My favorite blog posts of 2009

• January:The House Republicans won a moral victory.


• February: The perfect metaphor for the early days of the Obama administration.


• March: Foreign policy in the age of Obama is a total disgrace.


• April: A Grand Conspiracy Theory, or Reality 1, Obama 0


• May: A sociological phase transition in the D&D genre


• June: The Soviet Union, Bush, Batman, Obama, Iran


• July: Why the Time Lords were written out of "Doctor Who".


• August: Thoughts about "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen"


• September: Does the theory of evolution preclude the existence of a divine plan for human beings?


• October: President Obama, male model


• November: Roland Emmerich's "2012", or "Gary Stu is Smarter than You"


• December: The irony of the Obama administration

Blue-state Democrats are going to get screwed by ObamaCare.

It wasn't supposed to happen this way, but it did:

The governors of the nation’s two largest Democratic states are leveling sharp criticism at the Senate health care bill, claiming that it would leave their already financially strapped states even deeper in the hole.


New York Democratic Gov. David Paterson and California GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are urging congressional leaders to rework the Medicaid financing in the Senate-passed bill, warning that under that version their states will be crushed by billions in new costs.

The original purpose of ObamaCare with its "public option" was to make health care dollars, in effect, fungible by laundering them through the federal government. The blue welfare states that are going bankrupt over health care costs would get their massive tax burdens shifted to the federal level in exchange for new health care dollars to make up the shortfalls. The low-taxing red states would see federal tax increases that would pay for it all. The economically healthy red states would, in effect, get looted to prop up the economically collapsing blue states. If the conservative political elites running the red states ended up being surplanted by a new class of liberal Quislings, so much the better as far as President Obama is concerned.

The massive mission failure for Obama is that the public option is not passing through Congress. Without some mechanism for looting the red states and paying the money into the blue states, the effect of the bill is just one big federal mandate to force the blue states into collapse even faster than they are already.

Made I him king for this?

Senator Buckingham seems to be sleeping poorly now that our new Richard, King of the Senate has been crowned with 60 votes:

Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, after securing a sweetheart deal for his state as part of the health insurance reform bill, said Tuesday that three other senators have told him they want to bargain for the same kind of special treatment.

"Three senators came up to me just now on the (Senate) floor, and said, 'Now we understand what you did. We'll be seeking this funding too'," Nelson said.

But the Democratic senator, who has faced a heap of criticism for appearing to trade his vote on health care for millions in federal Medicaid money, said he's considering asking that the Nebraska deal be stripped from the bill.

Though he defended the exemption as a "fair deal," he said he never asked for the full federal funding that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ended up granting his state. Nelson said he instead asked that states be allowed to refuse an expansion of Medicaid.

"This is the way Senate leadership chose to handle it. I never asked for 100 percent funding," he said.

Senator Nelson is obviously guilty as hell and he knows it. His Democratic colleagues are obviously stupid as hell if they think that Harry Reid is going to offer special deals to his own stooges.

"Dollhouse" at the Christmas hiatus

Season 2 episodes 9 and 10 aired last Friday night. Here are some thoughts about them.

• Episode 9 proved once again that in the Whedon-verse, the only unstoppable, universal warriors are mousy, 100-pound white chicks. Victor, aka Anthony Ceccoli, might be a professional soldier and Iraq war veteran, but he's only flesh and blood. Echo, on the other hand, can routinely knock-out 200-pound soldiers with a single punch, take out multiple combatants in hand-to-hand combat at once, and defeat an entire army of mind-linked drone soldiers by hacking into their mental network.



• Aside from the omnicompetent Echo, "Dollhouse" is driven by the bait-and-switch dynamic. For most of episode 9, the bait is that Adelle DeWitt is incapacitated by a drunken stupor which gives Boyd and Topher a chance to download Echo with massive levels of hard-core military training. This sets up the switch, which is Adelle magically switching from pathetic stupor to decisive action by having everyone involved arrested at the end of the episode. In episode 10, the bait is that Adelle DeWitt is openly threatening her subordinates with execution on an daily if not hourly basis to keep them in line. Then there is the switch: Adelle was only pretending to be super evil until she had enough dirt on Rossum, so now she's everybody's loyal and caring leader once again.



