Finding a presidential candidate, part I: Illegal Immigration

Like many other Republican voters, I'm still undecided about who I am going to support in the Republican primaries. In order to make up my mind, I'm going to examine the web sites of the current major party candidates and point out where their positions on a given topic differ from mine. When I decide upon a candidate to support, the process will stop and an endorsement will be declared. To make the process fair for the general election, I'll even include the Democrats. The first topic that I will examine is illegal immigration.

What I'm looking for: Illegal immigration is really the two separate problems of illegal entry into the United States and illegal residence in the United States. What I'm looking for is candidate who will be strong in stopping illegal entry, strong but tolerant in eliminating illegal residence, and supportive of legal immigration. General disqualifiers are amnesties without securing the border, making it illegal to enforce the laws against illegal entry or residence, and any form of outright lunacy.

Here are how the major party candidates appear to me on the issue, starting with the Republicans.

Alan Keyes: Keyes appears to be running on a conservative "morality" platform, so he seems to accept controlling the borders, enforcing the law, and encouraging citizenship. On the other hand, his web site's issue statement comes pretty close to invoking the "outright lunacy" disqualifier with talk of "de facto colonization of our country."

Ron Paul: Ron Paul has another Republican platform of border control and enforcing the laws, but with two proposals that ring false to me: ending birthright citizenship and no welfare for illegal aliens. Birthright citizenship is an American tradition and deserves to be continued. Denying welfare benefits to illegal aliens, period, is just too simply put here. We don't want to have a system that showers tons of free money on illegal immigrants while leaving legal immigrants out in the cold, but there are also certain services that government provides to its citizens that, yes, even illegal immigrants should be able to participate in.

Mitt Romney: Romney has the standard "law and order" Republican position -- control the border, enforce the laws -- without the pitfalls that we saw endorsed by Ron Paul. Avoiding mention of denying benefits to illegal immigrants helps Romney here and hurts Paul, because this is really a legislative decision and not an executive one. Explicit mention of punishing sanctuary cities is another plus in the Romney platform.

Rudy Giuliani: Giuliani has another standard "law and order" Republican position similar to Romney's, but with the exception of "Deporting illegal aliens who commit a felony." Oh, well, I guess that as long as illegal aliens aren't, say, carjacking the mayor's limo somewhere on Main Street, USA, then illegal immigration is ok.

Mike Huckabee: Huckabee has another good "law and order" Republican position -- if only he hadn't been brainwashed by the the Fair Tax. His platform also has a nice "screw you" to foreign governments: "Inform foreign governments when their former citizens become naturalized U.S. citizens."

Duncan Hunter: Hunter has yet another good "law and order" Republican position that, unfortunately, proves that he has been in Congress way too long. His website mentions his proposal for a "congressional pardon" for Border Patrol agents Ramos and Compean. While this is a cause célèbre for many conservatives, the congressional pardon idea is, frankly, too non-presidential. Even if you think that these agents shouldn't be pardoned, Hunter's statement that he has been lobbying the president to pardon the agents is also too wimpy. It would be better, bolder, and more presidential to say "If President Bush won't pardon these agents, President Hunter will." Duncan Hunter also wants to end birthright citizenship, which I oppose.

John McCain: The Chameleon is already disqualified on this topic due to supporting the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007.

Fred Thompson: His website has another good "law and order" Republican position with no real standouts and no real drawbacks. There is nothing to celebrate but nothing to regret.

Moving on to the Democrats:

Joe Biden: He actually has an impressive website on this position. He seems like a standard Republican on the issue, but also has a subtle reminder that he is a liberal when he states "This debate has turned into a race to the bottom. It has become about ways to keep Spanish-speaking people out of this country when in fact undocumented people in this country are from all backgrounds." I guess his position is that conservatives are racist morons, so vote for me.

Hillary Clinton: Categorically disqualified. Sorry.

Christopher Dodd: Since I can't find immigration on his web site's issues list, he's disqualified as well.

John Edwards: Disqualified on the same technicality as Christopher Dodd.

Mike Gravel: His website blames illegal immigration on NAFTA. I guess he hasn't realized that, in fact, undocumented people in this country are from all backgrounds. The other day on NPR, he blamed the furor over illegal immigration on "scapegoating" due to, among other things, the instability in Iraq. Disqualified for outright lunacy.

Dennis Kucinich: His policy positions crash my web browser, so disqualified on a technicality. If you can't "step up to the plate", you don't get to be president.

Barack Obama: If I close my eyes and pretend that I didn't disqualify John McCain for the comprehensive immigration reform that Obama supports, he actually has a pretty reasonable-sounding position.

Bill Richardson: His position is similar to Barack Obama's, in the sense that it sounds reasonable if I ignore the support of comprehensive immigration reform.

Recap: Out of the Republican candidates, it looks like Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and Fred Thompson are at the top of the list for me, followed by Rudy Giuliani in tier two, Ron Paul and Duncan Hunter in tier three, and with Alan Keyes and John McCain disqualified. The three non-disqualified Democrats don't compete with the Republicans for me. Otherwise, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Bill Richardson would be the three roughly equivalent potential endorsements on this issue.

Vacuum Energy Favorite Posts of 2007 (so far)

It is a venerable year-end tradition in the blogosphere to compile a list of one's favorite blog posts (or favorite anything, really). Thus, here are my favorite posts, one for each month, from 2007.

January: Liberals don't want to destroy private enterprise. They just want to make private enterprise "better".

February: The stupid party

March: How to make liberals hate a movie in 6 easy lessons.

April: Welcome to Opposite Land.

May: Porkbusters

June: From Thomas Jefferson to Star Trek

July: A brief history of United States foreign policy, part I

August: Really dumb Supreme Court commentary

September: Idiocracy

October: Is Al Gore an environmental hypocrite?

November: An abominable proposition

December: A dialogue from Opposite Land

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto

Disaster strikes Pakistan:

Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday by an attacker who shot her after a campaign rally and then blew himself up. Her death stoked new chaos across the nuclear-armed nation, an important U.S. ally in the war on terrorism.

At least 20 others were killed in the attack on the rally for Jan. 8 parliamentary elections where the 54-year-old former prime minister had just spoken.

The big question now is whether or not the "Putin of Pakistan" was involved.

Megan McArdle versus the Ronulans

Apparently the best way to draw attention to your blog is to badmouth the gold standard, thus tempting the Ronulans to attack in force (some people just cannot escape those pesky orbital mind control lasers). A textbook example on how to enrage these idiots comes from Megan McArdle where she discusses an exchange between congressman Ron Paul and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke:

What Congressman Dr. Paul is saying doesn't make any particular sense; American consumers are not particularly suffering because of the decline of the dollar, the dollar is not declining because of Fed policy, and the Federal Reserve has nothing to do with a relative scarcity of oil and food, which is what is driving the CPI increases he complains about. If we were on the gold standard, oil and food would still be getting more expensive, and people on fixed incomes would still be feeling the pinch.

I think this all makes sense; making a sympathetic reading of her posts instead of blowing your top about them tends to help the reasoning sink in faster. Here's my analysis (admittedly a physicist's point of view) on the subject.

• At any point in American history, there is a certain amount of suffering experienced by American consumers. I believe her point is that American consumers are not particularly suffering because of the decline of the dollar.



• The dollar isn't declining because of Fed policy. The dollar is declining because of a decrease in the demand for dollars. Think of the case of China and the United States as an example. For years, China has been exporting anything that wasn't nailed down to the United States in exchange for dollars. China then loaned those dollars back to the United States in exchange for repayment with interest (i.e. more dollars). The United States was getting lots of cheap consumer goods, China was slowly dollarizing its economy, and life was good.
  
  Then the housing bubble burst. If we assume that Chinese investors with spare dollars formed the impression of greater risk associated with American investments, this would serve to deter them from investing their dollars in American investments. So what do they do with their spare dollars to make a profit? They buy American-made goods and resell them in China! So the supply of dollars is the same, but the demand for dollars has partially switched to a demand for American-made products. Thus, the dollar weakens without the Fed having been involved.



• The Federal Reserve doesn't have anything to do with the relative scarcity of food and oil, unless you suspect that Ben Bernanke has a secret reservoir of oil wells and corn fields that nobody else knows about. You might want to double-check the magnetic permeability of your metallic head covering, just in case.

Megan McArdle reiterates this last point (my boldface):

How much of the higher price of gasoline is the Fed's fault?

To a first approximation, zero. Oil is priced in dollars in the international market. The falling dollar has no effect on the price of oil. And inflation is a tiny contributor to the huge increase in gasoline prices. The huge increase is due to the fact that a lot of people want to consume oil, but producers have been slow to supply additional quantities. When demand goes up and supply doesn't, prices rise.

You can read a dissenting view here.

Sometimes I'm so good, it's scary.

