Vacuum Energy Favorite Posts of 2006

Emulating blogger Ann Althouse's similar listing, these are my favorite posts from 2006 listed on a monthtly basis.

January to May: No posts.

June: Liberal wierdness on Iraq

July: The centrist internet goes nuts over Mel Gibson

August: Campaign finance reform is political gasoline.

September: The repairer of reputations

October: A post-modern pet peeve

November: The chameleon changes his colors.

December: The real reason why the Republicans lost the election

An even worse choice for "Person of the Year"

Salon.com chooses Mr. "I am macaca." as its "Person of the Year". Notice the resonance with Time Magazine's "you, the internet user".

Time magazine wimps out

Time Magazine wimped out with its choice of "Person of the Year": You. The explanation:

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

Why didn't Time Magazine choose the obvious candidate, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for "Person of the Year"? Here is one answer:

And Stengel said if the magazine had decided to go with an individual, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the likely choice. "It just felt to me a little off selecting him," Stengel said.

Ahmadinejad is only masterminding the American retreat from the Middle East, pushing Iran into the nuclear club as fast as he can, establishing himself as the world leader of the Holocaust-denial movement, and threatening Israel with annihilation on a weekly basis. Saudi Arabia is already threatening a regional sectarian and/or atomic war to prevent the coming Ahmadinejad hegemony.

In short, Ahmadinejad is bestriding the world like a titan. But making him "Person of the Year" might call attention to the fact that somebody, somewhere -- and maybe someone from the United States -- might actually have to do something to stop him someday. The mainstream media can't risk that happening!

Thoughts about Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto"

I watched Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" on Friday night. Keeping in mind the caveat about not believing everything one sees in the movies, I think the film makes a pretty good "two hour tour" of the late 14th or early 15th century Mayan civilization.

Yes, that's it. That is the whole movie.

You don't believe me? Well, perhaps there were a few minor points that arose in the film that deserve some extra comments:

• According to Gibson, there is supposed to be some kind of parallel between the Mayans, their downfall at the hands of European invaders, and the Bush Administration and Iraq. You might even believe that if you spent all of your adult life in an ultra-Left wing anthroplogy department. The problem with any such comparison is that modern industrial societies have armies of people called "scientists", "economists", and "political scientists" who get paid to analyze problems and recommend ways of fixing them. Yes, even President Bush has a better grasp of the world and the tools necessary to understand it than his ancient Mayan counterparts.


• I could have sworn that the grotesque, evil dwarf from "The Passion of the Christ" makes a brief appearance in "Apocalypto". Does this make "Apocalypto" objectively pro-conquistador?


• It's interesting that a film can show graphic combat scenes, animal violence, human sacrifices, and big piles of dismembered and rotting bodies but still be fairly scrupulous about keeping the actress's tops on and the sex off-camera -- the R-rating must be protected at all costs.

You know that you're getting old when...

you start defending the purity of the English language from things that some people believe are words. For example, "natch" is not a real word. Even as an abbreviation it seems like it is derived from a misspelling of "naturally" as "natchurally". The word seems to me something cooked up by the drug subculture insofar as the only people I seem to hear saying it are weedy college undergraduates ... and certain trendy and purportedly serious writers.

Another example is Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2006: "truthiness" (please please don't spell it "truthyness"). The definition given by the American Dialect Society is "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true". Of course, back in the good old days when statements were either true or false, this would be called some variant of stupidity, delusion, or sophistry.

First impressions about the Iraq Study Group's report

I haven't read the report yet, but my impressions from the media's reporting about it is that isn't such a piece of bad news for President Bush as you might have been led to believe. The main recommendations of the report seem to be that the United States should reduce its troop committment to Iraq to a rump force that would be devoted to training the Iraqi military forces; that the United States should open negotiations with Iran and Syria and the other regional powers over the future of Iraq; and that a final settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict should be negotiated in these talks as well.

My first impression is that Democrats are heralding this report primarily because it opens diplomatic relations, of a sort, between the United States and Iran. This has been a standing Democratic goal since the Clinton Administration, but it doesn't look quite as wimpy when you have the claim of stabilizing Iraq to use as a cover story.

A more comprehensive judgement is that, in chess parlance, this is what is called "exchanging queens". The report basically suggests trading a United States military force large enough to topple a dictator in exchange for Iran's terror network and it's Palestinian allies. This is a testament to the fact that the Washington political culture realizes that enough United States troops stationed in the Middle East to be a threat to Iran can make a useful bargaining counter. This also gives the ISG report a rather limited shelf-life. Despite Jonah Goldberg's suggestion that keeping troops in Iraq until 2008 is now the "mainstream" view, I woudn't make any bets that Democrats are going to wait until anywheres near 2008 (or even next week) to start pushing for a faster withdrawal than the ISG report recommends.

For the time being the ISG report is basically the United States telling Iran "Let's make a mutual draw-down of forces in the Middle East." Compared to the United States' pre-2003 message to Iraq, namely "Please don't hurt us.", the ISG report thus makes a certain amount of sense. Unfortunately, it's the kind of sense that the exactly analagous report from 1967 or so would have made to the Hubert Humphreys of the world. The report also underscores a silver lining to the Bush Administration's conduct of operations in Iraq: Iran has not been able to produce a Middle Eastern "Tet offensive" against American forces.

Post #300

Only random thoughts are being deployed for this blogging milestone. I'm saving the good stuff for post #1000.

• The Gates Foundation is planning to run through its $60 billion dollars within 50 years of the trustee's deaths. This is presumably to avoid the Gates Foundation becoming a sitting duck for a future "bureaucratic capture" -- wealthy foundations attract the kind of attention from political operators that high-stakes gamblers attract from mafia kingpins. Twentieth century liberals in particular were notorious for targeting the big charitable foundations established with industrial profits such as the Ford Foundation.


• A review of the movie "The Nativity Story" faults it for not making the Virgin Mary more of a contemporary American teenager (author's italics):

  It seems odd that [director] Hardwicke, who coaxed superb performances from both Evan Rachel Wood and Holly Hunter in the emotionally raw coming-of-age story Thirteen, would be content with such a placid, even submissive Mary. As she proved in Whale Rider, [actress] Castle-Hughes has no shortage of spark. If only the movie had tweaked expectations enough to give her Mary a Gethsemane moment, in which she struggled to reconcile the directive of her God with her natural adolescent desire to rebel, to have fun, maybe even to taste the pleasures of the flesh.

  I'm not a Biblical scholar, but I think its safe to say that giving the Virgin Mary the sexual mores of a twenty-first century MTV "fly girl" pretty much directly contradicts the point of the nativity story. Or why can't the Virgin Mary be more like Lindsay Lohan?

The real reason why the Republicans lost the election

The real reason why the Republicans lost Congress in last month's elections is very simple: they ran out of leaders. To illustrate, here is the list of Democratic Senate and House leaders (i.e. Presidents of the Senate, Presidents Pro Tempore, Speakers of the House, Majority/Minority Leaders and Majority/Minority Whips) who left their Party's congressional Leadership during the 12 years of Republican control of the House:

• Al Gore lost the position of President of the Senate in 2001 when his Vice-Presidential term expired. He also left the Executive branch leadership when his 2000 Presidential campaign was defeated.
• Tom Daschle lost the position of Senate Majority/Minority leader when he was defeated for reelection in 2004.
• Wendell Ford lost the position of Senate Majority/Minority Whip when he retired from the Senate in 1999.
• Dick Gephardt resigned as House Minority Leader to run for President in 2002 and didn't run for reelection to the House in 2004.
• David Bonior did not run for reelection in 2002 after he was redistricted out of his House sear.

Contrast this with the Republican list:

• Strom Thurmond was no longer President Pro Tempore Emeritus of the Senate when he resigned from the Senate in 2002.
• Bob Dole lost the position of Senate Majority Leader when he resigned from the Senate to run unsuccessfully for President in 1996.
• Don Nickles decided not to contend for the position of Senate Majority Whip position after the Republicans won back the Senate 2002 and did not run for reelection in 2004
• Bill Frist lost the position of Senate Majority Leader when he decided not to run for reelection in 2006
• Newt Gingrich resigned as Speaker of the House and as Representative in 1998 after a revolt of the House Republicans against him due to the Republican's poor political performance against the President Clinton-led Democrats.
• Bob Livingston resigned as Speaker of the House elect in 1998 and from the House in 1999 after revelations of marital infidelity arose during the Clinton-impeachment debate.
• Dennis Hastert stepped down as Speaker after the Republicans lost the House in 2006.
• Dick Armey stepped down as House Majority Leader when he didn't run for reelection in 2002
• Tom DeLay was forced to step down as House Majority Leader in 2005 after being indicted and did not run for reelection in 2006

It's pretty easy to see what has been going on for the last 12 years. The nearly indestructible Democrats have taken 4 "political casulties" during the last 12 years, with all four coming in the early years of President Bush's first Presidential election and first term. The relatively more volatile Republicans, on the other hand, have taken 5 "political casulties" -- mostly in a running battle to defeat President Clinton starting with the 1996 elections -- with 4 leaders leaving Congress for other pursuits. It's easy to see that Republicans could have been at a competitive disadvantage against the Democrats when the original architects of the 1994 Republican revolution have mostly been replaced by their second and third-rank understudies by 2006.