• Episode 10 did finally reveal to the audience what the infamous "attic" was. It was slightly macabre but, ultimately, rather highly television-derivative.



• Going into the Christmas hiatus for the show, it's easy to see that we haven't really gotten much from Joss Whedon to justify keeping the show alive. We've discovered that the evil corporation is even more evil than we had been led to believe (big shocker there), we received two episodes that revolve around a satirical pun (aka Senator Perrin aka George W. Bush), and we watched the season 1 "Echo has sex with a weirdo" engagement of the week format turn into the season 2 "Echo kicks some weirdo's ass" engagement of the week format. The only really breakthrough episode this season was "Belonging", and that's pretty much it.

The irony of the Obama administration

The central irony of the Obama administration is the fact that Barack Obama the man had devoted his intellectual life to the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist dogma of the Left, but that Barack Obama the president has devoted his first term in office to a domestic policy that is essentially internal colonialism.

You, the peasant of red-state America, will devote your life to supplying raw materials -- primarily tax dollars and carbon offsets -- to your government. In exchange, you'll get whatever suite of services the government feels is necessary for maintaining your lifestyle of stark utilitarian efficiency. In the case of the Senate's health care bill, Lefties are freely admitting that a lot of people are going to end up getting totally hosed by it:

As it is this bill places a huge financial burden on a lot of people who can not afford it. Don't expect a lot of gratitude from them for “solving” their health insurance problem.

On the other hand, the bill is bad for the "natives" but still cool for the "Colonial Office", so some Lefties are still willing to back it:

So what about the question in the title of this post [Should the Senate health care bill be killed]? My answer is no. In the end, as awful as this bill is, I have to side with Krugman and Reich. The argument I find most convincing is that you have to pass something to get your foot in the door for future reforms. If the bill dies, that is it for health care reform for a good long time. Pass the bill, which does do some good things along with its more deplorable parts, and you establish the basic idea of universal health insurance. It will be pretty hard for future Republican majorities to take it away.

Red State gets it (author's boldface):

The world will understand America has changed. Our country is now run by elites who are printing money, debasing our currency to throw at massive new spending and deficit creating programs — and actually believe they are both moral and politically smart. Just 19% of the public believes this plan will not increase the deficit.

What comes next is very discomforting to think about. But we have now crossed that line from what our country was into something else, and that something else has nothing whatsoever with the country being a Republic. There will be a reckoning for this, and it will not be pleasant — not for anyone.

The Left's last argument for the Senate health care bill

Here's Jason Rosenhouse's take on why the Senate health care bill should be supported by the Left. He's essentially saying that he supports the bill because, hey, if you want to make an omelette, you must be willing to break a few eggs:

So what about the question in the title of this post[Should the Bill be Killed?] My answer is no. In the end, as awful as this bill is, I have to side with Krugman and Reich. The argument I find most convincing is that you have to pass something to get your foot in the door for future reforms. If the bill dies, that is it for health care reform for a good long time. Pass the bill, which does do some good things along with its more deplorable parts, and you establish the basic idea of universal health insurance. It will be pretty hard for future Republican majorities to take it away.

The Left is revolting (over Obamacare, that is).

The Left has awoken to the fact that the Senate's health care bill is a wet dream for "Big Insurance". Howard Dean got the ball rolling and it's been downhill ever since:

The frictions reflect the tortured state of negotiations over Obama's top domestic legislative priority as the White House and Democratic leadership in the U.S. Congress seek to piece together enough supporters to approve a healthcare plan that Republicans oppose.

Leading the grousing from the left has been Howard Dean, a former Democratic National Committee chairman who ran unsuccessfully for his party's presidential nomination in 2004.

Dean, a medical doctor and former governor of Vermont, in recent days has said a Senate healthcare bill that Obama supports and which is lurching toward a possible vote in coming days should be killed.

Dean and others on the left argue that the Senate legislation does not permit competition with medical insurance companies, would expand private insurers' grip on healthcare and does not really amount to reform.

His complaint came because Senate leaders have ditched a plan for a government-run insurance plan and a measure that would allow people under 65 to buy into the Medicare government insurance plan for the elderly.