Vacuum Energy, December 13, 2007:

Next week, I expect a top Clinton aide to accuse Barack Obama of having sexual relations with an intern.

Here's the latest scandal in the Democratic primary race:

Presidential candidate John Edwards is caught up in a love child scandal, a blockbuster ENQUIRER investigation has discovered.

The ENQUIRER has learned exclusively that Rielle Hunter, a woman linked to Edwards in a cheating scandal earlier this year, is more than six months pregnant — and she's told a close confidante that Edwards is the father of her baby!

The ENQUIRER's political bombshell comes just weeks after Edwards emphatically denied having an affair with Rielle, who formerly worked on his campaign and told another close pal that she was romantically involved with the married ex-senator.

I was aiming at Obama and Edwards was the one that got nailed (so far).

A nice comparison

Vox Day on October 23, 2007 (author's emphasis and hyperlink):

Read Benito Mussolini's Fascist Manifesto. There is not a SINGLE ONE of the seventeen policies that would apply to radical Islam. Not one! I highly doubt any radical Muslim wants the secular state to seize all the possessions of the Islamic clergy or to grant women's suffrage; radical Islam is closer to the complete opposite of fascism than it is to being a form of it.

Note that one of the line items of the Fascist Manifesto is "A national policy intended to peacefully further the Italian national culture in the world."

Vox Day on December 18, 2007:

Only a fool would believe that the next Fascists will come wearing blackshirts and speaking Italian.

Obviously only a fool would believe that the United States is even close to becoming a fascist state. The United States hasn't even taken the first steps towards seizing the possessions of the religious congregations and the abolition of all the bishoprics. We don't even have the slightest hope of abolishing the Senate yet.

Ex-President George H. W. Bush joins the club.

The former president joins the "Friends of Bill" club, that is:

Former President Bill Clinton said Monday that the first thing his wife Hillary will do when she reaches the White House is dispatch him and his predecessor, President George H.W. Bush, on an around-the-world mission to repair the damage done to America's reputation by the current president — Bush's son, George W. Bush.

"Well, the first thing she intends to do, because you can do this without passing a bill, the first thing she intends to do is to send me and former President Bush and a number of other people around the world to tell them that America is open for business and cooperation again," Clinton said in response to a question from a supporter about what his wife's "number one priority" would be as president.

One would think that if there was one person in the world that Bill Clinton wouldn't dare to treat like a personal lackey, it would be another former president -- especially a former president who set personal feelings aside to work with Clinton for humanitarian causes. Wrong!

Have a happy December rest interval, citizen!

The real reason why Christmas has to be totally banned from the public sphere: somebody might get hurt.

The so-called "War on Christmas" is always something of a gray area from the atheist point of view. On the one hand, the annual arguments and lawsuits about the exact ratio of Christmas tree ornaments to menorah candles that is consistent with the First Amendment such sound totally ridiculous.

On the other hand, the preferred liberal solution to the problem of culture conflict during the month of December is for everyone to speak in starkly utilitarian cant. Obsessively referring to the date of December 25th as "holiday" -- as if December 25th has always been known only as "holiday" -- is exactly the type of mind-deadening jargon that liberals used to ridicule their totalitarian opponents for employing. Now it is liberals who are making people feel like thought criminals for daring to acknowledge the existence of a Christmas.

Yet more electoral hypocrisy from the Clinton

The wife of Bill "I did not inhale" Clinton now thinks that drug use disqualifies a candidate from the presidency:

A top adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign said Wednesday that Democrats should give more thought to Sen. Barack Obama's admissions of illegal drug use before they pick a presidential candidate.

Obama's campaign said the Clinton people were getting desperate. Clinton's campaign tried to distance itself from the remarks.

Next week, I expect a top Clinton aide to accuse Barack Obama of having sexual relations with an intern.

It's not over until the Electoral College sings.

The possibility that Hillary Clinton may lose the Democratic Iowa caucus to challenger Barack Obama has produced a great deal of speculation about a change of plan for the Clinton campaign. For example:

Hillary Rodham Clinton's backup plan if she falters in Iowa can be summed up in two words: New Hampshire.

Clinton's Democratic team is preparing television ads here criticizing Barack Obama's health care plan and working to build what campaigns call a firewall. If the Obama presidential campaign ignites in Iowa, she wants to be ready to cool him off in a state where her organization is strong and her support has proven durable.

Apparently the contingency planning doesn't stop there. Mickey Kaus points out speculation that Hillary might lose the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary and offers advice about what to do after that (author's boldface):

Anyway, given today's outlook, Hillary is well advised to drop the "halo of inevitability" and don the fur suit of the Energizer bunny candidate who will just keep going and going even if she, say, loses the first three primaries and the next three. Her strategists are presumably already thinking about such a long-haul comeback plan.

The common factor ignored by these types of conventional campaign analyses is the propaganda factor. We know that Hillary Clinton is unlimitedly ambitious, unstoppably ruthless, and raking in tons of cash. She also has a lot of friendly -- to the point of utter gullability -- media figures on her side. That puts a lot of options on the table for her that other candidates don't have:

• The most obvious campaign tactic is that Barack Obama will "pull a Howard Dean" and fall victim to an instant-onset Big Media counter-punch. That is, the mainstream media would seemingly spontaneously adopt an anti-Obama story that would be repeated endlessly in an effort to stampede Obama supporters into abandoning him. The actual storyline used for this attack could be anything, whether rational ("The Clinton campaign released new video footage of Barack Obama snorting coke today..."), exaggerated ("Was Obama wearing mascara at his post-caucus victory speech?"), or entirely irrational ("Obama supports wombat attacks on little girls . News at 11").



• Another posssible campaign tactic is messing with Obama's delegates at the nominating convention. After all, only ignorance about the true facts could cause someone to fail to recognize Hillary Clinton as the natural leader of the human race. This could come in the form of a media counter-punch or in a direct lobbying effort from the Clinton campaign. Another plus is that it does have the virtue of having been tried before.



• A related tactic would be for Hillary Clinton to wait until the election is over, then launch a lobbying campaign against the Electoral College to defect en masse to voting for Hillary Clinton for president. Historically speaking, it has been completely unprecedented to attempt to lobby one's way to a voting majority of defectors starting from scratch; when Al Gore attempted this in the 2000 election, he was only looking for two defectors to put him over the top in the totals. On the other hand, rules are for Republicans, dude.



• Another similar tactic would be a late-game ballot switch. Hillary could just wait for Barack Obama to get pounded mercilessly by his Republican challenger, then try to stampede public opinion her way to "save the election" for the Democrats. Again, while this tactic has been battle-tested to a certain extent to keep Senate seats in Democratic hands, this is an unprecedented tactic for someone to pull off in a presidential election.

Yet more really stupid propaganda

Why is it that the only way to be "black enough" to be elected president is to be rich, well-educated, Southern, and white? The very notion is totally insane, yet the belief doesn't seem to be going away. For example, this article reports that:

Civil rights icon Andrew Young says Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is too young and lacks the support network to ascend to the White House.

In a media interview posted online, Young also quipped that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton has her husband behind her, and that "Bill is every bit as black as Barack."

Here's another bit of relatively stupid pro-Hillary propaganda. It's subtle, but it's also totally bogus:

"I want Barack Obama to be president," Young said, pausing for effect, "in 2016."

"It's not a matter of being inexperienced. It's a matter of being young," Young said. "There's a certain level of maturity ... you've got to learn to take a certain amount of (expletive)."

Bill Clinton turned 46 in 1992, the year that he was first elected president. Barack Obama will turn 47 in 2008.

A dialogue from Opposite Land

In Opposite Land, scientists are dangerously unstable, superstitious nutballs who throw logic to the wind to concoct their bizarre theories, and the religious believers are level-headed, rational, scholars who carefully sift through the evidence in the search for truth. To get an idea about what debate is like in Opposite Land, examine this dialogue (written by Vox Day) in which Vox Day slaps "Athiest Science Supporter" around with his own logic.

If the intent of the dialogue is to convince people to abandon atheism for some for of theism, the argument is not particularly convincing. For example, we have the following exchange:

ASS: No, there is [scientific evidence], but it's not what was generated by the application of the scientific method. Data was what was generated. The labelling of that data as "evidence" afterwards is subjective.

VOX: You're saying that scientific evidence is subjective, then?

ASS: Er... yeah.

Here Vox has his creatively written, atheist stooge fall into the trap that was left out in plain sight for him. After a little irrelevent verbal fencing for show, Vox springs the trap and lets his atheist character dissolve into a fury of ad hominem attacks:

VOX: I have no doubt it [the scientific method] produces data very effectively. The relevant question regards the validity of the subjective interpretations required to transform the data into evidence. But regardless, when you talk about "scientific 'evidence'", you actually mean "the subjective interpretation of data", right?