The one Republican exception to the rule is the past Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who will return to the Senate as Minorty Whip in 2006. The fact that Trent Lott is a political surviver with the skill to make it back into the leadership ranks after getting nailed by the Democrats in 2002 gives me some hope that the Republicans might win back the Senate in 2008.

There are a few lessons to be taken from this list. The first is that the Founding Fathers intentionally made the President an especially powerful Chief Executive for the express purpose of making it very difficult for Congress to impeach or otherwise dominate him*. Newt Gingrich the Impeacher and Tom Daschle the Obstructionist learned that lesson the hard way! The second lesson is that the 1994-era reform of voluntary term limits for Senaters and Representatives will almost certainly weaken any Party that adheres to them by replacing experienced leaders with untested subordinates. The Republicans might still want to keep term limits in mind as a reform, but they should be expecting their future control of Congress to be cut short by another "2006" if they do.

*The Murray Convention for the third person singular pronoun -- that the pronoun corresponding to the author's sex be consistently used -- is adopted here.

Looks like I picked a good year to leave Syracuse.

More than 600 illnesses reported that are related to a famous local restaurant.

Secondary Characters

The topics of secondary characters in fiction arose a couple times today, so here are some thoughts about them. The topic was first brought up by a conversation about secondary characters in fiction that develop admirers of their own.

"Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope" seems to be especially rich in fan favorite secondary characters such as Lieutenant Jek Porkins, Greedo, and a personal hero of mine who happens to be the other survivor of the Death Star, Chief Bast:

When the rebels at Yavin only sent two squadrons of single-pilot starfighters to assault the Death Star, Bast must have immediately suspected that the enemy might indeed have discovered a peculiar vulnerability, as Gernal Tagge had feared. Bast and his staff monitored the battle very closely, so that he was able to identify the critical design fault of the thermal exhaust port immediately after the rebels made their first attack run. Grimly confident of his analysis and fearful of the reaction which it would provoke, Bast carefully attempted to inform Tarkin of the news. Bast asked whether the Grand Moff's ship should be prepared in case an emergency evacuation proved necessary, but Tarkin would hear none of it. Bast retreated.

Within the following minutes, General Bast evidently made what must have been the hardest decision of his life. By Tarkin's direct order, the Grand Moff's ship would not be readied, but neither had Bast been explicitly forbidden from making his own escape. Bast would probably have faced a firing squad for desertion if the danger proved false, but his professional confidence in the analysis was decisive. Bast somehow made a courageous and hasty escape, giving him the distinction of being one of the few Imperials to have survived the Battle of Yavin. Bast was probably the only survivor who understood the precise nature of the design flaw exploited by the rebels.

Of course, promoting bit characters to starring roles is nothing new in fiction. One famous example is Enoch from the Book of Genesis. The attention that different religions have given to this barely described figure illustrates that some of the appeal from secondary characters comes not from who they are, but from the interpretive possibilities that they produce.

James Bond versus the Elders of Zion

I went to go see the new Bond-movie "Casino Royale" over the weekend. I thought it was pretty well done. But then, late last night, I finally realized how the producers managed to slip something really strange and offensive into the movie.

The villain of the movie is an international investment banker named Le Chiffre who engineers terrorist attacks in order to profit from the adverse reactions that are produced in the world's stock markets. About half-way through the movie, we are told by Bond's superior M that Le Chiffre notoriously bet against airline stocks on September 10, 2001. We also find out that Le Chiffre is working for a shadowy international conspiracy that British Intelligence knows nothing about.

Think about it for a second. Le Chiffre is an international investment banker working for a shadowy international conspiracy who shorted airline stocks on 9/10. These are Left-wing code phrases meaning "Le Chiffre is Jewish".

A quick check on Wikipedia about Le Chiffre mentions the following passage from the book "Casino Royale":

Height 5 ft 8 ins. Weight 18 stones. Complexion very pale. Clean shaven. Hair red-brown, 'en brosse'. Eyes very dark brown with whites showing all round iris. Small, rather feminine mouth. False teeth of expensive quality. Ears small, with large lobes, indicating some Jewish blood. Hands small, well-tended, hirsute. Feet small. Racially, subject is probably a mixture of Prussian or Polish strains. Dresses well and meticulously, generally in dark double-breasted suits.

The movie Le Chiffre's "corrupted tear duct" that occasionally weeps a drop of blood seems like an obvious reference to this profile from the book.

Thought's about Steven Spielberg's "Munich"

I watched Steven Spielberg's film "Munich" last night. Thoughts about the movie will accumulate here for the next few hours. Spoilers to the movie will almost certainly follow so be warned.

• A striking thing about the film is the awkward way in which the Munich massacre is incorporated into the film. The events are portrayed on camera in a series of episodes throughout the film but are also accompanied in the opening minutes of the film by a series of shots that establish the massacre as a media event. Some of these shots are of people -- the main characters, representative "men on the street", or the wives of the athletes who were killed -- watching the television coverage of the event on television. Other shots deal heavily with the media presence surrounding the event in a vaguely negative way: the standard media feeding frenzy that carelessly telegraphs important information to the enemy is well depicted.
  
  The impression that this gives me is of a director invoking what we today might call the "Cindy Sheehan effect". That is, the director underscores how you, the typical viewer of the film, have no right to criticize the actions of those principally suffering from the events of the film due to their absolutely superior moral authority. Which is to say that these scenes, and whatever critique of the broadcast news media we might construe from them, are basically a waste of screentime.


• Another aspect of this depiction of the Munich massacre is that episodes from the enactment of the massacre are sometimes intercut with actions by the Israeli agent Avner who is trying to track down and assassinate those who planned the massacre. For example, near the end of the film, the film interlaces scenes of Avner having sex with his wife with scenes from the climax of the massacre. The effect seems to imply that Avner is principally traumatized by the massacre itself than his actions taken in response to it. Given all of the time, effort, expense, emotion, and casulties that Avner had invested in his hunt for the terror-planners, this juxtaposition makes practically no sense!
  
  The best explanation I have for this is that it implies that Avner realizes that the Munich massacre has not been fully avenged and that it is his principal duty to avenge it, but that he knows that he is running away from carrying out that duty.


• Perhaps the best line of dialogue in the film is given to Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, who says "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values." Remember that this is in the context of her ordering an assassination squad be formed to kill the 11 principle planners of the massacre. What makes that such a great line is that it leaves so much unsaid about exactly which values Golda Meir feels she is compromising. Is she trying to rationalize the murder of Palestinian terror plotters that should really be captured and put on trial? Or has that decision been made and she instead trying to rationalize sending a team of otherwise good men to execute a mission that she knows is something of a suicide mission? Or has even that decision been made and she is instead trying to rationalize the collateral damage that might arise, for example, from her assassination squad becoming a freelance "murder for hire" team?
  
  Every post-massacre event in the movie ultimately touches on this single line of dialogue. How many of the post-massacre events of the movie did Golda Meir forsee as resulting from her decision? And which of these events forseen -- and perhaps casulties forseen -- was she willing to consider acceptable risks?


• Another thing to admire about the film is the ease with which the assassination squad's French contacts (who are some kind of anarchists) manipulate them. After Avner assembles his assassination team, the first thing he does is hook up with various European underground types to try and get information about where the terror-planners are located. Eventually Avner stumbles onto some kind of French anarchist group, represented by a man named "Louis", that is "ideologically promiscuous" and willing to locate anyone for a price.
  
  The other members of the assassination squad at first seem at first to distrust Avner's French connection. The head of the Anarchist group, Louis' father (who insists that he be called "Papa"), apparently picks up on this discontent and with a very shrewd move apparently wins Avner's trust by inviting him to a family dinner at his expansive country chateau (ala "The Godfather"). After the dinner, all doubts about the French anarchists disappear for the rest of the film even though it's pretty obvious that the French anarchists are trying to get Avner and his men killed (that Avner doesn't break contact with or kill Louis after Louis sticks Avner's Jewish assassins in the same "safe house" as a group of Palestinian gang-bangers is a total mystery). In the end, Papa's dinner has worked almost embarressingly well in buying Avner's loyalty: Louis has to flat out say "Yes, we have been selling you out to your enemies." to try and get Avner to believe it.