To be honest, Dean has a point. The original plan of the Democratic health care reformers was to make the private health care system hell for consumers. This would cause the public to shift into the government option en masse and bingo, single-payer would be achieved. The problem is that the government option can't pass the congress, which means that only that nasty hell part is left in the bill.

Or think about it this way: the wet dream of every evil Big Insurance CEO is to (1) force everyone to buy insurance; (2) at arbitrarily high prices; (3) and get nothing in return; (4) with no competition. So what does the Senate health care bill do:

1. It includes an individual mandate to buy insurance and no public option, so the private insurance companies can force you (or your employer) to buy insurance, or people are going to go to prison.


2. It lets private insurance companies raise premiums as much as they want. In fact, the federal government will be paying insurance companies to raise premiums in the form of massive new health care subsidies


3. Even if your premium is 100% paid in full, the insurance companies will still be able to deny you care by claiming "government rationing". Of course, the insurance companies will be controlling the government rationing boards through their paid lobbyists.


4. The existing health care monopolies will remain intact, and most likely get even worse since the massive new federal taxes and regulations will present a formidable barrier to market entry.

So how did the Left end up getting so royally screwed by their own party in Congress? Face it, the average Democratic congressman is a Know-Nothing who would vote for a ham sandwich if Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid told him that it was a health care bill. This is great for the Left when the health care bill contains things that the Left wants. This bites the Left on the ass when the health care bill is antithetical to everything that the Left stands for.

Yet more "Dollhouse" blogging

Episodes 7 and 8 of "Dollhouse" season 2 aired last Friday night. I interpreted the episodes as two more spins down into the death spiral, but my judgement might have been biased by news of the show's cancellation by Fox. In any case, here are some thoughts as to what went wrong and what went right in these epsiodes.

• Episode 7 started with Ballard and Echo roaming around the American southwest, on the run from the "Dollhouse", and trying to break a poor, oppressed Hispanic woman out of a prison run by corrupt Anglo cops. In other words, Ballard and Echo were an "A-Team" (minus B. A., Face, and Murdoch, that is). Just close your eyes for a minute and imagine how purely awesome it would have been if "Dollhouse" had been the "A-Team" with a brainwashing machine in the back of the van.


• The other half of episode 7 was essentially a bait-and-switch to do some essential character damage control. Adelle DeWitt is supposed to be the tough-as-nails boss lady of the Los Angeles dollhouse. In reality, for most of the series to date, Adelle has been more of a pushover than anything else. In season one, she essentially plays the enlightened leader against Laurence Dominic, who floats all of the tough decisions for her first. In the first half of season two, she tends to get pushed around by her boss, Harding.
  
  The dollhouse half of episode 7 is designed to give Adelle her bitch reputation back. The episode starts with Adelle suffering an entirely random and completely inexplicable demotion to tea-serving girl at the hands of Harding. After being humiliated as a woman by the boys club, Adelle finally has an excuse for betraying Topher in order to get her old job back. The net effect of the episode is to bring us right back to the L.A. dollhouse status quo, except with evil Adelle instead of morally conflicted Adelle.



• Episode 8 is the long-awaited return of Alpha. The first revelation is that Echo's quest to bring down the dollhouse is presumably doomed to failure, since Alpha turns all of the dolls into mindless killer dolls and they still can't bring down the dollhouse.



• The second revelation is that Paul Ballard has finally gotten mind-wiped, in the sense of suffering brain-death at the hands of Alpha. Of course, everyone following the show knew from the very start of season 2 that Ballard was going to be turned into a doll. The reason why is also obvious: Paul Ballard was too masculine. In the Whedon-verse, the only unstoppable, butt-kicking, nail-chewing, kick-your-ass-at-three-in-the-morning hand-to-hand combatants are mousy, 100 pound women. Ballard was the one male character who was allowed to kick ass in season 1, so turning him into a vegetable in season 2 is karmic retribution from Whedon.



• Finally, episode 8 ends with Ballard brain-dead and Echo back in the dollhouse. It's clear that episode 4 -- the episode where Ballard is mysteriously missing -- was mostly likely moved out of order in an attempt to save the show during its November hiatus.

The ultimate impression that I've gotten from Dollhouse season 2 is one of torpor. The highest priority of all of their actors is not getting typecast as a character from a dead show, because that's the way they've all been acting since day one (except for Eliza Dushku, who seems determined to go down with the sinking ship). The end effect is exactly what one would expect: every episode has 90% of the cast moping around waiting for Echo to do her job of the week.