ASS: "The subjective interpretation of data produced by the scientific method", actually.

VOX: All right. So when one says "there is no scientific evidence for the existence of God", one is actually saying "there is no subjective interpretation of data produced by the scientific method for the existence of God." And this is quite clearly false, as there are tens of thousands of examples to the contrary floating around the Internet. Therefore, by your own definition, there is not only evidence for the existence of God, there is also scientific evidence for the existence of God.

There we have it! Scientific data is entirely subjective evidence, so of course you cannot actually prove anything with science; don't even bother trying to prove that God does not exist with science! On the other hand, in Opposite Land, every fragment of stone tablet or scrap of papyrus from millenia ago is objectively evidence for the existence of God:

VOX: The Bible is documentary evidence, just as Arrian's manuscript written on the basis of non-existent texts is documentary evidence for the existence of Alexander the Great and Commentarii de Bello Civili is documentary evidence for the existence of Julius Caesar. Rainbows and the Jewish people are real evidence of God's existence, as, theoretically, is the Cohen gene. "The Passion of the Christ" is demonstrative evidence, as would be a three-dimensional chart explicating the improbabilities posed by the Anthropic Principle.

In conventional reality, the situation is the exact opposite from what Vox Day describes. It is the scientific data which is objectively evidence for or against (or, possibly, not bearing upon) hypotheses. It is mostly Vox Day's fellow Christians who are using the subjective interpretations of data as evidence to prop up their theories (and I'm sure it pisses Vox off to no end when they do this in his comments).

Great Moments in Western Information Technology

The 1 drachma wax tablet (325 BC): As Alexander the Great spoke to General Ptolemy, "If we could get ten thousand of these into the hands of Persian schoolchildren, we could rule an empire stretching from Greece to India." The sceptical response: "The sun gets awfully hot in Persia. Are you sure these things aren't going to melt?".

The 1 denarius vellum sheet (AD 200): The sales pitch to Caesar was simply "If we could get one hundred thousand of these into the hands of barbarian children on our northeastern border, we might be able to keep the Empire from collapsing someday." Reason for failure: unscrupulous merchants flooded the market with cheap papyrus imported from Egypt.

The 100 monk monastery (AD 800): Wise King Charlemagne was the first leader to realize that one hundred monks, all working and living together as one, could recopy the entire contents of a library in forty or fifty years. Drawback to plan: nobody else knew how to read.

The 1 franc per year university student (AD 1050): One of the panels of the Bayeaux Tapestry states that "if we can get young men to work fourteen-hour days of mind-bending intellectual labor in exchange for just enough food, water, clothing, and shelter to keep themselves alive, we might be able to revive learning in Normandy and finally conquer England." Drawback to the plan: there were no drawbacks! Medieval kings, Renaissance princes, enlightened eighteenth-century despots, and today's billionaire software gurus have all realized the benefits of exploiting geek labor for profit.

The 100 florins per week savant (AD 1400): "If we could send these men to teach a couple of hundred schoolchildren of Europe each, we'll have muscle-powered flying machines by AD 1500!" Drawback to plan: charlatans.

The $100 dollar laptop (AD 2005): From the Wall Street Journal (via MSM Money):

In 2005, Nicholas Negroponte unveiled an idea for bridging the technology divide between rich nations and the developing world. It was captivating in its utter simplicity: Design a $100 laptop and, within four years, get it into the hands of up to 150 million of the world's poorest schoolchildren.

Drawback to plan: computer hackers discover how to run "Tetris" on the $100 laptop.

Yet Another Stupid Campaigning Tactic

This report, if true, makes me wonder if Hillary Clinton believes that all Iowa Democrats are morons, or just likely Democratic primary voters:

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton ramped up criticism of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama today, and said his positions on health care and handling of campaign finance rules have begun to reflect on his character.

The poster-woman for disastrously botched health care reforms, who just happens to be the single most notorious violator of campaign finance laws in post-Watergate history, now believes that making poor choices for health care proposals and campaign financing* is a disqualifier for the presidency. That's an excellent reason for voting for Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton.

*I suspect that Barack Obama's true campaign finance mistake was actually trying to comply with the rules, as opposed to cackling shrilly at the FEC until the election is over.

The clown congress gets a clue.

All year, I have been stunned and appalled by how utterly ridiculous the Democratically controlled Congress has been. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have been so blinded by ideology and hatred of President Bush that even the most stupid, brain-damaged, totally moronic ideas sounds great to them. These people are total fools, yet they don't even care.

Case in point: Congressman John Murtha now thinks that the surge in Iraq is working:

U.S. Rep. John Murtha today said he saw signs of military progress during a brief trip to Iraq last week, but he warned that Iraqis need to play a larger role in providing their own security and the Bush administration still must develop an exit strategy.

"I think the 'surge' is working," the Democrat said in a videoconference from his Johnstown office, describing the president's decision to commit more than 20,000 additional combat troops this year. But the Iraqis "have got to take care of themselves."

Representative John Murtha has been fighting tooth and nail against the Bush "occupation" of Iraq since day one of the current congress. Representative John Murtha has spent the last eleven months employing every legislative trick in the book in a desperate attempt to stop the surge and remove the troops from Iraq. Representative John Murtha is the standard-bearer of a political party that believes that President Bush only ordered a surge of troops because President Bush wants more working class people to die. Representative John Murtha of the "The War is Lost" party and the "The Surge is Futile" party now thinks that the surge is working after all!

Gee whiz, you know, if we had ever taken John Murtha's foreign policy advice seriously, it would have totally screwed over our troops and the nation of Iraq. It's a good thing that there is no danger of that ever happening again.

Senator Hillary Clinton: Control Freak

How is it that Senator Clinton is being allowed to run the most blatant and utterly shameless dirty tricks campaign since, say, the last time a Clinton ran for president? Why is it that the suggestion that Hillary Clinton is anything less than the greatest, most compassionate, most infallible person to ever run for president is seen by the Clinton campaign as horrible crime to be subjected to swift retaliation? Why is it that the other presidential candidates are not allowed to think anything other than happy thoughts abouts Hillaryland if she can help it?

The latest trick from the first female presidential candidate to make Richard Nixon look like the Marquess of Queensberry: yet another planted questioner, this time at a Republican debate. Republicans everywhere were expecting some level of general idiocy from the clowns at CNN, and -- SURPRISE -- they got it.

Thoughts about "Lions for Lambs"

Based on a single positive review, I went to go see the new film "Lions for Lambs" in the theaters. Although I missed the last third of the film due to an audio failure in the theatre, most of the rest of the film wasn't all that bad. Here are some thoughts about it.

• The first thing one notices about the film is the attention to detail required to make Tom Cruise look like Republican Senator Jasper Irving. There is the obligatory lapel pin indicating his personal, daily political sentiment to the observing public (I blame Madeleine Albright for this), there is the vaguely flag-like red, white, and blue striped tie, and there is the important Southern hair. Apparently it was also necessary to give Tom Cruise non-lethal doses of Joker gas to broaden his grin into a full-head beamer.



• The particular saga of the two college students, Ernest and Arian, who go from political science classes to being stranded on a winter mountain plateau in Afghanistan, could have easily made a great movie all on its own. The highlight of their backstory is a flashback to their college political science class presentation, which in a fairly obvious parallel to their Afghanistan prediciment involves them getting "sniped" at with half-baked questions and comments from the bored college students in the audience. Arian and Ernest managed to hold their own in the debate that their presentation provokes by resorting to the movie's default mode of political argument: cant.



• Probably the most stupid argument that I saw in the movie came from Meryl Street's character, journalist Janine Roth, during her interview of the Republican Senator. Very roughly speaking the argument goes something like this:

  Senator: I have a new plan for winning the war in Afghanistan.
  Journalist: I think it's more important that we talk about the mistakes that were made.
  Senator: Yes, mistakes were made. Really bone-headed mistakes. Let's talk about the new plan now.
  Journalist: You already admitted to mistakes. How do you know that this new plan isn't a mistake?

  The one true pleasure of this movie is watching Senator Irving grow visibly more annoyed with this type of inane questioning while trying to hide the fact that he thinks she is a half-witted dingbat.

An abominable proposition

An engineer proposes that control over monetary policies be given over to engineers. As a physicist, I can categorically state that that would be an economic disaster of titanic proportions. The culprit is that current hobgoblin of little, conservative minds: a fixed value of the dollar. Perhaps we physicists, being more acquanted with the theory of relativity than your average engineer, are more comfortable with relative quantities.

The first intellectual casualty of the fixed-dollar mentality is blaming the business cycle on the Federal Reserve system (author's italics):

“Capital” is measured in terms of money (dollars), is mobilized by money, but is not money. Capital represents real economic resources. The Fed cannot create capital. All it can do is create money and use that money to commandeer capital. Unfortunately, this can cause inflation.