• "Munich" also has plenty of gore, graphic violence, full frontal male and female nudity, and combinations of all three at once. Hollywood rule of thumb: a movie that shows a naked woman having sex with a man is rated NC-17, but a movie that shows a naked woman getting shot in the breasts with a machine gun is rated R.


• By the way, in case you didn't know this already, whenever every spy in Europe is out to get you, the first place they'll look is where you live. Every moviegoer in America knows this, but two member's of Avner's team didn't.

The Kramer Incident

A previously respected paragon of the Comedic-American community, Michael Richards, went hysterical in front of crowd and made certain racially insensitive remarks. These remarks, of course, have been instantly translated into 44 languages and beamed around the world.

There is really only one thing that Richards can do to put this ugly incident behind him and that is to step down as Senate Majority Leader.

The chameleon changes his colors.

Senator John McCain, hitherto the leading champion of "big government conservatism", now blames big government for the Republican's election losses:

He said last week's election, when Republicans were swept out of power in both chambers of Congress, was punishment for the party's seduction by big spending and big government.

"We increased the size of government in the false hope that we could bribe the public into keeping us in office," McCain said, adding Americans "still prefer common sense conservatism to the alternative."

Now we see that McCain was really a "conservative of doubt" all along:

"Common sense conservatives believe that the government that governs least governs best, that government should do only those things individuals cannot do for themselves and do them efficiently," he said.

Yes, you read that right. Senator Campaign-Finance Reform is now a "small l" libertarian.

Here's a first step for Republican victory in 2008.

The first step for a Republican victory begins with an issue that, by its very nature and by the claims of its supporters, should have played a key roll in the pre-election debates but was conspicuously absent from them. That proverbial "dog that didn't bark" in election 2006 was campaign finance reform.

The just-completed elections, if they prove anything, prove that campaign finance reform is a total failure at preventing corruption. Do you remember hearing any left-of-center pundits complaining that what was really needed to prevent another Abramoff scandal was a new round of tightened campaign finance regulations? Or do you remember hearing the left-of-center pundits calling for Republicans to be thrown out of power to clean up Washington? And if campaign finance reform was such a potent anti-corruption issue, why didn't the Republicans get any credit for enacting it. Shouldn't that have been the centerpiece of Republican efforts to refute the Democratic Party's "culture of corruption" charge?

The key point that the anti-Republican opposition hammed into the Republican Party's skull in the last year is the exact same point that conservatives have been trying to make all along. This is the observation that the best way to eliminate the tie between campaign finance and political corruption is to reform Congress and its methods of distributing funds, not the political donations that are supposedly buying political favors from Congressmen. Republican critics picked up on this by targeting earmark reform and eliminating pork as issues to push this year and won big; the Republicans comfortably sat on their campaign-finance reformed butts and ended up as the biggest losers.

The notion of campaign-finance reform as an "incumbent protection racket" has just been blown out of the water by recent events as well. But as you might have guessed, the anti-Republican opposition was more concerned about gerrymandered congressional districts to complain much about that incumbant re-election guarentee supposedly buried within the campaign-financing system.

Another big liability hidden within campaign-finance reform is that the leading Democratic contender for winning the 2008 presidential election, namely Senator Hillary Clinton, is also a leading practicioner of campaign-financing violations. Any Republican presidential contender who makes his or her stand on the campaign-finance system while the Clintons cheat like crazy is a guarenteed loser. Are you listening Senator McCain?

A first step for Republican victory in 2008 is therefore to make a stand on the First Amendment's right of free speech, dump the campaign-finance reform crusade, and enthusiastically support real reform of how Congress distributes money. The benefits of doing so include:

• re-energizing conservative and libertarian support for the Republican Party by liberating political speech from campaign-finance restrictions.


• making real reforms of Congressional spending that can be used for tax cuts or deficit reduction


• sticking Democrats with defending the campaign-finance restrictions. Campaign-finance reform is, in the final analysis, a historically Democratic Big-Government issue in the post-Watergate era. If the Republicans put the First Amendment ahead of Big-Government, the Democrats won't be able to follow them.

The Republicans lost Congress yesterday.

As disappointing as losing Congress is, there's only one to be done about it and that is winning again in 2008.

The end of an era

Saddham Hussein sentenced to death by hanging for a massacre of Shiites in the city of Dujail in 1982.

Senator Clinton on North Korea and "South Shi'ite-nam"

The latest news referring to North Korea:

North Korea affirmed Wednesday it would return to nuclear disarmament talks to seek a resolution of a U.S. campaign aimed at choking the communist nation's access to foreign banks.

Stepping back from further provocative moves after conducting its first-ever nuclear test three weeks ago, the North said it hoped to see a resolution of the financial issue at the resumed six-nation arms talks that it has boycotted for a year.

Obviously, North Korea's recent nuclear weapons test has significantly increased the degree of isolation between North Korea and China, thus inducing North Korea to return to six-nation talks to try and repair the damage.

The latest news referring to Senator Hillary Clinton:

"We did not face World War II alone, we did not face the Cold War alone, and we cannot face the global terrorist threat or other profound challenges alone either," she said.

Clinton also defended the idea of bilateral talks with nations that Washington has been avoiding, such as Iran and Cuba.

Notice that the moment six-party talks with North Korea are back in action, Senator Clinton calls for bilateral talks with enemy nations. It's almost as if Democrats are deliberately trying to sabotage the Bush Administration. Also notice the strange juxtaposition in a single speech of "We did not face World War II alone" with a call for bilateral talks with enemy nations. Isn't the whole point of building an international coalition against an enemy state that no one member of the coalition unilaterally negotiates with that enemy?

Senator Clinton also announced her support for one of the fashionable Democratic Party policies for Iraq (another such policy being the partition plan):

Concerning Iraq, Clinton blasted the administration's policy, and said the best policy instead would progressively redeploy US troops in the region, call for a regional conference to help discuss options and advocate for the creation of an organization aiming at guaranteeing a division of oil income among all Iraqis.

As I've pointed out before, this is basically the Democratic Party's Vietnam policy circa 1968 or so updated point-by-point for Iraq.

Conservative Rule #1: Don't take voting advice from Democrats.

The very first thing that any would-be conservative should learn about the contemporary Democratic Party is to never, under any circumstances whatsoever, take voting advice from it. The Democratic Party invariably offers up shamelessly self-serving electoral advice to conservatives and Republicans. Why would any conservative seriously consider voting advice from a political party that compares conservatives to Nazis or psychopaths on a daily basis?

So the big important electoral advice any conservative is likely to get from their fair-weather liberal friends this year is a nice lecture about how great and fun and character-building it would be for Republicans to lose everything. The Democrats are just begging for the chance to totally screw-over and destroy their own party by winning back Congress next week. What better way for a conservative to show a principled stand for conservative government than by electing as many welfare statists as he or she can?

A nice example of this type of propagandizing comes from a blog I had considered to be fairly rational until now and its cringingly obsequious "Eight reasons not to vote for the Republicans".

The post's reason 1 is the most ridiculous: Not much is really at stake. Of course a lot is at stake! We're talking about control of a branch of government here, not the Mickey Mouse club. Yes, it's true that there are currently no open positions on the Supreme Couty, but a Republican majority in the Senate also means a better chance of conservative nominees being confirmed in all of the lesser positions of government as well. You can also be sure that a Democratic congress would be eager to start cutting off funding for American troops in Iraq, assuming that it doesn't launch a two-year impeachment drive against the President first.

Reason 2 is actually a great reason to vote for Republicans. Remember 1992? Does any conservative in his or her right mind want another 1992?

Reason 3 is another great reason to vote Republican: Democrat Nancy Pelosi will be such an inept Speaker of the House that she's almost certain to totally screw things up by 2008.

Reason 4 is a little more subtle than the others. Here the argument is that the Republicans have shamelessly gerrymandered so many Congressional districts that they have become corrupt and insulated from their voting base of support. I'm willing to conceed that conservative or Republican voters might judge themselves to be "anti-gerrymander" voters first and foremost this year. One slight caveat to keep in mind is that Democrats have gerrymandered districts in both Republican and Democratic-leaning states, so some anti-gerrymander voters would have to vote Republican against a Democratic incumbent to "decline to participate in this rigged process."

Reason 5 goes back to the phoney-baloney again. Here the post suggests that:

Losing control of one or (preferably) both houses will provide an excellent moment of clarity. This will be the point at which rising figures in the Party can safely call for a new approach and new policies, citing the demonstrated outcome of the current approach and current policies.

A "new approach and new policies" sounds like a euphemism for "cutting and running" from Iraq. Taken at face value, this reason is meaningless. Of course candidates can safely call for a new approach and new policies. It happens all the time. Remember 1988?