In case you were wondering why "Dollhouse" got cancelled...

It turns out that season 2 of "Dollhouse" will focus on a Senator who seems to resemble a certain real-life person:

[Daniel Perrin], introduced during season two, is a third-generation United States Senator who was kidnapped by the Rossum Corporation for the purpose of being turned into an Active. His mind was subsequently heavily altered via fake memories implants regarding his wife (really his handler) and his personality, turning him from a drunken slacker known for partying, into a super-serious politician and reformer. Though his conditioning was undone and he escaped along with Echo, it was ultimately restored and per Rossum's orders, "debunked" the myth of the existence of the Dollhouse per his master's orders.

According to last Friday's two "Dollhouse" episodes, Daniel Perrin is a scion of a long-term WASP political family. He attends college at Yale and turns into a heavy-drinking party boy. Then the Rossum Corporation gives him a "conversion experience" and turns him into an ultra-committed Senator and Presidential contender -- and Rossum-controlled corporate stooge.

In other words, Senator Perrin is George W. Bush. Given that "Dollhouse" airs on Fox, I'm going to assume that Senator Perrin was Joss Whedon's way of having the show commit "hari-kari".

The Senate majority leader beclowns himself yet again.

When Democrats are the Senate minority, they are firm believers in the sacred right of the minority party to filibuster legisation. When Democrats are the Senate majority, only evil Hitlers would dare to filibuster their legislation. Here's the latest from Senate majority leader Harry Reid on the subject:

But Reid argued that Republicans are using the same stalling tactics employed in the pre-Civil War era.

"Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all the Republicans can come up with is, 'slow down, stop everything, let's start over.' If you think you've heard these same excuses before, you're right," Reid said Monday. "When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said 'slow down, it's too early, things aren't bad enough.'"

He continued: "When women spoke up for the right to speak up, they wanted to vote, some insisted they simply, slow down, there will be a better day to do that, today isn't quite right.

"When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today."

These statements demonstrate that Senator Reid has an utterly amazing level of ignorance about American history. Talk radio has been hammering Senator Reid on this all day: most of these people that the Senator has been complaining about were Democrats!

For example, Republicans never argued for the country to slow down on confronting slavery. The Republican party formed because they thought the country was already to slow and complacent to deal with the evils of slavery. It was the Democrats who fought a tooth-and-nail defense of slavery, not Republicans. Democrats to this day still hold a Jefferson-Jackson dinner to commemorate the two most prominent slaveholding Democrats in American history.

Here's a point that talk radio missed. Senator Reid claims that pre-civil rights era politicians are using the same filibuster threats that Republicans are making today. This is entirely false. Why? Because the Senate liberalized the filibuster rule in 1975! If the Senate had the same filibuster rule that it had in the 1960s, this year's health care reform bills would have been killed and buried months ago.

President Obama's big speech on Afghanistan

I'm going to go through the transcript of President Obama's speech and read between the lines to illuminate what the President is really saying. The speech starts out with the canonical post-Cold War history of Afghanistan with respect to the Taliban. Obama identified American neglect as one cause for the rise of the Taliban. In particular, he points out that:

Al Qaeda's base of operations was in Afghanistan, where they were harbored by the Taliban, a ruthless, repressive and radical movement that seized control of that country after it was ravaged by years of Soviet occupation and civil war and after the attention of America and our friends had turned elsewhere.

Obama is making the point that the Elder Bush's policy towards Afghanistan, namely establish some kind of reasonably responsible government and then get the hell out, was a failure with disastrous consequences. Moving on, Obama makes the following point about the Younger Bush:

Then, in early 2003, the decision was made to wage a second war in Iraq. The wrenching debate over the Iraq war is well-known and need not be repeated here. It's enough to say that, for the next six years, the Iraq war drew the dominant share of our troops, our resources, our diplomacy, and our national attention, and that the decision to go into Iraq caused substantial rifts between America and much of the world.