Once inflation gets going it tends to run away, with rapidly rising prices and escalating inflationary expectations. Ultimately this must be stopped. Unfortunately, raising the fed funds rate in order to halt inflation can cause an economy to “overshoot” into recession. Then, to fight the recession, the Fed will cut its fed funds target, thus starting the next oscillation of the business cycle.

Certainly the Fed could and probably has done this in the past. Certainly other monetary policies of past United States governments have also done this in the past. Remember, the business cycle has been around throughout American history; Andrew Jackson developed the predecessor of the modern Democratic Party, in part, to fight inflationary booms and busts caused by the State banking regime of his day. In another sense, the idea that the Federal Reserve can only create money is completely false. For example, the Federal Reserve controls the amount of money that banks must keep in deposit within the Federal Reserve system. By raising this requirement, the Federal Reserve can remove money from circulation.

Setting a fixed value for the dollar in terms of gold (or anything else) also doesn't make much sense in the era of globalization. Consider the case of China before the U.S. mortage disaster. China was then exporting anything and everything that wasn't nailed down to the United States in exchange for dollars. China would then use its dollars to invest in the United States in order to earn more dollars. In effect, China was shipping mass quantities of goods to the United States for the privilege of dollarizing its economy. This should have weakened the Chinese Renminbi substationally, but it didn't because the Chinese government maintained a fixed value of the Renminbi. In effect, the Chinese government was spending huge sums of money to prop up a boutique currency to compete against the dollar for the sake of national pride.

Setting a fixed value for the dollar in terms of gold would be just another example of spending money for the sake of keeping an inherently variable number at a fixed variable. In engineering terms, it's like arguing that the space shuttle should keep a rocket engine firing at all times merely to provide a comfortably constant 1g acceleration to the astronauts inside. If the astronauts inside can work perfectly well at any net acceleration at 1g and below, then why waste the rocket fuel?

Also note that the value of a dollar, even in terms of a fixed amount of gold, can still be altered. One mechanism for doing this is rumor-mongering. "Psst. Hey buddy, rumor has it that a bar of gold from the Fed is actually 1 percent lead. Pass it on."

The worst problem with the case for the fixed value of the dollar is the contention that interest rates would be kept low:

This new system would not be concerned with the federal deficit or the U.S. trade deficit. These relate to capital, and capital is not money. Similarly, the system would not be concerned with interest rates, which represent the cost of capital, not money. (As an aside, if the dollar were as stable as the foot, interest rates would be very low.)

The idea that putting the economy on the gold standard will make everyone happily share money with each other at practically no cost is just plain stupid. After insisting that the dollar must be defined in terms of a fixed amount of capital, in effect eliminating money in preference for a capital-only economy , the author now insists that we don't have to worry about deficits or interest rates because they just involve capital and not money. Yeah, right, whatever...

How Noble!

Senator Hillary Clinton wins the world's smallest gold star for this:

Agents of Sen. Hillary Clinton are spreading the word in Democratic circles that she has scandalous information about her principal opponent for the party's presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, but has decided not to use it. The nature of the alleged scandal was not disclosed.

Inevitability? What inevitability?

There has long been talk about whether Senator Clinton winning the Democratic nomination for the presidency is inevitable. The reason for the expectations of inevitability is obvious. Blind loyalty to the Clintons has become a defining pillar of contemporary liberalism.

This tradition of blind loyalty to the Clintons left her rivals for the Democratic nomination, Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards, with a dilemma: how to argue that he was more qualified to be president than Senator Clinton without implying that she was unqualified to be president. Their initial solution to the problem was to accept both premises and run upbeat, entirely positive campaigns. While there was still time, they could promote their candidacies without criticising her overtly; this strategy worked wonders for "Saint" Obama, but not as well for Edwards.

Relatively recently, this electoral strategy begain breaking down. Both Obama and Edwards were behind in the polls in the early primary states with the primary dates becoming uncomfortably close. Their refusal to overtly criticize Clinton left them looking like mere minions of the Clintons, as if they so weak-minded that they would rather accept a humiliating and possibly career-ending election loss rather than take the most elementary steps to salvage their campaigns. This was the crisis point for their candidacies. Staring defeat in the face, Obama and Edwards finally had to decide how much they wanted to be president. As it turns out, they wanted it rather badly after all, so they went on the attack.

Amazingly, the attacks actually worked surprisingly well, with the mainstream media even picking up on them and not dismissing them out of hand. For the first time since the defeat of HillaryCare in the 1990s, Senator Clinton was actually confronted with a political reality that wasn't happily rewriting itself to conform to the dictates of her will. The aura of inevitability began to waver and fade. Then, just today, this happened (hyperlinks removed):

ABC News' Eloise Harper and Rick Klein Report: It's been a rough stretch for Hillary Clinton -- a tough debate performance, a lost voice, and the revelation that the Clinton campaign had been coaching questioners at events.

Then, on Sunday, everything started falling down around her.

After a very Presidential-esque news conference - Clinton turned around to leave the reporters and their peppering questions. A staffer swooped open a curtain, and chaos ensued. Four large American flags came crashing in front of Senator Clinton as she headed for the door. In a controlled panic, the staffers and the Senator attempted to catch the flags before they fell to the ground.

This isn't the kind of thing that just happens by accident. When a presidential candidate's set decorations "spontaneously" collapse around him or her, it is a message from powerful people on the inside of the campaign to the public that they want that candidate to lose. A notorious example in recent memory was Senator Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign (my boldface):

Without meaningful primary opposition, Clinton was able to focus on the general election early, while Dole was forced to move to the right and spend his campaign reserves fighting off challengers. Political adviser Dick Morris urged Clinton to raise huge sums of campaign funds via soft money for an unprececented early TV blitz of swing states promoting Clinton's agenda and record. As a result, Clinton could run a campaign through the summer defining his opponent as an aged conservative far from the mainstream before Dole was in a position to respond. Compared to the 50-year old Clinton, Dole appeared especially old and frail, as illustrated by an embarrassing fall off a stage during a campaign event.

Yet Another Self-Refuting Column

Here is Frank Rich discussing the dangers of a United States military strike on Iran (embedded hyperlinks removed):

There are saner military minds afoot now: the defense secretary Robert Gates, the Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen, the Central Command chief William Fallon. They know that a clean, surgical military strike at Iran could precipitate even more blowback than our “cakewalk” in Iraq. The Economist tallied up the risks of a potential Shock and Awe II this summer: “Iran could fire hundreds of missiles at Israel, attack American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, organize terrorist attacks in the West or choke off tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s oil windpipe.”

The point seems to be that the United States could end up being totally screwed if it attacks Iran. Later in the column, Frank Rich writes (embedded hyperlinks removed):

A full-scale regional war, chaos in the oil market, an overstretched American military pushed past the brink — all to take down a little thug like Ahmadinejad (who isn’t even Iran’s primary leader) and a state, however truculent, whose defense budget is less than 1 percent of America’s? Call me a Pollyanna, but I don’t think even the Bush administration can be this crazy.

The argument seems to be that Iran could do all sorts of horrible things to us if we attack it, therefore, we shouldn't bully such a pathetically weak nation.

What's so great about Dinesh D'Souza? Part III

After a hiatus, I went back to reading Dinesh D'Souza's book "What's So Great About Christianity?" starting with chapter 11. This is apparently the start of a long set of argumentation about how God's creation of the universe is supported by modern science. For example, D'S0uza writes (p. 116, author's italics):

In a stunning confirmation of the book of Genesis, modern scientists have discovered that the universe was created in a primordial explosion of energy and light. Not only did the universe have a beginning in space and time, but the origin of the universe was also a beginning for space and time. Space and time did not exist prior to the universe. If you accept that everything that has a beginning has a cause, then the material universe had a nonmaterial or spiritual cause. This spiritual cause brought the universe into existence using none of the laws of physics. The creation of the universe was, in the quite literal meaning of the term, a miracle. Its creator is known to be a spiritual, eternal being of creativity and power beyond all conceivable limits. Mind, not matter, came at the beginning. With the help of science and logic, all this can be rationally determined.

I think there's a serious problem here that D'Souza hasn't realized. First, let me introduce some more convenient terminology. Let's denote the sum total of everything in existence, in whatever manner, shape, or form by the capitalized term Universe. Let's denote the entity with the properties of space and time that we describe with general relativity and quantum physics by the uncapitalized term universe. Now, we can imagine three possible hypothetical Universes:

1. There is the Universe where God exists independently of any notions of space and time.


2. There is the Universe where God exists independently of space and time, but where God coexists with a universe that does have the properties of space and time


3. The Universe consists solely of a universe with the properties of space and time. There is no God.

Out of this slate of choices, athiests are pretty happy to pick Universe 3, even if the current laws of science break down at sufficiently early times in the universe's history. D'Souza, on the other hand, wants to assert both Universes 1 and 2 by asserting that Universe 1 leads to Universe 2 through an act of creation by God. In other words, despite explicitly stating that Universe 1 has no temporal properties, D'Souza nevertheless asserts that there is, in fact, a temporal property of Universe 1 after all: time evolution from Universe 1 to Universe 2.