Reason 6 is pure liberal wish fulfillment:

The architects of the current Party hegemony need to be fully discredited. Rove and company have been at the forefront of an astonishingly cynical Party strategy. Does it not pain you to hear the plainly idiotic slogans of this bunch – Democrats will lose the war on terror (you mean we're winning?), your taxes will go up, and your son will be gang pressed into the Gay Mafia. It's sad when a Party has no real strategy beyond caricaturing its opponents. Telling, too.

This is the argument (most notoriously advanced by Andrew Sullivan nowadays) that Democrats are just Republicans who care a bit more about the poor and minorities and women, and that the only reason why American politics isn't one big happy song is that evil "Rove and company" (who are so self-evidently evil that they should just fall on their swords right now).

Reason 7 boils down to making the elections a referendum on Iraq. Also, notice how reason 7 nicely dovetails with the suspicious euphemism of reason 5 ("new approach and new policies")while also blantantly contradicting reason 1 ("not much is really at stake"). Reason 7 is obviously the key message of this whole exercise: that Democrats will really stick it to President Bush over Iraq if they ever get their hands on real power again. But hey, conservatives just might relish a chance to vote for two years of partisan warfare waged by a Democratic party that's been howling for REVENGE against President Bush since November 2000 .

Finally, the anticlimactic reason 8 goes back to the argument that losing builds party character, although in reality losing really just builds losers. There is a minor point for conservatives to notice here: making a stand on the moral high ground of conservative principles will take some of the sting out of the amazing non-stop Democratic-Party triumphalism that will be all over the mainstream media if the Democrats recapture Congress.

My critique of "The Conservative Soul"

Andrew Sullivan invited readers of his book "The Conservative Soul" to write their own critiques of it. After reading the book and mulling over it for some time, here is what I came up with.

Think of "The Conservative Soul" as a repackaging of Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy for a twenty-first century mainstream audience. Like Objectivism, "The Conservative Soul" divides humanity into the rational and irrational, here called conservatives and fundamentalists. Like Objectivism, "The Conservative Soul" rests such policy prescriptions as it ventures to make essentially on the basis of keeping the rational conservatives in charge of the government at all times. And just as practically no person ever born or ever likely to be born is an Objectivist in the Randian sense -- Objectivism conceeds that only as many as two true Objectivists have ever lived -- the book's author admits that even he has succumbed to the temptation of a fundamentalist thought on occasion.

Of course, like Ayn Rand and her insistance that people could only be truely rational if they were chain-smoking cigarettes like Howard Roark, "The Conservative Soul" has it own unconscious inconsistencies. A nice example is its observation that government tax increases are uniformly a bad thing (my boldface):

Domestically a conservative will seek to ensure that the freedoms enshrined in a written or unwritten constitution are protected. That is his first task. If a government starts to attack individual liberty, invade personal privacy, increase his taxes, or burden him with regulations, a conservative will resist.

Resisting tax increases is thus a conservative imperative, except, of course, when President Bush is doing the resisting, in which case not resisting tax increases is a conservative imperative (my boldface):

It soon became apparent that [President Bush's] tax cuts were simply a matter of faith, unrelated to any empirical context or consistent rationale.

"The Conservative Soul" also exhibits the same willful ignorance of opposing points of view and historical events that in Objectivism made anyone with a vaguely liberal political bent akin to being a "Stalinist". For example, truely conservative doctrines about the law -- doctrines believed in by actual lawyers -- are treated as Orwellian abuses of language, such as the author's implication that judicial activism is just some kind of homophobic Right-wing smear phrase:

Judges -- many liberal, some conservative -- were described as "activists" or "extremists" if they applied their state constitution's guarentees of equal protection to gay couples.

Long standing historical trends such as geographical voting patterns are also attributed to nefarious short-term machinations, such as when the author implies that the Red State/Blue State divide was actually created by Republicans in the 1990s:

In a much milder fashion, the appropriation of religious groups for the political base of the modern Republican Party immediately and progressively divided the United States into "blue" and "red" states, between "Godless" and "God-fearing" regions.

But mere tinkering with the electoral game is child's play compared to an accusation of pure monarchism against President Bush:

[The President's legal Advisor John] Yoo works at one of the most prestigious think tanks in the United States: the American Enterprise Institute. He is absolutely sincere in believing that the executive branch can override any domestic law, any international treaty, and any moral boundary if necessary to protect national security. In a war on terror that stretches decades into the future, the new conservatism allows for a president with no checks at all on his own power as commander in chief.

Left unsaid is the fact that the presumption that military necessity works in exactly this way has been the default view of the president's role as commander in chief since the founding. The key to the equation is military necessity. Literally nobody to the political right of Michael Moore thinks that the President is ready to take over American society and rule as a dictator from the White House to defend the United States against the Third World terror threat. What people do think is that a sufficiently dire threat to the United States -- a Dalek invasion of Earth bent on mass extermination perhaps -- would be necessary for any extreme measures by the President to be justified on the basis of military necessity. As conservatives are fond of saying, the Constitution does not oblige a nation to commit suicide when faced with total annihilation.

That there is no check on the President's power as commander in chief is also totally false. The whole point of the Constitution is checks and balances on every branch of government, after all. But this is a false argument for another reason. Every nation ever made may be confronted by a person with the ruthless to acquire power and to exercise it without restraint; every nation is vulnerable to the possibility of a powerful individual that cannot be held in check by the combined efforts of others. The ultimate check on power is the ability of some humans to collectively enforce restrictions on the use of power by other humans, and until the United States consists of only one person and lots and lots of computers, this check on power will be in place.

As this critique suggests, you would be correct in inferring that "The Conservative Soul" portrays the current President Bush and other fundamentalists with the same level of respect and fairness that "Atlas Shrugged" gives to its moochers and looters. The exception is that, perhaps out of an extraordinary exercise of doubt, the author quite suprisingly admits that his entire analysis of the contemporary fundamentalism's drive for monarchical power in America is absolutely wrong:

Evangelical and Catholic fundamentalists have largely engaged in America in completely legitimate and democratic activity: voting, organizing, campaigning, broadcasting, persuading. Even where they disagree with the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution, they do not question that Constitution's legitimacy (although a few have indeed walked to the bring of declaring the United States an illegitimate "regime" because of the court's rulings). They constantly use religious language to defend their political positions -- but so did Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln. The political methods of the new fundamentalists are overwhelmingly democratic ones.

Even the arch-fundamentalist George W. Bush is conceeded to be somehwat closer to your average vote-mongering politician than a monarch-in-waiting:

The narrow election of George W Bush in 2000 -- an electoral victory that nonetheless left him with considerably fewer votes than his opponent -- was the moment the new fundamentalists had long been waiting for. In the primaries, John McCain's surprising surge in New Hampshire forced Bush to an even closer alliance with the religious right than he might otherwise have preferred.

Obviously those democratically legimate, Constitution-respecting fundamentalists had committed something similar to the crime of "aligning fundamentalist churches and populations with a single political party" instead of happily rendering themselves politically impotent by supporting two rivals equally.

In the political sphere, once we subtract out all of the author's contradictions, misrepresentations, and amazingly devastating concessions, we are left with nothing more a set of the author's personal moral choices -- private, consensual, adult sex good; government torture bad -- along with a set of recipies for deciding who is sufficiently agreable with the author to merit the rewarding "conservative" mark of approval.

Do you support tornados, Hugh?

Talk radio host and blogger Hugh Hewitt, in a massive favor to anyone who has been comtemplating a critque of the book "The Conservative Soul", had the book's author Andrew Sullivan on for an interview. After listening to the transcript, I have to agree with Hewitt's post-interview analysis:

In short, I think the book is an attempt to pass off easily exposed half truths and worse as objectively true assertions of fact in the service of a political agenda that Andrew Sullivan passionately wants the country to embrace but which it refuses to do. His anger throughout the interview stemmed, I have to conclude, from the sudden appearance across the microphone of a host who had read the book in detail, could call out its many flaws, and who refused to be diverted into non-book related subjects which required no defense of his own written words.

On a related note, the site's audio clip of James Lileks discussing the weather proves once again that Lileks is da man!

Same-sex marriage arrives in New Jersey

Analysis of the New Jersey state supreme court's ruling via The Volokh Conspiracy (hat tip: Instapundit). In a show of respect for the legislature, the court ordered that the people of New Jersey have 6 months to decide on the name of their new same-sex marriages. As the old joke goes: you can call it a "same-sex marriage"; you can call it a "civil union"; if you wish, you can even call it "Fred".

This is your brain. This is your brain on Roman history.

It suddenly occured to me one morning where the trend of rappers wearing hooded sweatshirts originated. Observe (in responsibly non-hotlinked fashion) that the more things change, the more things stay the same.

A really great reason not to abandon Iraq.