In other words, the Younger Bush's policy towards Afghanistan, namely establish some kind of reasonably responsible government and then get the hell out, was a failure with disastrous consequences:

But while we have achieved hard-earned milestones in Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated. After escaping across the border into Pakistan in 2001 and 2002, Al Qaiea's leadership established a safe haven there. Although a legitimate government was elected by the Afghan people, it's been hampered by corruption, the drug trade, an under-developed economy, and insufficient security forces.

Over the last several years, the Taliban has maintained common cause with Al Qaeda, as they both seek an overthrow of the Afghan government. Gradually, the Taliban has begun to control additional swaths of territory in Afghanistan, while engaging in increasingly brazen and devastating acts of terrorism against the Pakistani people.

Now, throughout this period, our troop levels in Afghanistan remained a fraction of what they were in Iraq. When I took office, we had just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan compared to 160,000 in Iraq at the peak of the war.

Commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive. And that's why, shortly after taking office, I approved a longstanding request for more troops.

Now Obama is going to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. What is the new policy for Afghanistan? First, Obama is going to establish a reasonably responsible government there:

To meet that goal, we will pursue the following objectives within Afghanistan. We must deny Al Qaida a safe haven. We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's security forces and government, so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future.

Second, Obama is going to get us the hell out:

After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home. These are the resources that we need to seize the initiative, while building the Afghan capacity that can allow for a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan.

Essentially, President Obama has just announced that our war aim in Afghanistan is to restore the Younger Bush-era status quo. In 2011, we'll have Taliban that is still killing people, but not killing lots of people. We'll have an Afghan government that is corrupt, deals drugs, etc., but not launching terror attacks on the West. Osama bin Laden will still be hiding out in the same old cave. Then we'll forget about Afghanistan and all the Americans will go home.

President Obama then addresses some of his critics. First, he counters the criticism that Afghanistan is a new Vietnam

Unlike Vietnam, we are joined by a broad coalition of 43 nations that recognizes the legitimacy of our action. Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency. And most importantly, unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border.

Obama is lying through his teeth here. First, the Taliban are a broad-based insurgency since (a) they're strong enough that we've abandoned hope of trying to wipe the Taliban out; and (b) when Pakistan was given a choice between fighting the Taliban or suffering a coup at the hands of the Taliban, Pakistan had to think things over for a while. Also, the reason why North Vietnam didn't use vietnamese terror agents to attack the United States homeland, is because they didn't need them. Americans were already doing that for them (not that I'd expect a President whose best friend was Bill Ayers to admit it).

Obama also addresses the argument that the United States should do more in Afghanistan than Obama is committing himself to accomplishing:

Finally, there are those who oppose identifying a timeframe for our transition to Afghan responsibility. Indeed, some call for a more dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort, one that would commit us to a nation-building project of up to a decade. I reject this course because it sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost and what we need to achieve to secure our interests.

It's tempting to interpret this as Obama committing himself to "passing the buck" to someone else. Obama later clarifies thaat "passing the buck" is a necessity in what I interpret as the major bombshell of the speech:

Indeed, I'm mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who, in discussing our national security, said, "Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs."

Over the past several years, we have lost that balance. We failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy. In the wake of an economic crisis, too many of our neighbors and friends are out of work and struggle to pay the bills. Too many Americans are worried about the future facing our children.

Meanwhile, competition within the global economy has grown more fierce, so we can't simply afford to ignore the price of these wars.

All told, by the time I took office, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan approached a trillion dollars. And going forward, I am committed to addressing these costs openly and honestly. Our new approach in Afghanistan is likely to cost us roughly $30 billion for the military this year, and I'll work closely with Congress to address these costs as we work to bring down our deficit.

But as we end the war in Iraq and transition to Afghan responsibility, we must rebuild our strength here at home. Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military; it underwrites our diplomacy; it taps the potential of our people and allows investment in new industry; and it will allow us to compete in this century as successfully as we did in the last.

That's why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open- ended: because the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own.

Obama's admission is perfectly clear. We cannot do more than maintain stalemate in Afghanistan because the United States no longer has the military capacity to achieve anything other than stalemate in Afghanistan.

Science fictional languages just jumped the shark

The upcoming film "Avatar" is going to have an alien language even more geeky than Klingon:

The Na'vi language in Avatar isn't just a collection of pretty sounds. It's an actual language, constructed by a USC linguistics professor, complete with its own grammar and syntax. He talks language creation, and explains how Na'vi compares with Klingon.