The problem for D'Souza is simple. To say that creation is possible presupposes the existence of time. To say that God can create time is therefore a contradiction.

A question for liberals

San Jose, California got hit by a magnitude 5.6 earthquake on Tuesday night. Global warming exacerbated by the policies of the Bush Administration must be at fault somehow, but how?

What's so great about Dinesh D'Souza? Part II

I finally finished reading Part III of Dinesh D'Souza's "What's So Great About Christianity?" tonight, and I am definately underwhelmed by the level of argument. D'Souza describes the purpose of this part as (p.83):

examin[ing] the relationship between Christianity and science. Specifically, [D'Souza] will consider whether there is an inherent antagonism between the two; atheist writers often portray an ongoing war between them.

As far as I can tell, D'Souza makes his case in this section in three ways:

1. In part, D'Souza uses the logical construction known as "proof by tweaking the opponent's nose". This is an argument of the general form "Atheists believe in or admire X, but in reality, we Christians invented X. Ha Ha."


2. D'Souza also argues against a self-constructed straw man: the atheist who believes that all Christians everywhere are totally irrational nut-balls.


3. Finally, D'Souza makes the case that the Church hardly persecuted Galileo at all, and such persecutation that the Church engaged in was a slap on the wrist, really, and Galileo totally had it coming anyway.

It's a rather pathetic book that forces its critic to explicitly conceed that, yes, there have been Christians who have held some rational beliefs as well.

In reality, the war between Science and Christianity doesn't comes down to just the fact that Christianity makes certain claims about the physical world that are false that are nonetheless expected to be belived in as true by the good Christian. The war between Science and Christianity really arises from the fact that the Christian belief in an all-powerful God capable of performing miracles undermines the notion of human rationality. Christians are not all totally irrational nut-balls because they just don't take the idea of an all-powerful God seriously.

As an example, consider the following proposition: humans do not breath air. Instead, they breathe a mixture of squid ink and liquified petroleum derivatives. The miraculous intervention of God provides us with the utterly convincing illusion of breathing air and might foil attempts at physically examining the viscuous ink/petroleum mixture (so don't give up trying, even if you fail).

As you can see, there are no laws of nature if God can suspend them anytime He pleases. There can be no science if God can skew the results willy-nilly anytime He wants. Despite his emphasis on the rationality of Christian belief, in Part III, D'Souza is completely oblivious to this point when he admits to believing in miracles (p. 94):

True, Christians believe in miracles, which can be seen as departures from the orderliness of nature. But miracles are notable because they are exceptional. Miracles inspire wonder because they are believed to be the product of a natural order that is, in rare cases, suspended. Medieval Muslim theologian Abu Hamed al-Ghazali claimed that God intervenes in every moment to make the events in the universe happen as they do. There is not question of laws; everything is the product of ceaseless divine intrustion.

So what makes the Christian scientist possible? How does a Christian know that he or she isn't living in one of those rare times of a suspension of the rules? What caused the vast prevalence of science in Christian, Western civilization? It's the conviction that, in order to obtain some generally useful data about the world, one has to assume that God isn't going to be miraculously altering it for a while. The difference between a Christian and al-Ghazali is that the Christian believes that his or her conception of reality is so profoundly important that God wouldn't dare to miraculously mess with it. The Christian scientist who studies, say, fluid mechanics and who believes in miracles basically has to underline his work with the additional proviso "Yes, I believe that God can miraculously part oceans and suspend the flow of rivers despite the established laws of science. My work is made possible by the fact that God basically doesn't give a s**t about water pressure any more."

In short, science is done despite Christian belief, not because of it. The reason why so many Christians were and are science friendly is because they can suspend their Christian beliefs for the sake of making scientific progress. Everyone knows that you just can't take God's all-powerful miraculous ability seriously if you expect to be able to accomplish something useful in your life. This is known as normal, rational behavior.

Finally, as to whether the Church persecuted Galileo or went easy on him, you can judge for yourself what the definition of "persecution" is. Consider what would happen if, say, President Hillary told a prominent conservative author something similar to what the Church told Galileo. Suppose this conservative received a letter from the White House that read "We are very interested in your conservative views. If conservatism turns out to be a correct political philosophy, Democrats everywhere will happily adopt it for themselves. On the other hand, we aren't entirely certain that conservatism is true or not. We have to be absolutely sure the conservatism is correct before we start encouraging people to adopt it. Just to be on the safe side, we think you shouldn't write anything or say anything to promote conservatism for the time being. Oh, by the way, don't say or write anything criticising liberallism or this whole thing could get a lot worse." Would this conservative meekly go along with the letter, or would this conservative claim "persecution" during his or her every waking moment?

What's so great about Dinesh D'Souza? Part I

I started reading Dinesh D'Souza's recently published book "What's So Great About Christianity?" the other day. So far, I am quite far from being impressed.

The book comes with a certain amount of history. In recent months, a number of big name authors have published books promoting atheism and denigrating Christianity. This has sparked a mini-boom of popular interest in (or, at the very least, popular advertising about) atheism. Not to be outdone by this new atheist offensive towards the mass book-reading audience, a number of Christian authors have published rebuttles and works extolling Christianity and critiquing atheism. "What's So Great About Christianity?" is one of these new pro-Christian publications.

We're not exactly talking philosophy even on the level of the weekend philosopher here on both sides of the argument here, so I don't have high expectations of technical precision. On the other hand, one would hope that our pro-Christian authors would take more than a slapdash approach to answering these new criticisms from the atheists. After reading a couple of chapters in "What's So Great About Christianity?", I haven't seen much evidence of that.

For example, in D'Souza's chapter eight he considers two famous arguments for the existence of God. He summarizes the first, attributed to Aquinas, as follows (pp. 85-86):

Aquinas argues that ever effect requires a cause, and that nothing in the world is the cause of its own existence. Whenever you encounter A, it has to be caused by some other B. But then B has to be accounted for, so let us say it is caused by C. This tracing of causes, Aquinas says, cannot continue indefinately, because if it did, then nothing would have come into existence. Therefore there must be an original cause responsible for the chain of causation in the first place. To this first cause we give the name God.

It's an interesting philosophical argument, provided that we ignore the fact that one of the premises have been explicitly disproved by science. As we know from quantum mechanics, there are events that have no cause; the quantum mechanical two-slit experiment is a classic example. The other example that D'Souza gives in chapter 8 is attributed to Anselm, and D'Souza formulates it as follows (pp. 87):

Anselm defines God as "that than which no greater can be thought." Presumably, this is a reasonable and widely accepted definition. Even an atheist should have no problem with it. We all understand the idea of God to correspond to a supreme being that stretches -- even transcends -- the limits of our imagination. Anselm proceeds to say that as we acknowledge and understand the definition, we must have some idea of God in our mind. He doesn't mean a pictorial representation. He simply means that our minds comprehend as a logical possibility the idea of God as "that than which no greater can be thought."

But if this is true, Anselm says, then God exists. We have proved God's existence. Why? Because if "that than which no greater can be thought" exists in the mind, then it must also exist in reality. The reason is that to exist in reality is, according to Anselm, "greater" than to exist merely in the mind. What is possible and actual is obviously greater than what is merely possible.

Maybe I'm missing out on some subtle point, but to me, this argument seems to rely upon "begging the question" about the existence of God. The problem is that identifying God as the being "than which no greater can be thought" is not a definition but a proposition

Suppose, for example, that God does not exist, but accept that we can think of a God that exists as being greater than such beings that do, in fact, exist. The proposition of the existence of "that than which no greater can be thought" would therefore be false. I don't see any reason why I must accept this proposition as true. Embaressingly for D'Souza, according to wikipedia, Aquinas himself rejected this argument by Anselm.

Is Al Gore an environmental hypocrite?

The short answer is no.

Right wing talk shows and blogs have been making a big deal lately about how big-name environmentalists like Al Gore are hypocrites. The point is that while Al Gore is allowed to fly around the world producing greenhouse gases as part of his quest to educate the public about global warming, the average citizen is expected to conserve resources as much as possible and live a carbon-neutral lifestyle.

This is not hypocrisy. This is the Right misunderstanding the point. The problem with carbon consumption is not the production of greenhouse gases per se; the planet doesn't "die a little a bit more" everytime a bit of carbon dioxide is produced. The problem is the production of greenhouse gases on a mass scale. As long as the priviledge of consuming carbon is restricted to the few -- by making carbon so expensive that only the rich can afford to consume it, say -- then the amount of potential environmental impact is negligible.