See if you can spot a trend here:

• The Korean Civil War of 1950 to 1953 cost the United States roughly 54,000 deaths before the military situation was stabilized, but the United States to this day maintains forces in South Korea.


• The second phase of the Vietnamese Civil War during the years 195 to 1975 cost the United States roughly 58,000 deaths. The war ended when the United States removed its troops and cut of support to South Vietnam, leading to that country being conquered by North Vietnam.


• The 2003 invasion of Iraq has cost the United States roughly 3000 deaths as of this writing. A prominent anti-war faction is already calling for United States troops to be withdrawn from Iraq, and that faction considers that the money spent on stabilizing Iraq since 2003 might have been better spent on Americans schools and health care.

We've gone from a pledge of support for South Korea that's still going strong after nearly 60 years, to a pledge of support for South Vietnam that finally fell to pieces after more than a decade of holding things together, to a pledge of support for a democratic Iraq that started falling apart from basically the moment people started getting hurt.

As you can see, the real question isn't whether United States troops should be withdrawn from Iraq, but how much worse the next conflict is likely to be if the United States doesn't stay the course now in Iraq.

The Right-wing blogosphere and its discontents

One thing that's easy to notice about the political blogosphere is the Right/Left divide over the political role of blogs. The major Left wing blogs tend to focus on relentlessly recruiting Democratic voters in the hopes of electing a Democratic majority to Congress someday soon. The major Right wing blogs tend to focus on creating an "alternative" media to the mainstream media of NBC/ABC/CBS/New York Times/etc.

The Right-wing blogosphere's conception of itself as a "media" outlet has its advantages, mostly arising from the fact that the mainstream media is both ultra-liberal and surprisingly inept. A big chunk of the Right-wing blogosphere, after all is said and done, is powered by the ability of any common person to open up any "Section A" of any day's "New York Times" and find some egregious piece of biased reporting. And internet phenomena involving prominent liberals, such as the "Rathergate" scandal, have earned the Right-wing blogosphere an honorary place in the liberal conspiracy theorist's "Republican noise machine".

On the other hand, a standing joke for the Left-wing blogosphere is that Right-wing blogs are basically useless for delivering votes to Republican candidates. An exemplary case in point is the website Instapundit. Instapundit is one of the most visited Right-wing blogs -- Right-wing only in the negative sense of not being explicitly left wing -- and is more aligned with a Libertarian philsophy instead of a Republican or Conservative one. Thus, Instapundit occasionally regurgitates self-defeating libertarian lunacy in the guise of the "alternative media" consensus.

The last year's most notorious example of libertarian lunacy is the PorkBusters campaign against out-of-control government spending. Don't get me wrong. The latest battle in the 230-year war against needless political spending is certainly a good thing as far as it goes. But the real problem with government spending is not pork but the welfare state mentality. Republicans and Conservatives could have really used some political cover for reduced spending through entitlement reform from an independent source of public opinion such as the internet. The primarily libertarian-leaning Right-wing blogosphere, sensing that the Republican-controlled congress was vulnerable on spending, characteristically decided to stick it to Republicans on behalf of the welfare-statist Democrats instead.

The current example of libertarian lunacy in the Right-wing blogosphere is encapsulated by Instapundit's now-infamous "GOP pre-mortem", which has been widely interpreted as the internet's conceeding a Republican disaster in the upcoming elections. The damage here is so bad that Republican media figures from Rush Limbaugh on down furiously attempting damage-control. But again, this shouldn't be much of a surprise since libertarians are always saying "Republicans deserve to lose; Democrats don't deserve to win". Why would any Republicans with any sense at all bother to go to their fair-weather libertarian friends for political advice and expect anything different?

And then there is blogger Andrew Sullivan, who apparently believes that the great Solon of the modern day conservative movement is Democratic Senator John Kerry. Since I'm plugging away at his book, we'll save that topic for another post.

An extraordinary set of coincidences

Some very interesting events have been happening in the course of the 2006 elections. Consider the following:

• Six weeks before the elections, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez deliver heavily publicized anti-Bush speechs at the United Nations. Aside from the God-talk, these speeches are largely indistinguishable from the Democratic Party's day-by-day anti-Bush rhetoric.
• North Korea detonates its first nuclear weapon a month before the elections; this event is immediately exploited by Democrats as proof that Bush's North Korea policy has failed.
• It's now three weeks away from the elections and Saddham Hussein is confident that "the hour of liberation is at hand" for Iraq. It goes without saying which American political party is more than eager to end the occupation of Iraq.

Call it coincidence if you wish, but it certainly seems like the World's Dictators Club is expecting good things to result from Democrats retaking Congress this year.

The next challenge

Andrew Sullivan has challenged his readers to critique his latest book with the sharpest criticisms and responses to be posted on his blog.

The book is titled "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back". From what I've read so far, it reads like the exact polar opposite of a foundational work of the modern conservative movement: "Witness", by Whittaker Chambers.

Deplorable history but brilliant art

A new American textbook is discovered to contain appalling comparisons of President Bush and the United States to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. As history, this textbook is absolutely crazy. As art designed to "win hearts and minds" in the Middle East, it's quite brilliant. Consider the article's quotation from that textbook which states:

"Like Bush and the neocons, Hitler and the Nazis inaugurated their new era by destroying an architectural monument and blaming its destruction on their designated enemies."

In the United States, that is a vicious lie. On the other hand, the Middle East loves the Nazis! Adolf Hitler is their favorite Westerner ever. If you really wanted to make President Bush look like an arrogant jerk in the Middle East, you should be comparing him to liberal-leaning types like Lawrence of Arabia or Senator John Kerry, not Hitler.

There's also this quote:

"The architects of the 9/11 myth were trying to preserve the very empire they so efficiently destroyed. The US empire, and especially its Iraeli [sic] outpost, were doomed in the medium-term anyway, with or without 9/11."

We all know that America was the victim and not the perpetrator of 9/11, but the image of a ruthless American president who is willing to do anything to prop up the Empire is a big selling point in the Middle East. Sure, the jihadis and the Osama bin Ladens hate America, but what really ticks them the hell off is that the current crop of Muslim leaders don't seem to have any balls like Bush does. When President Bush is shown on Arab television cringing from a scathing verbal harangue coming from, say, Jacques Chirac, the "Arab Street" thinks to itself "this man does not have a penis". But show President Bush breaking his foot off in Saddham Hussein's ass and the "Arab Street" tells itself "Bush, we hate you, but... You da Man!". Besides, telling the Arab world that Israel is America's "nuclear capo" only reinforces its image of the United States as the global "Godfather", so to speak.

Again, the easiest way to convince the Arab world that America is for losers is to portray President Bush as just another do-gooding liberal. The Arab world hates liberalism. Why? Because the various Arab nations have spent the last 100 years or so watching liberal regimes around the world immediately crash, burn, and get replaced by fascists or communists. Practically every nation in Eurasia -- including the Ottoman Empire that most Arab nations used to be part of -- has a failed liberal regime in its past that almost immediately began weakening itself until the point where a dictator of some kind toppled it. The big exception to the rule of liberalism as national "death wish" is that dreaded Anglo-American empire: for some reason, the United States and Great Britain can happily elect liberals over and over again and still kick butt around the world. Arab states view being invaded by the United States as bad enough; being invaded by the United States then saddled with a democratic regime that puts the local versions of John Kerry and Tom Daschle in charge of national security is every Arab state's worst nightmare.

The Libertarian Democrat

The great and mighty kos himself explains that libertarian democrats don't want to destroy private enterprise; they just want to make private enterprise better(author's italics):

The problem with this form of libertarianism [i.e. "traditional" libertarianism] is that it assumes that only two forces can infringe on liberty -- the government and other individuals.

The Libertarian Democrat understands that there is a third danger to personal liberty -- the corporation. The Libertarian Dem understands that corporations, left unchecked, can be huge dangers to our personal liberties.

Libertarian Dems are not hostile to government like traditional libertarians. But unlike the liberal Democrats of old times (now all but extinct), the Libertarian Dem doesn't believe government is the solution for everything. But it sure as heck is effective in checking the power of corporations.

In other words, government can protect our liberties from those who would infringe upon them -- corporations and other individuals.

Generally speaking, internet commentary on the Kossian Libertarian Democrats seems to be viewing the concept purely as a trial balloon for some kind of "traditional" Libertarian/Democratic political alliance. The idea is that Libertarians are so fed up with conservatism that they'll gladly accept Democratic support on Libertarian social issues in exchange for Libertarian support for the welfare state. Given that a large faction of Libertarian voters only joined the party for the legalization of pot in the party platform, this isn't such a bad idea for an alliance. For the other faction of Libertarian voters who rank other considerations above sex, drugs, and rock and roll, the possibility of an alliance with the Democrats seems like a non-starter; although you never know if the Randian Libertarians might decide to start voting for the less irrational of two evils.