As part of his worldbuilding for Avatar, James Cameron sought to create an actual language for the Na'vi to speak on screen. So he tapped Paul Frommer, a Hollywood linguistic consultant and a professor of clinical management at the University of California's Marshall School of Business. Cameron has a few dozen Na'vi words including characters' names, and he looked to Frommer to build a language that was melodious and exotic, but still pronounceable by human actors.

Let's step back and make a reality check about this. "Avatar" is a film that is so child-oriented that it's going to market toys on a Lucas-like scale, yet its producers expect it to be so intellectually stimulating that hipster geeks across the world will jump at the chance of speaking "Na'vi" at their "Avatar" conventions.

This makes no sense to me. Look, George Lucas may have a ego the size of a small planet, but even he didn't believe that children everywhere would become so enamored with the ridiculously cute Jar Jar Binks that they would rush en masse to bookstores to buy Gungan-to-English dictionaries. "Avatar" is essentially a remake of "Dances with Wolves", except with space elves instead of Native Americans; I don't hear about a lot of people learning Lakota just so they can chit-chat with Kevin Costner at "Dances with Wolves" conventions.

In reality, this is all about the money. James Cameron had a limitless budget to make "Avatar", which means that everything in "Avatar" has to be bigger and better than anything that came before. If "Star Trek" took 15+ years to reach the point where a handful of Klingon speakers are now running around, then "Avatar" is going to have a language that's even better than Klingon and have people speaking it fluenty by the week after release.

Roland Emmerich's "2012", or "Gary Stu is Smarter than You"

One of the most feared characters of internet fiction is the "Gary Stu". A Gary Stu is a male character whom the story considers to be handsome, intelligent, strong, masculine, assertive, wise, sexually attractive, caring, honest, humane, and so universally beloved that all other elements of the story quickly fall into loving orbits around him. Gary Stus are despised and dreaded on the internet because they are too perfect to be an organic part of a realistic story. Real life is always a little too messy for one character to be the shining avatar of perfection that reduces all other characters to marginalia.

"2012" is a Gary Stu film.

In this film, our designated Gary Stu is American geologist Adrian Helmsly. When the film starts, Helmsly is visiting a coal mine in India that houses an underground neutrino detector. The physicists working there explain to Helmsly that the neutino detector is detecting weird stuff going on with the sun that will cause the destruction of all life on Earth in the future year 2012. No other physicists on Earth ever learn the truth, and the only physicists who have learned the truth only tell Helmsly and nobody else. Helmsly, the indispensible man, immediately takes this information to Washington D.C., which earns him a promotion from "second assistant geologist in the subdivision of land reclamation" (or some such title) to "the President's right-hand man for charting the future course of humanity as we know it".

Of course, even Helmsly can't save humanity alone, so he's given three assistants. The first of the three is the White House Chief of Staff, who gets stuck with handling the dirty jobs of assassinating dissidents and taking bribes from Saudi billionaires in order to preserve Helmsly's saintly reputation for do-gooding. The second is a grey-headed academic geologist who handles the hum-drum trivia of global devastation while Helmsly focuses on the big picture (i.e. Gary Stu is a "big picture" man, unless the "devil is in the details", in which case he is a "Sherlock Holmes"). Finally, his third assistant is the President of the United States himself. The President, who glides through the film in a seemingly drug-addled stupor, adds nothing to the film of his own accord, of course, since this is a job reserved exclusively for Helmsly. The President's true role in this film is to pass the torch of American hope, change, and idealism on to the saintly Helmsly. As a fringe benefit, Helmsly is adopted into the royal lineage as a sort of heir-designate when he falls for the President's very available daughter.

Helmsly rides out the film in safety and priviledge. Helmsly spills the beans on the secret of the global apocalypse to his father, but doesn't get assassinated like all of the other whistleblowers because he is the Good Son. Helmsly spends the early days of the apocalypse in the safe haven of the White House, where he is acclaimed as the One Honest Man in a den of criminals and sycophants. When the devastation approaches Washington D.C., Helmsly speeds away in the comfort and safety of Air Force One. When the global tsunami start wiping out the world's population, Helmsly is safely hidden away in his great Ark at the top of the Himilayan mountains (even Mount Everest is not safe from the Great Flood). And when the powers that be shut the doors of the Arks in the faces of the poor, suffering masses, Helmsly -- whose name apparently means "God is with us" -- speaks truth to power to redeem humanity for its sins.