So, no, Al Gore is not an environmental hypocrite. He simply believes that a sustainable society will consist of two basic social classes. One social class will be granted extensive carbon-consumption priviledges in exchange for benevolent governance of world civilization. The other social class will consist of the masses: people living lives of stark* utilitarian discipline in order to preserve the environment for generations to come.

* Research suggests that bourgeois social institutions lead to increased greenhouse gas emissions.

A battle tactic of modern political rhetoric: "moving the goalposts"

Modern political rhetoric has a number of tactics that one can employ to confound one's enemies and bolster one's allies. "Moving the goalposts" refers to a rhetoric of subtly altering to one's benefit some key definition used in political debate. This works on the assumption that the mob mentality of a mass audience is in a perpetual state of being "born yesterday", in the sense that nobody of any political influence within that audience can be bothered to keep track of the shifting terms of a debate conducted in a public forum.

The run-up to the Iraq war was a good example of this. The Bush administration at the time was unloading data about Saddham Hussein's weapons programs on the public and making a vigorous case for an invasion of Iraq. Operating under the impression, whether rightly or wrongly, that the Bush administration's case for war was strengthing, the Democratic opposition to the war gradually moved the goalposts away from the administrations case. The reason for non-invasion gradually shifted from the future success of the inspections regime to the lack of evidence that Saddham Hussein had been developing nuclear weapons (as opposed to, say, chemical weapons), then to the lack of evidence that Saddham Hussein had test detonated a nuclear weapon, and then to the lack of evidence that Saddham Hussein's future nuclear arsenal was not deterrable by the United States' arsenal.

Here's another nice example referring to the debate over the meaning of the word "Islamofascist". Christopher Hitchens makes a good but imperfect attempt at a definition with:

The most obvious points of comparison [between fascism and Bin Ladinism] would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.

According to Vox Day, this comparison is abysmally stupid. In his opinion, there are no Islamofascists because they do not advocate the political and social program of Benito Mussolini (author's hyperlink and emphasis):

There is virtually NO similarity between the historical Fascist program and the Islamic Jihad. One is nationalistic, the other international in scope. One is utterly indifferent to questions of morality, the other is obsessed with it. One is heavily based on economics and politics, the other is almost entirely concerned with religion.

Read Benito Mussolini's Fascist Manifesto. There is not a SINGLE ONE of the seventeen policies that would apply to radical Islam. Not one! I highly doubt any radical Muslim wants the secular state to seize all the possessions of the Islamic clergy or to grant women's suffrage; radical Islam is closer to the complete opposite of fascism than it is to being a form of it.

Osama Bin Ladin isn't fighting for the universal eight-hour work day? Oops, I guess he's not an Islamofascist after all.

There is no such thing as too many clowns for Speaker Pelosi's car.

Democratic Representative Pete Stark lost his marbles on nationwide TV while blasting President Bush for his veto of legislation for S-CHIP:

Where are you going to get that money? Are you going to tell us lies like you're telling us today? Is that how you're going to fund the war? You don't have money to fund the war or children. But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president's amusement.

Return of the self-refuting column

Over at worldnetdaily.com, Vox Day wrote:

Despite its flaws, America has been one of the best friends the Jews have ever had. It would not only be a tragedy, it would be a stupid and wasteful one if Americans were provoked into developing the instinctive anti-semitism that currently pervades Europe, the Middle East and so much of the rest of the world.

So, what is the instinctive anti-semitism that currently pervades much of the rest of the world? Earlier in the article, Vox Day wrote:

One hopes that Mr. Forman's co-religionists have the wisdom to ignore his demand for the shunning of Miss Coulter as the Israel lobby's petulant demand for a third Middle East war, this time in explicit defense of Israel rather than U.S. national security, already has the potential to severely divide America's Jews from the rest of the country, Christians and nonChristians [sic] alike.

Can we please just not elect stupid to the next Congress?

It looks like political reality has finally set in with the House Democrats as they back away from their vote condeming the Armenian genocide:

Worried about antagonizing Turkish leaders, House members from both parties have begun to withdraw their support from a resolution supported by the Democratic leadership that would condemn as genocide the mass killings of Armenians nearly a century ago.

Almost a dozen lawmakers had shifted against the measure over the last 24 hours, accelerating a sudden exodus that has cast deep doubt over the measure’s prospects. Some representatives made clear that they were heeding warnings from the White House, which has called the measure dangerously provocative, and from the Turkish government, which has said House passage would prompt Turkey to reconsider its ties to the United States, including logistical support for the Iraq war.

Not surprisingly, this issue fits the recurring pattern of the Pelosi Speakership:

• Step 1: Propose a seemingly common-sense measure X that should win the support of a majority of Congress.
• Step 2: Demonize Republicans as spawn of Satan for daring to crawl into the light of day to oppose measure X.
• Step 3: Realize that the measure X is, in fact, mind-numbingly stupid, and that anyone who supports measure X would have to be a total idiot.
• Step 4: Allow Republicans, who were right all along about the merits of measure X, to pass not-X.

I know I'm a conservative blogger, and thus must pounce on the slightest sign of liberal weakness. This time, in all honesty, if the Democrats out there want to dump Pelosi from the House Leadership, I'll be supporting them on it.

Will Al Gore run for president in 2008?

There has been much speculation that that the momentum of winning the 2007 Nobel peace prize will push Gore into the 2008 presidential race. I believe that this would be highly unlikely. Think about it for a second. Al Gore has just won the world's most prestigous prize in commemoration of his benevolent governance of human civilization. Why would the "Goracle" abandon his influence over the global order in order to limit himself to being a mere president?

Is Hillary winning the nomination inevitable?

Michelle Obama, demonstrating that she would make a better choice for the nomination than Hillary Clinton, argues against inevitablility:

“Nothing is inevitable,” said Michelle Obama, vowing that her husband was a “uniter” who could beat Clinton to the party nomination, in a Sunday Times article.

Asked if she thought Clinton was a polarizing figure, she replied: “That is definitely one of the challenges she faces. You can see it in the surveys.”

Hillary Clinton's biggest advantage in the presidential race -- utter ruthlessness -- is also her biggest disadvantage. To a certain extent, the entire question is a reflection of the Clinton's propaganda machine: admitting that Hillary Clinton is not the inevitable winner means admitting that Hillary Clinton is not perfect, which means admitting that Republicans might have offered a valid criticism of her character at some point. Can't have that happening!

The other reason for the aura of inevitability comes from the Howard Dean catastrophe of 2004. If you remember, Dean had ridden a wave of popular acclaim in support of his bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. The Dean campaign seemed to have real grassroots fervor: college students across the nation were experiencing religious epiphanies before volunteering for the Dean campaign. At my university at the time, the Dean supporters were so heavily propagandized that one of them accused gays and lesbians of "intolerance" for not allowing the Dean campaign to be discussed at a weekly GLBT meeting.

Then as fast as you can say "Iowa", the Dean campaign imploded. One conspiracy theory that formed in explanation was that the entire Democratic nominating process was all an elaborate crowd-pleasing charade. The Democratic leadership simply waited for the right moment (to preserve "plausible deniability") and then "pulled the trigger" on the Dean campaign. The nagging suspicion is that something similar might be the reason for the present success of the Obama campaign.

This theory also suggests a reason for why so many states have been jockeying for the earliest nominating primary date. If the field of candidates for the 2008 nomination is going to get decimated down to one in the first week of the primary season, there isn't any point for a state to not have one of the first primaries.

Are video games art?

Film critic Robert Ebert has the opinion that video games are not art. Writer and video game designer Clive Barker disagrees. Ebert has a summary of the debate and a detailed response to Barker's comments here. The key exhange is this one (Ebert's choice of fonts in all cases; hyperlinks removed):

Barker: "I think that Roger Ebert's problem is that he thinks you can't have art if there is that amount of malleability in the narrative. In other words, Shakespeare could not have written 'Romeo and Juliet' as a game because it could have had a happy ending, you know? If only she hadn't taken the damn poison. If only he'd have gotten there quicker."

Ebert: He is right again about me. I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist. Would "Romeo and Juliet" have been better with a different ending? Rewritten versions of the play were actually produced with happy endings. "King Lear" was also subjected to rewrites; it's such a downer. At this point, taste comes into play. Which version of "Romeo and Juliet," Shakespeare's or Barker's, is superior, deeper, more moving, more "artistic"?

Believe it or not, I find myself agreeing with Ebert this time.

The key observation to make is that interactivity in entertainment certainly predates the computer age. I think we can presume that the world has had no shortage of Lego pyramids or paint-by-numbers Mona Lisas, but despite decades of labor expended, none of them has moved into the higher echelons of works of art. One real difference between Michelangelo's David and, say, a plastic version requiring the assembly of puzzle pieces is that the original statue is a product of both technical greatness and greatness of conception. For a single man to apprehend a work of art on a gigantic scale to be enacted in a fabulously expensive and risky medium is greatness of conception. Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", a real play expected to be performed before a real audience, is more of an artistic risk than "Romeo and Juliet: The RPG for your PC".