The other issue with the Libertarian Democrat idea is that it isn't a particularly clever or original one at all. In fact, it is nothing more than the classical New Dealer Democratic position of FDR/Truman style liberals (i.e. the "old time" liberals mentioned in the quote above). The old time liberals never saw themselves as welfare statists per se; they all saw themselves as good, old-fashioned, freedom-loving liberal Americans who just felt a bit more deeply about social justice than those pesky "economic royalists". And if elementary social justice meant nationalizing private-sector industries, the old time liberals would consider it.

Notice also that kos doesn't mention that one terrible phenomenon that good liberals have been crusading against since the days of Madison and Jefferson: inequality of wealth. Libertarians are generally stuck accepting large inequalities of wealth since even if all agents in an economy are purely fairly interacting with each other, some people are just a heck of a lot better at accumulating wealth than others. Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, think that inequalities of wealth are the one sure sign of the proverbial "going to hell in a handbasket". For kos to ignore inequalities of wealth in making his pitch is a sign that he is trying to "finesse" the issue.

The Star Trek franchise and how to fix it

The latest gossip about the continuation of the Star Trek franchise is that a film "Star Trek XI" is in the works. This production will involve an entirely new production crew in order to avoid the jinx of the previous films in the series. The nominal plot is that this series will focus on Spock and Kirk during their Starfleet Academy days.

This seems like a really boneheaded idea to me, although to be fair, it does have the virtue of having been tried with a successful spin-off into a television series. Another film followed by a few seasons of television will at least keep hope alive for the Star Trek fan base.

So how does one "fix" the Star Trek franchise by coming up with a blockbuster hit Star Trek film? In my previous analysis of the Star Trek franchise, I blamed outdated cultural assumptions that had been grandfathered into the Star Trek canon for the failures of the franchise. The key to "fixing" Star Trek is to identify those assumptions and update them.

A good place to start is with the Star Trek franchise's ideal of good Starfleet leadership being based around a core of sensibility. This is dead wrong. Good Starfleet leadership should really be based on decisiveness. Consider that the typical Star Fleet captain portrayed from "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock" on through the early "Deep Space Nine" era (where my Star Trek interest largely ended) is typically something of a Jimmy Carter-esque prisoner of events. For example, the final four movies based on the original series involved the starship Enterprise being captured once, surrendered twice, and blown up once (and not even appearing in one of the four films) , while these four movies had Captain Kirk exiled on Vulcan, exiled in Earth's past, captured by Sybok, and convicted and exiled to a Klingon prison planet. The decisive victor Kirk of "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan" is largely the last real hurrah of Captain Kirk's brilliant career.

But suffice it to say that even the Captain Kirk of "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" excels in comparison to Captain Picard (i.e. the Colonel Blimp of Starfleet) and his successors. The only real exception being Commander Riker; various high-level Starfleet and Federation puhbahs have been begging Commander Riker to accept his own command since about season two of "Star Trek: The Next Generation". Giving now Captain Riker of the starship Titan a starring role in a new Star Trek film would be an excellent idea.

Another big problem with the Star Trek films is that the main "bad guys" are either massively imposing overmatches for the Enterprise (such as in films I, IV, VI, VIII, IX, and X) or somehow manage to take a mechnically crippled or compromised Enterpise by surprise (films II, III, V, VII). The classic Klingon "bird of prey" starship -- highlighted in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" for example -- looks like a dependable, workhorse technology by comparison. So another great strategy for a "Star Trek XI" would be Federation technology that doesn't suck!

Another interesting point is that Captain Kirk's career starts to falter and decline in "Star Trek III", which not coincidentally is the earliest reference to the Klingon peace negotiations that end up becoming a dominant theme of all post-Khan Star Trek fiction. This is a sign that the Federation, at least in the post-Khan era of the canon, has been largely abandoned for the Klingon Empire as a creative inspiration for the film and series producers. As Andrew Sullivan might say, this tells us something about ourselves. So another good idea for reviving the Star Trek franchise would be inventing a reason for people to be inspired by the Federation again instead of giving us yet another ultimately self-defeating Federation conspiracy theory (as in movies VI and IX).

A post-modern pet peeve

A common story device that seems to pop up in a lot of contexts is the character who is experiencing unusual phenomena that suggest either that the character has developed some kind of mental illness or that some kind of bizarre circumstance is somehow mimicing the symptoms of mental illness. In a postmodern sense, it's easy to see the attraction of this kind of plot device. The author (or director or scriptwriter or whoever) of the story can either gratify or frustrate the audience's expectations by adjusting the ratio of "craziness" to "extenuating circumstance" accordingly. Of course, it's entirely possible to screw up the formula one way or another, and one easy way of doing that is through overuse. A canonical example of overuse is the television series "Star Trek: The Next Generation", which produced episodes in which

• Dr. Crusher thinks she is delusional but is really trapped in a bubble universe


• Commander Riker awakens 16 years in the future with 16 years of memory loss but is really just being held captive in an alien-made fantasy world


• Commander Riker finds himself in an alien mental hospital but is really being held captive and having his mind probed by hostile aliens


• Lt. Commander Data is suffering nightmares that are being caused by alien parasites


• Lt. Worf has a reality breakdown that is really being caused by a dimensional rift


• Captain Picard gets zapped by an alien artifact and becomes "Kamin".

In hindsight, one is suprised by the fact that better defensive measures haven't been adopted by a crew that is fighting off alien mind games in a sizable fraction of its recorded adventures.

Another way of bungling a story involving a character who cannot decide if he or she is insane or not is to introduce a third option that precludes the other two. The example that I have in mind is the movie "Solaris". In this case, astronauts housed in a space station in orbit around an alien planet named Solaris are visited by apparitions that appear to be real people that have been recreated from the astronauts' memories. For example, the character Chris Kelvin awakens after his first night in orbit around Solaris to find himself in bed with his wife -- here seen alive and well -- whom he had previously believed to be dead.

One question that Kelvin finds himself confronted with is whether this entity is his wife, or is simply a fantasy version of his wife reconstructed from his imperfect memories of her, or is something in-between. A second question is whether Kelvin can determine the answer to the riddle embodied by Solaris before the mental strain of dealing with these apparitions incapacitates him. Unfortunately, the evidence that the film gives for answering these questions is rendered unreliable by a third possibility: that the drugs that Kelvin takes to remain awake at a critical point have themselves damaged his ability to distinguish fantasy from reality.

An even more botched example involves the introduction of a fourth explanation which renders moot the previous three options. Here, the case I have in mind is the film "The Tenant". The story involves a shy young man who moves into an apartment previously inhabited by a woman who just recently committed suicide. At first, we have the familiar dilemma when the young man realizes that he cannot decide if he is merely being paranoid or if he is the victim of a subtle murder conspiracy involving his neighbors (thus leading to the suicide of the previous tenant). The film is relatively slow-paced at first, so halfway through the movie the action accelerates when the young man suffers some kind of presumably drug-induced hallucinatory delirium. Certainly the question of conspiracy versus insanity at the beginning of the film is rendered moot when the young man rather abrubtly appears to go bonkers because of this mysterious delirium. Then, as if this wasn't enough muddying of the waters, a final plot twist establishes that all of the previous events were in fact the product of an insanity that was totally different than the audience had previously been led to believe. As Roger Ebert described it:

There is then an ironic ending that will come as a complete surprise to anyone who has missed every episode of "Night Gallery" or the CBS Mystery Theater. It turns out that -- but never mind, never mind. It's been a long time since I've heard an audience talk back to the ending of a horror film. "The Tenant" might have made a decent little 20-minute sketch for one of those British horror anthology films in which Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Vincent Price pick up a little loose change. As a film by Polanski, it's unspeakably disappointing.

Obviously a big drawback to this entire line of storytelling is the tendency of 20th century citizens of Western societies to immediately adopt self-medication as a solution to their problems. Star Trek: The Next Generation escapes this problem since the main characters are getting cycled through sick bay for either examination or treatment on an episode-to-episode basis in any case. The show assigned roughly 30% of its main character cast to support personnel keeping the other 70% alive and functional, after all.

Yet Another Ascension Post

I finally won a game of Nethack this week. Now I can never play this game ever again!

Yet more evidence that the Agricultural Revolution was humanity's greatest blunder.

Al Gore realizes that cigarette smoking is a significant contributor to global warming. Udolpho comments:

Of course it is. Cigarettes: deadly to smokers, even more deadly to non-smokers, and most deadly of all to the planet itself. Please wait, I am going to go out and buy a carton of Pall Mall. (I guess that Indian with a tear rolling down his craggy cheek is the real villain.)

Good luck getting the world to ban cigarettes Mr Gore! Countries like China and Iran are probably more likely to give up enriching uranium than giving up tobacco.

