some of his chapters are nothing more than an extended conversation on a single topic, and these have often stuck with me for years afterwards, getting me to think more about it.

The first novel of his that I read was The Andromeda Strain back in junior high, and it was written in the pseudo-documentary style so well (with even the acknowledgements keeping up the pretense) that I kept turning back to the spine to check that I'd actually taken it from the Fiction section of the library!

The WSJ mentions Al Gore's displeasure regarding State of Fear, which critiques the anthropogenic global warming hysteria. It's a little ironic, considering that I've gotten the impression that he'd consulted Gore heavily for Rising Sun some years earlier. (I think Gore might have been mentioned in the acknowledgements, and there's certainly one of those extended dialogue chapters, with a politician who seemed to me to be favorably based on Gore.) The reaction of the Left to Crichton's discussion of global warming is a strange overreaction. I got an earful from a German astrophysicist at a conference in 2005 when some of us were discussing Jurassic Park. This guy was absolutely outraged by Crichton regarding global warming and was using really strong language and just anathematizing the guy. Yikes! Of course, this was also a person (the German fellow) who gave us a heartwarming anecdote about his parents meeting, all thanks to Mao Tse Tung, and so he has a soft spot for the blood-soaked Communist dictator. So he's got a different set of priorities than I do, let's say.

A load of manure from Reuters

"Media bias largely unseen in US presidential race" To quote Bill Cosby, "Riiiight!"

WSJ predicts GOP gets 30% of the black vote, post-Obama

Now there's a bold prediction! But why not? Blacks are often socially conservative (note their strong support for California's Proposition 8, among other things). James Taranto surprises me with some history: when a minority or marginalized group has one of its own elected to the highest office, it seems to integrate them into the political culture and reduce the sense of ethnic/racial/religious solidarity, politically. Read and decide for yourself.

Arbeit macht frei

Obama's campaign idea of encouraging community service has morphed into requiring it for middle school, high school, and college. (H/T to Derb in The Corner)

UPDATE: They've changed the text on the official website in the past few hours or so. The first time I saw this today, it said it would be required. Now it's part of some kind of deal, apparently in return for money for college, and at the secondary level vaguely worded as a "goal." Well, that part still sounds like a euphemism for a federal requirement.

The sinking of MSM Titanic

Funny Day-by-Day cartoon. Pre-election, but it has a timeless quality, I'm afraid.

Protein Wisdom on Sovereignty

He's said it well, and I could hardly agree more. The issue of treaties under our next administration is one that's got me worried...

Sigh.

Maybe next time.

One more thing I hope

is that the popular vote tallies remain as close as Fox News has them right now: 51 Obama vs. 49 McCain. I want this to have been a much closer election than the opinion polls have been predicting, with the last Real Clear Politics average having Obama up by 7.6%.

I've never bought the idea of a "mandate" for the President. The President gets his mandate by being elected, no matter how slim the margin. What I want tonight is for the results to show that McCain was just about as popular with the country as Obama was, despite the near-universal opinion that the country is some near-solid mass pushing for Obama.

Murtha wins

The offensive jerk from Johnstown, Penna. has apparently won re-election. Maybe now he'll feel free to tell his constituents what he really thinks about them.

Comments from Mark Levin

On The Corner:
"John McCain just gave a classy concession speech. If McCain had won, we were told of possible riots."

Good point.