It's easy to see where the video game falls short of being art then. Explicitly elevating interactivity to the center of the mass gaming experience makes greatness of conception hardly greater than the conceptions of the "average man" (or, if you prefer, the "average teen") of the gameplaying public. Of course, Ebert hits this point himself when he wrote (hyperlinks removed):

I treasure escapism in the movies. I tirelessly quote Pauline Kael: The movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have no reason to go. I admired "Spiderman II," "Superman," and many of the "Star Wars," Indiana Jones, James Bond and Harry Potter films. The idea, I think, is to value what is good at whatever level you find it. "Spiderman II" is one of the great comic superhero movies but it is not great art.

Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize. News at 11.

I know that, as a conservative, liberals everywhere are expecting me to go crazy about this. To be perfectly honest, it's not that big of a deal for me. A prominent American liberal winning the Nobel Peace Prize is like me winning a free small french fries at McDonalds. In either case, it's somewhat less than necessary for the world to stop in order for people to disembark.

I think I can safely throw "The Conservative Soul" into the dumpster now.

After years of beating his readership over the head with the evils of "Christianism", Andrew Sullivan has finally started warming up to the "Big Oil" hypothesis for the Iraq War. He quotes from Jim Holt, who wrote in the "London Review of Books" that:

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

So "Christianists" weren't the real bad guys after all! The "Christianists", the Neocons, the Israel lobby (or whoever) were just as bought-off or deluded as everyone else: they engaged in the same old Big Government power capitalism that the United States has been engaged in since the days of John Adams and thought that they wouldn't be left holding the bag when the fiasco occured.

To cover his rear end on this massive blunder, Sullivan's article has a humerous point at the end:

Was this a plot from the beginning? I doubt it. But it is an obvious game-plan now.

He thinks that Big Oil executives -- i.e. the people who spend millions of dollars a year solely on keeping track of where the world's oil is and exactly how much it is worth -- just woke up yesterday morning and realized that they had a 3000% profit on a $1 trillion government investment in Iraq! What a lucky coincidence!

The new stupid party

Last week's conventional wisdom in the Democratic Party: don't question our patriotism!

This week's conventional wisdom in the Democratic Party: Rush Limbaugh is a draft dodger!

How did we end up with a Democratic party run by a bunch of clowns?

Do you remember last year when the Republican-controlled Congress wanted to pass the Flag Desecration Amendment? At the time, Democrats argued that Congress had too many important tasks ahead of it to waste time debating this amendment. Now it's a year later and the Democrat-controlled Congress has spent two weeks debating whether Right-wing talk show hosts are bigger bozos then Left-wing political pressure groups.

Yet Another Democratic Party Scam

It just drives me nuts that the Democratic Congress can't seem to debate a single proposal without making some kind of scam or joke out of it. The big Democratic uproar about Rush Limbaugh is the biggest case in point recently, but the latest tax-hike proposal from Congressman Jack Murtha is just as ridiculous:

Arguing it is unfair to continue to pass the cost of the war in Iraq to future generations, three senior House Democrats Tuesday offered a longshot plan to raise taxes to pay for the $150 billion bill for the war in 2008.

At the same time, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee announced they would delay action on the White House's war request for next year, saying he refuses "to continue the status quo."

The tax plan, unveiled by Reps. David Obey, D-Wis., John Murtha, D-Pa., and Jim McGovern, D-Mass., would require low- and middle-income taxpayers to add 2 percent to their tax bill. Wealthier people would add a 12 to 15 percent surcharge, Obey said.

Sponsors of the tax plan appeared more interested in making a point — getting people to focus on the cost of the war — than offering it as a serious proposal.
Top Democrats immediately shot down the idea, and it came under scathing assault from Republicans for linking funding for U.S. troops overseas with tax increases.

Why would anyone in their right mind agree to a lower-class tax hike to fund the war proposed by the same legislators who want to defund the war? This is such an obvious bait-and-switch that even "top Democrats" won't touch it with a 10-ft pole.

Post #400: Senator Clinton still corrupt. News at 11.

Senator Clinton proposes a blatant vote-buying scheme:

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that every child born in the United States should get a $5,000 "baby bond" from the government to help pay for future costs of college or buying a home.

Why can't Democrats realize that just throwing money at voters during an election campaign is a major no-no in a democracy?

The SEIU's dilemma

Picking a presidential candidate to back in 2008 is turning out to be a tough call. This is the point in the decision-making process that the SEIU has reached(hyperlink in original):

Writing on his personal blog, Marc Cooper, a contributing editor for The Nation, suggests that “the already sputtering Edwards’ campaign” hit “a definitive speed bump” yesterday when Edwards failed to win the endorsement of the Service Employees International Union. Cooper thinks “the much-coveted endorsement of Big Labor’s biggest union seemed to slip one notch closer toward never happening.”

So why did Edwards fail to win this key endorsement. The reason offered by Cooper is:

SEIU officials are openly concerned that their once-favored Edwards is running a distant third in most national and state polls (with the exception of Iowa) and may no longer be a viable candidate, no matter how many union resources are poured into his campaign.

You see, the union could endorse their entirely sycophantic suitor Edwards, but he seems like he might lose. So, in order to guarentee that they endorse a winner, the union is thinking about endorsing Mr. and Mrs. NAFTA for the White House instead. Doesn't that sound a little counterproductive?

Senator Clinton thinks independent voters are idiots.

That is really the only way to explain this:

U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton said Sunday she can appeal to Republicans as well as Democrats on the presidential trail.

Clinton appeared on "Fox News Sunday." Host Chris Wallace, citing his acerbic interview with former President Clinton last year as well as the former first lady's comments this year, asked, "Why do you and the president have such a hyper-partisan view of politics? … Why do we want another president who thinks so much in terms of right versus left and red state versus blue state?"

After attempting to turn the questioning to declining family income and the loss of healthcare, Clinton said, "Oh, Chris, if you had walked even a day in our shoes over the last 15 years, I'm sure you'd understand. But you know, the real goal for our country right now is to get beyond partisanship. And, I'm sure trying to do my part. Because we've got a lot of serious problems that we're trying to deal with."

It's just amazing to me how stupid you would have to be to believe this. The Clintons spent most of the 90s defending themselves from what they claimed was a fanatical Republican Party that was consumed with an anti-Clinton vendetta of unparalleled ferocity. According to the Clintons, the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy -- when it wasn't attempting a coup against the constitutional government -- was using "hate radio" and "Right-wing militias" to prepare for a military conquest of Washington D.C.

Now Hillary Clinton wants you to believe that she is the one Democrat in America who can get along with conservatives. Who does she think she is, Barack Obama?

Giuliani makes a bold proposal.

You've got to give the guy credit for this proposal:

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani urged NATO to admit Australia, India, Israel, Japan and Singapore on Wednesday as part of proposals to combat Islamic extremism.

On the merits, there are a few big problems and some plusses. For the most part, the list looks a lot like the "anglosphere" idea -- an alliance of the post-colonial English-speaking states -- that's been floating around the Right-wing blogosphere for years. Plus-wise, Australia, Singapore, and Japan will probably be easy to sell on a counter-terror alliance. Australia is a staunch ally of the United States on terror already, and Japan is likely to continue happily beefing up its self-defense forces with more U.S. support. Singapore may or may not go along, although it doesn't seem as if they have much to lose by staying away from the idea.

India, on the other hand, is a question mark. Although India might decide to go along with the deal to rachet up the pressure on Pakistan, India might decide that getting too attached to the United States isn't in its long term interests. India is in a tougher neighborhood than Singapore or Australia, so India has a lot more to lose by ending up on the wrong side of NATO's potential expansion into Asia.

The biggest problem on the list is Israel. That's not to say that the deal is a lousy one from the Israeli point of view. I'm sure that Israel would applaud any gesture of the West to help it fight terror, as opposed to, say, politely lionizing the terrorists as anti-Zionist freedom fighters. In other words, the real deal-breaker is that Left-wing parties around the West will almost certainly unanimously rise up against plan as the demented plotting of yet another Neocon cabal (not that Giuliani was going to win New York City in 2008 anyway, though).

Idiocracy

Back in the days when any Tom, Dick, or Harry with a crayon box could scribble out a design for a 9/11 memorial, there was one particular design that struck me as the epitome of American stupidity. Someone with perhaps just a moment's exposure to real-life architectural principles decided that since the Twin Towers were constructed from positive space, the memorial should be the same two Twin Towers constructed out of negative space. That is, since the originals were stacks of matter erected into air, the memorials should be shafts of air excavated out of matter.