Just because you're a non-smoker doesn't mean that you aren't an environmental threat. Human respiration is based on the production and emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thus potenially affecting the global climate. We're all sinners in the Church of Gore-ianity.

The repairer of reputations

Here's the situation. You're a top Hollywood star who has hit a really tough spot. You've got a DUI, so you've spilled the beans on your drinking problem. You've also got a big mouth, which has branded you with a reputation for potentially career-ending "controversy". But you've also got an expensive new movie coming out in a few months, and your "controversial" remarks have come very very close to flushing all of your production money down the drain.

In short, you need a repaired reputation and fast. Short of saving a drowning infant from Niagara Falls, the only way to do it is Bush bashing:

Mel Gibson has returned to the spotlight to promote his upcoming movie "Apocalypto," and to criticize the war in Iraq, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Almost two months after he railed against Jews when he was arrested for driving drunk in Malibu, the actor made a surprise appearance Friday at Fantastic Fest, an event in Austin, Texas, devoted to new science fiction, horror and fantasy films, the trade paper said in its Monday edition.

He presented a work-in-progress screening of his Mayan adventure tale, and then took questions. About one-third of the full house gathered for the film gave him a standing ovation. The film is scheduled for a December 8 release via Disney.

In describing its portrait of a civilization in decline, Gibson said, "The precursors to a civilization that's going under are the same, time and time again," drawing parallels between the Mayan civilization on the brink of collapse and America's present situation. "What's human sacrifice," he asked, "if not sending guys off to Iraq for no reason?"

That's a strange point of view from someone whose previous movie is essentially a two-hour redemptive human sacrifice.

A Missed Opportunity for Democrats

The latest obsession of the Right wing blogosphere is President Clinton's meltdown on Fox news. Apparently the question that pushed President Clinton into an extremely vigorous defense of his administration was "Why didn't you do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaeda out of business when you were president?" The Right sees this as President Clinton coming unglued from a mixture of shameless egotism and a need to counter what Democrats perceive as the "Path to 9/11" propaganda from ABC. The Left sees this as President Clinton gallantly defending himself from yet another conservative smear campaign.

What really matters here is that President Clinton's shameless egotism has hurt the Democrats. Remember, this is an election season. That means that all Democrats, everywheres, should be excercising "message discipline" (insofar as Democrats actually have a message, that is). The interview question should have really gone like this:

Q: Why didn't you do more to put bin Laden and Al Qaeda out of business when you were president?

A: If I had had someone like Representative Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House in 1994, I would have had bin Laden's head on a silver platter. Vote Democrat.

In other words, whenever President Clinton would normally talk about himself, he should be talking about congressional Democrats instead. Good luck getting that to happen!

Hugo Chavez blows it, big time.

Apparently, word has gotten around in the World Dictator's Club that playing nice with American liberals is a great asset for keeping one's dictatorial power intact. The goal is obviously to end up like Castro or Gorbachev, not like Saddam Hussein or Noriega. But some dictators are better at impressing the liberals than others, and recently Hugo Chavez really blew it with liberals by comparing President Bush to the devil. Even Nancy Pelosi was pissed off by Chavez's remarks:

"Hugo Chavez fancies himself a modern day Simon Bolivar but all he is an everyday thug," House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said at a news conference, referring to Chavez' comments in a U.N. General Assembly speech on Wednesday.

"Hugo Chavez abused the privilege that he had, speaking at the United Nations," said Pelosi, a frequent Bush critic. "He demeaned himself and he demeaned Venezuela."

It's as easy as pie to see why Chavez pissed liberals off. It's because if President Bush is the devil, then by implication there must be a God. No liberal politician is going to stand for that kind of mean-spirited insinuation.

Ann Coulter on the Geneva Conventions

Ann Coulter's opinion about the recent Generva Conventions controversy is well expressed by her first paragraph:

It turns out the only reason McCain is demanding that prisoners like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – mastermind of the 9-11 attacks, the beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl and other atrocities – be treated like Martha Stewart facing an insider trading charge is this: "It's all about the United States of America and what is going to happen to Americans who are taken prisoner in future wars."

Or to make her point in a different way:

Or as the New York Times wrote in the original weasel talking points earlier this summer: "The Geneva Conventions protect Americans. If this country changes the rules, it's changing the rules for Americans taken prisoner abroad. That is far too high a price to pay so this administration can hang on to its misbegotten policies."

If you believe that terrorists who couldn't care less about the Geneva Conventions might retaliate against the United States by, say, disregarding the Geneva Conventions, you might be a liberal.

The notion that other nations fighting wars with America might therefore disregard the Geneva conventions to retaliate against the United States is also for the most part unfounded. This is because the Geneva Conventions are grounded not in a single set of papers that various countries have signed on to, but in the common actions of belligerent nations. The protections that the conventions afford are inherent in what nations do. Even if the documents denoted by "the Geneva Conventions" did not exist, nations would still abide by the practices that the Conventions codify provided that their adversaries did so as well.

Confiscate-and-spend liberalism in action

The hallmark of contemporary liberalism is the imposition of "forced contributions" to pay for progressive policies. The essence of the forced contribution is the leveraging government power to force private economic agents to donate money to some government purpose, or else! In practice, the forced contribution is expressed in the liberal viewpoint that any industry that dares to show a profit (or that dares to show weakness) is a target for a money-grab. That this is one of the more illiberal means of funding government short of slave labor doesn't bother liberals in the slightest.

The latest example of a new forced contribution campaign is California's lawsuit of automakers over carbon dioxide emissions, which was filed immediately after Governor Schwarzenegger signs a new bill for curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Is this because American automakers -- and nobody else -- are entirely responsible for the planet's global warming problem? Or is this because California liberals have decided that it's payback time?

A few easy pieces

• Madonna's latest gimmick is apparently suspending herself from a giant glittering cross while singing (hat tip: Drudge report). I call it a gimmick instead of an "outrage" because it's hard to see why anyone should care if an enormously wealthy entertainer wants to become slightly more enormously wealthy by comfortably suspending herself from a giant cross. Are there any other career "shock the buorgeois"-style performers who haven't been suspended from a cross by now?



• Al Gore's latest book is apparently going to be titled "The Assault on Reason" (hat tip: Evolutionblog). The title is immensely humourous given that it is being penned by the career politician who infamously "reinvented" his public personality on a yearly basis. Perhaps Gore could do his readers a service and include the definition of the word "is" in his preface.

It's nice to see American values are spreading to Islamic nations.

If this week's outrage by Muslims over comments made by the Pope proves anything, it's that an American-style "gotcha" media presence is spreading in Islamic countries. There's just something about Muslim outrage over something the Pope said instead of outrage over the existence of Israel or the policies of the Great Satan that just screams "slow news week in Istanbul" to me.

Some of the articles list of responses to the pope's statements seem stereotypically American as well. For example, the article states

Many Muslims accused Benedict of seeking to promote Judeo-Christian dominance over Islam.

That's a lot like the American media's occasional hysteria over reports that "Democrats accuse Bush of seeking to promote Republican Party." What else do you expect? Promoting Christianity over other religions (What do you mean "Judeo-"?) is kindof the pope's day job.

There's also the "turning back the clock to the 50s" accusation:

"He has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages. He is a poor thing that has not benefited from the spirit of reform in the Christian world," Kapusuz told Turkish state media. "It looks like an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades."

Usually, American liberals accuse President Bush of rolling back the clock to the 1650s at the earliest in order to emphasize Bush's anti-Enlightenment animus. Accusing the pope of trying to turn back the clock to the 1250s is a very gutsy move then, even by American standards. The closest President Bush ever gets to being a 1250s man is the occasional unflattering comparison to Genghis Khan.

You bet your (political) life!

Senator John McCain has finally found an issue that pushed him to the edge:

John McCain, the Republican frontrunner for the 2008 presidential election, has dramatically raised the stakes in a fight with the White House over interrogation techniques permitted for use at secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons by saying he is unwilling to back down on the issue even if it ruins his chance of becoming president.

Since I'm currently reading "Running Alone: Presidential Leadership JFK to Bush II", it's pretty clear to me that this is simply another iteration of McCain's textbook JFK-style political campaigning. Independence -- above all else, independence -- is the name of the game. So it's clear that, instead of seriously believing his future presidency at risk, McCain really sees this issue as a key to winning in 2008. Whether this strategy makes McCain electable in 2008 is questionable. Although, despite the obvious drawbacks, running for president as the "Republican JFK" against a Democrat at least has the virtue of having never been tried.

Speaking of people who have blown their presidential chances, Colin Powell's comment in the article is quite ridiculous:

“The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. To redefine Common Article 3 [of the Geneva conventions] would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk,” Mr Powell wrote in a letter to Mr McCain released yesterday.

Yes, I'm sure that the terrorists, who have absolultely no regard for the Geneva conventions, will be so outraged by President Bush's policies that they will retaliate against the United States by disregarding the Geneva conventions.

Eris, not Xena

The solar system object that started this year's planet dilemma has been officially named Eris, not Xena. The moon of Eris has been officially named Dysnomia, not Gabrielle.

This can be considered decisive proof that a voting majority of professional astronomers are not nerds.

You don't get promoted to Grand Ayatollah for nothing.

Captain's Quarters comments on a report that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has defeated a partitioning of Iraq:

The Shi'ites had jealously viewed Kurdish semi-independence for years and eagerly pursued this proposal. With hardly any effort, Sistani swatted it down almost immediately. His pronouncement, as announced by Mashhadani, ordered the leading faction's politicians to stop considering the plan, and Mashhadani sounded happy to comply. He acknowledged that the country did not have a strong enough security apparatus to hold together in such a structure, and his allies quickly fell into line.

Obviously the people of Iraq as well as the Grand Ayatollah have more common sense than the American media gives them credit for having. A plan to break up Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions is a really dumb idea, partly because some American liberals were hyping such a plan as a cure-all for America's Iraqi quagmire, and partly because the one thing that all factions in Iraq can certainly agree on is what the borders of Iraq are at present. Besides, do we really want to leave behind a weak, rump Shi'ite state as a sitting duck for an Iranian Anschlusss?

Liberals should also remember that a weak confederal state is a prime target for a Right-wing coup launched by a very political military figure.

Another missing constitutional clause

Glen Greenwald comments on the constitutional views of a Bush legal theorist (hat tip: Daily Kos):

The Constitution is actually pretty clear on that score. Article I says "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States" -- Article II says the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" -- Article III says "the judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in . . . inferior Courts." That arrangement isn't really a side detail or something that shifts based on circumstance. It's pretty fundamental to the whole system. In fact, if you change that formula, it isn't really the American system of government anymore.

I'm not a lawyer or a constitutional scholar, but I do know that Article II, Section 1 also says "The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America."

Of course, it's the current day political agenda that drives this particular constitutional debate. Liberal Democrats are currently heavily invested in portraying President Bush as some kind of extra-constitutional monarch, presumably because accusing someone of monarchical ambitions is a still-effective political smear. The classic examples are the Whig Party's vilification of President Andrew Jackson and FDR's accusation that rich Republicans were "economic royalists".

As I understand it, the grant of executive power to the President in Article II, Section 1 gives the president additional authority over and above his powers as Commander-in-Chief. If I remember correctly, this is because the vesting of executive power to the president may include certain unspecified reserve executive powers that are inherent in the notion of the executive power. For example, the issuance of executive orders may be justifable in this way. So the Democratic case for a King George really depends on scrupulously ignoring the existence of Article II, Section 1.

The Nerd, part II

Another aspect of the concept of the nerd as a class stereotype is that some of the most perceptive anti-nerd writing seems to come from successful tech writers. For example, this writer for Wired News observes that:

"Blog" itself is short for "weblog," which is short for "we blog because we weren't very popular in high school and we're trying to gain respect and admiration without actually having to be around people."

The very clever implication is that being around people is a unmistakable sign of one's worth to contemporary American society. The absolutely indispensible people in American society are so coveted as companions that they are never not around people and even expect you to pay for the privilege of spending time with them.

Another example is the correlation of "geeks", mental derangement, and excessive masturbation:

The mental imbalance I refer to is most readily seen in the geek's masturbatory obsessions. Having no sense of perspective and lacking a personality, the geek attempts to kill two birds with one stone and form a personality around fanatical involvement in an arbitrary pastime. This pastime could involve watching Japanese cartoons, reading fantasy novels, playing video games, or literally just masturbating a lot. The pastime itself is not so significant and has only two universal attributes: that it not require physical prowess of any kind, and that it be impossible to distinguish between enjoying the pastime and not enjoying it.

Another perceptive observation that the only thing that contemporary American society values more than being around lots of people is having sex with lots of people (thus, America's greatest president). This has reached the point where foreign political movements hoping to attract American media attention have to start showing off protest babes to get themselves noticed. Anyone who isn't spending their formative years training themselves to have sex with as many people as possible is therefore mentally damaged and a bad person.

A misconception is that only nerds can understand things like physics or differential equations (author's italics):

At some point, Tom Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, is in Shanghai with some of the rest of his Impossible Mission Force buddies, and they are trying to figure out how to get into some super-secure building (part of the skyline to the right) in about 30 minutes. Cruise is hell-bent on doing it (for reasons I won’t go into in case you want to see the film) and starts planning a daring approach. He starts drawing the various buildings, noting the distances between them and their heights, and then he starts writing equations! He’s trying to figure out something or other to do with swinging from one building to another, and he’s -I repeat- writing equations. And mumbling to himself a bit as he calculates, if I recall correctly!

I suspect that this scene was added to disarm criticisms that multiple uses of deus ex machina were employed in previous installments of the "Mission Impossible" movie franchise. Unless one is Batman or Spiderman, obviously one has to plan out all of those death-defying jumps ahead of time. Another reason that this is at least moderately non-nerdy is that technological one-upmanship is an American sign of social status as well. Even jocks know that they are going to have to learn enough technical knowledge to buy and operate a top-of-the-line high-performance television for their future family room and/or babe lair.

Of course, the Middle Ages had a solution to the social problem of the nerd which was the monestary. Apparently, it was so much fun to learn how to read and write that people would spend the rest of their lives totally cut-off from society, doing nothing but reading and writing instead of having sex.

The Nerd, part I

This is another one of those clearing house posts where I clear out a number of related ideas that never germinated into full postings on their own merits. I like to think of it as the blogosphere equivalent of the television "flashback episode". The rules are simple: musings are aggregated as I consider the topic over the next few hours or so with iconoclasm and heresy, as always, being greatly prefered. Thus, without further ado, some musings on the post that started it all.

Sean at Cosmic Variance mentions the great blogosphere nerd-off of 2006, with some related social analysis about what being a nerd really means. He largely summarizes the difference between a nerd and a geek with:

Words like “nerd” or “geek” have two very different sets of connotations, and it’s hard to evoke one without the other. One has to do with technical mastery and know-how, or even a more broadly-based appreciation for things academic and intellectual. The other has to do with social awkwardness, the inability to comfortably converse with strangers at cocktail parties, and a tendency to dress in the least attractive way possible.

This is the conventional wisdom that being a nerd is essentially a social awkwardness problem. But when you really think about it, this is something of a "non-explanation explanation". Doesn't every marginalized subcultural grouping associated with negative stereotypes face a social awkwardness problem, one way or another?

I think that a more useful understanding of nerds as a social phenomenom is to realize that the term also has subtle class connotations in addition to skill connotations. The classical "Poindexter"-type nerd, for example, is always portrayed as wearing large-framed glasses conspicuously held together with tape as if he* cannot afford to wear unbroken glass frames. The "Comic Book Guy"-type nerd, on the other hand, is depected as overweight because the underclass are stereotypically unable to control vulgar impulses such as food consumption, and wearing ill-fitting clothing that was obviously purchased much earlier in the character's career of weight gain. The overweight nerd wearing ill-fitting clothing is either too poor or too unmotivated to buy fitting clothing, social apathy being another trait associated with poverty.

In this point of view, insofar as the stereotypical nerd has any aspirations at all, he could be characterized as someone with a lower class lifestyle who views education as a tool of upwards economic mobility. Part of the negative connotation of being a nerd might arise from the fact that this a decidedly pre-welfare -- almost 19th century -- strategy of social improvement: the poor literally attempting to lift themselves out of poverty by their bootstraps without assistance from a benevolent Big Government.

Another perspective is Paul Graham's essay "Why Nerds are Unpopular" which explains the unpopularity of nerds as being inherent in the public school system:

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

The essay also touches upon the seemingly natural antipathy between "jocks" and nerds:

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits.

So part of the social awkwardness of being nerd comes from a lack of "character", which in the context of public schools is associated with successful performance in preferrably group sports. This is suspiciously similar to the old British Imperial notion that everything one needed to know to run the British Empire could be taught on the rugby field.

The television adapation of the Sherlock Holmes story "The Empty House" starring Jeremy Brett has a good illustration of this. One gets the impression that upper-class Britons list their leisure-time activities on their resumes, or that they would if their "character" ever dropped so low that they would actually need to go to the trouble of writing them in order to obtain employment.

So in a sense, the contemporary American jock is the spiritual heir to the British Imperial bureaucrat; this makes the movie "Gandhi" the most objectively pro-nerd movie ever filmed.

*Yes, there are female nerds. This post adopts the Murray Convention that third person singular pronouns be chosen to refer to the sex of the author.