Yes, someone actually proposed digging two 400 meter shafts with offices hewn out of the sides on the World Trade Center site. At the time, it seemed like the most crazy ass proposal imaginable.

The time passed. A dissertation was written. A job was hunted for. Then one day, I wake up and discover that negative space won the memorial competition after all! Apparently, the winning design decided that the single most important aspect of 9/11 to memorialize was the concept of two big craters with broken street mains dumping water into them. Now we're stuck with two geometrically shaped craters with highly stylized broken street mains elegantly dumping water into them.

You might be a liberal if...

you recycle Democratic Party talking points into blog posts.

The talking point was Republican Senator John Warner handing the Democrats an early Christmas present by pulling the "MacArthur trick" on General David Petraeus:

He [Senator Warner] then asked Petraeus a pointed question: "Do you feel that [Iraq war][sic] is making America safer"?

Petraeus paused before responding. He then said: "I believe this is indeed the best course of action to achieve our objectives in Iraq."

That was, of course, a non-answer. And Warner wasn't going to let the general dodge the bullet. He repeated the question: "Does the [Iraq war][sic] make America safer?"

Petraeus replied, "I don't know, actually. I have not sat down and sorted in my own mind."

This was a question with no correct answer for General Petraeus, and thus the General's reponse was virtually guarenteed to become the sound clip of the week in the liberal media. It's also interesting to note that a certain purportedly conservative blogger has fallen for it hook, line, and sinker:

He's fighting a war that he hasn't even decided is vital or even beneficial to the security of the United States. That's how lost we are in mission creep. That's the depth of the hole in which Petraeus has been ordered to keep digging.

Another Whiff of Fascism

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards proposes mandatory preventative care under his universal health care plan:

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards said on Sunday that his universal health care proposal would require that Americans go to the doctor for preventive care.

"It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care," he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. "If you are going to be in the system, you can't choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK."

All citizens will make mandatory visits with government inspectors or face punishment: in any normal presidential campaign cycle, this position would have been the kiss of death for the Edwards candidacy. For some bizarre reason this year, all of the Democratic presidential candidates seem to be assuming that this is the way forward for Americans. It's as if the Democratic party has lost all faith in the ability of Americans to care for themselves without government intervention.

Senator Craig

I was listening to talk radio on a drive today, and one of the hosts was wandering aloud about what the Senator Craig scandal supposedly meant. These were a lot of the obvious questions such as "Why is it okay for Democrats to be gay but not Republicans?"

Suffice it to say that this line of reasoning misses the real meaning entirely. In reality, it is all about Iraq. Just look at the timing of the last big scandals. Before the 2006 elections, there was the Mark Foley scandal. When the Democrats were launching their spring offensive against funding for the troops in Iraq, there was the Alberto Gonzales scandal. Now we're a week or so away from General Petraeus' report on the surge in Iraq and another vote on war funding, and now yet another Republican scandal is all over the media.

A Whiff of Fascism

Everyone knows the basis of Senator Clinton's political appeal: she and her husband are the most ruthless employers of mass propaganda in contemporary political life. The interesting thing about Senator Clinton is that she's the first person to admit to it:

It's a horrible prospect to ask yourself, 'What if? What if?' But if certain things happen between now and the election, particularly with respect to terrorism, that will automatically give the Republicans an advantage again, no matter how badly they have mishandled it, no matter how much more dangerous they have made the world," she said.

"So I think I'm the best of the Democrats to deal with that as well," she concluded.

In other words, if a major terrorist attack on the United States succeeds between now and the election, Senator Clinton claims to be the Democrat best able to undermine the government and seize power (in the election, of course). Does anyone else smell that whiff of fascism in the air?

Updates:

Senator Clinton, the so-called democrat, issues dictation to the Iraq parliament:

In a statement released by her Senate office, Clinton echoed a call by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin for Iraq's Parliament to oust al-Maliki in favor of a leader who could restore order to Iraq's unity government.

"During his trip to Iraq last week, Senator Levin ... confirmed that the Iraqi government is nonfunctional and cannot produce a political settlement because it is too beholden to religious and sectarian leaders," Clinton said. "I share Senator Levin's hope that the Iraqi Parliament will replace Prime Minister Maliki with a less divisive and more unifying figure when it returns in a few weeks."

In other news, a Huffington Post columnist calls for a military coup to remove President Bush as Commander-in-Chief (boldface in original, hat tip: instapundit):

General Pace - you have the power to fulfill your responsibility to protect the troops under your command. Indeed you have an obligation to do so.

You can relieve the President of his command.

Not of his Presidency. But of his military role as Commander-In-Chief.

A Physicist's Take on the M-Door Monty Haul Problem

The M-door Monty Haul Problem is very simply stated. You are a contestant of a game show in which a collection of M closed doors is present on the set. Unobserved by you, one door has an expensive car behind it and the others doors have goats behind them. Neither the car nor the goats are switched between doors or replaced with a different prize at any time. To start, you pick a door and then host Monty Haul opens one of the doors (not the one you picked, of course) to reveal the goat behind it. You then alternate between choosing to switch or not the door you have picked and Monty Haul opening doors to reveal the goats behind them. Once you are down to only two doors, you have one final chance to switch doors and then Monty Haul reveals the prize behind your picked door.

It turns out that my previous proof of the optimal strategy for the M-door Monty Haul problem has a few errors in it. The most important was an assumption that switching doors on any round other than the final two-door round hurt one's chances of winnings. This must be false. To see this, let's suppose that at the start of the game you've picked door #1. Suppose also that, after making a series of switches or non-switches, you switch back to door #1. Can it really be said that your odds of winning the car are now lower than if you had never switched from door #1 at all?

In physical terms, this property is called the Markovian Postulate:

If K is any observational state and T is a trial whose preparation stage invariably ends with the system in the state K, then T is statistically regular. (O. Penrose, "Foundations of Statistical Mechanics", p.34)

In particular, suppose you go into the two-door round having picked a certain door and with a certain other door remaining (call them #1 and #2). You can think of this as one long trial T which invariably end with you having picked door #1 with door #2 remaining at the end of a preparation stage of a certain length. The Markovian Postulate says that your probability of winning the car at this point will only depend upon whether or not you switch in this final two-door round, regardless of the past history of switches or non-switches in the previous rounds.

In the M-Door Monty Haul problem, the probability of winning the car by making no switches at all except for one final switch in the two-door round is (M-1)/M. So this must be the probability of winning the car by switching doors in the final round, regardless or whether or not you switch or not on any previous round. So the optimal strategy is simple: switch doors in the two-door round.

Foolish Atheism

There's a bumper crop of Vacuum Energy posts today! I started reading Christopher Hitchens' new book "god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" the other day, and this paragraph threw me for a loop (p.4):

There still remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that is wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.

My first problem with this is that if one objection only occurs because of one of the other objections, then the list is not irreducible as claimed. Ok, so my first objection might be splitting hairs. Let's move on.

I haven't read the book past page 4 yet, so I haven't read Hitchens' argument for the "dangerous sexual repression" objection to religious faith. In the modern era at least, it seems as if the problem with religious faith is sometimes exactly the opposite one: a dangerous sexual liberation. What I mean by this is that the very servility expected by some religous leaders can act as a very compelling temptation to them. Put even an average person in a situation where his or her every wish must be obeyed as the word of God with no harmful consequences permitted and he or she is quite likely to start "losing it". One moment you're a successful religious guru preaching to the faithful; the next moment you're using biblical verses to redefine the concept of "virginity".

Stupid Creationism

Vox Day wields the "Argument from Personal Incredulity" against the Darwinist enemy:

From my admittedly layman's perspective, the Neo-Darwinian Theory of evolution looks remarkably like a historical model, except that it doesn't explain historical events half as well as my stock system did. It's not a reliably predictive model like the Law of Supply and Demand and it doesn't provide what I consider to be convincing answers to simple questions like why one population evolves and another does not when they share the same environment; declaring one to have reached equilibrium while the other is unstable is simply not convincing over the lengths of time that are supposed to be involved.

One would think that merely invoking the phenomenon of extinction would be sufficient to disprove Vox Day's point. In any given environment, some species will adapt to it and some species will die out within it. It is an obvious empricial fact that the abilities of species to adapt to a given environment are different.

There is another perfectly simple reason why one population in an area might evolve rapidly while another population in the same area does not evolving as rapidly. Evolution is ultimately changes in the DNA of members of a species over time. It would be extremely unlikely for the DNA of all organisms to have exactly the same potential for beneficial changes to occur at exactly the same rate when placed in a certain environment. What I would expect is that some species, because of the exact nature of their DNA and the way it is expressed, are going to be more resistant to changes than other species. In the absence of, say, a complete genetic profile of every species ever to have existed on Earth over the last 4 billion years, biologists might therefore have to come up with empirical relations to investigate mutation rates.