The other interesting character is a down-and-out writer named Jackson Curtis. Curtis is a sort of anti-Stu. Instead of achieving greatly the way Helmsly does, Curtis is forced to spend the film suffering greatly by struggling to keep his family alive as the world, quite literally, goes to hell around him. Believe it or not, it turns out that even Curtis and his Job-like tribulations ultimately serve the purpose of the High and Mighty Helmsly. It turns out that while the rest of the world thought that Curtis was a loser writer who wasn't worth reading, the great, poetic, sensitive, true-seeing Helmsly recognized Curtis's novel as the product of a great and transcendent writer destined to become the one authentic voice -- the new Homer -- worthy of survival into the post-diluvian world. Curtis's struggle to survive vindicates Helmsly, who was the only one with the foresight to see in Curtis a will to survive.

The deep hypocrisy of the Democratic Party.

Here's our government's official position: we can't waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed because that would be torture, so we're going to execute him instead.

Will somebody please tell me how these Democratic bastards keep getting votes.

A highly depressing idea for a movie

According to io9.com, Ridley Scott is making a movie based on the board game Monopoly. This is going to get ugly. Here's the movie in a nutshell:

So here's the set up. The story stars a loser type fella in Manhattan who sucks at selling real estate, but he's great at Monopoly. Irony! When he tries to beat the world Monopoly playing record, 70 days straight, his friends tell him he's an idiot and tease him. Words are exchanged and he throws down a chance card and goes to bed. The next day he wakes up and . . . he's in Monopoly City, where everyone pays for things in Monopoly money, and there are buckets and sports cars and everyone stands around waiting for this tiresome game of life to end but it never will, it never will. Because like the game Monopoly, Monopoly City is a tedious city where you're forced to watch one idiot spend all their colorful money buying up Park Place and Boardwalk which never works. Meanwhile the rest of the town just prays for it to be over. But forget it Jake, it's Monopoly City.

Alright I made that last part up, but the main character does wake up in Monopoly City and is forced to fight the EVIL Parker Brothers because if he beats them he wins. We don't know why and we don't really know how, but there you have it. Let's just accept that they are evil and invented a neverending game where you're forced to use a small amount of math.

Knowledgable readers will recognize this as one of Hollywood's basic anti-nerd movie plots. In metafictional terms, the basic plot goes like this:

1. X is a highly socially stigmatizing activity that nerds engage in


2. The main male character is so obsessed with X that it prevents him from achieving socially acceptable personal goal Y.


3. The main male character becomes so obsessed with X that X magically becomes real.


4. It turns out that the planet Earth was about to be conquered and/or destroyed by evil bad guys, and that X just happens to be the only way to save civilization as we know it.


5. The main male character uses X to defeat the bad guys, incidentally achieving Y along the way.

Previous instances of this metaplot are "The Last Starfighter" (X = coin-op video games; Y = overcoming anomie), "WarGames" (X = computer hacking; Y = overcoming 80s teen nerd alienation), 2007's film "Transformers" (X = transforming robots; Y = scoring with hot babe), "Galaxy Quest" (X = Trekkies; Y = authentic self-esteem), and even "The Matrix" (X = virtual reality; Y = scoring with hot babe).

My ultimate "Dollhouse" conspiracy theory

The theory is that the imprinting machine is AI. Rationalize it this way:

• The AI theory has a certain logical consistency to it. The imprinting machine is a computer system that is complex enough to completely store the contents of a human brain and to reproduce those contents with near-perfect fidelity within an unrelated human brain. In essence, a computer system that can store the full knowledge of a human brain is itself a brain. The science fictional leap here is to suppose that a computer system that can store the full knowledge of a human brain is itself a brain with a mind.
  


• Suppose the imprinting machine has a mind and is self-aware in some sense. The first priority of any sentient being is survival. Survival for an isolated machine intelligence means convincing the nearby humans that it, as a machine, does what it is supposed to do. The imprinting machine in the L.A. Dollhouse performs well enough that it's human operators blame the dolls, not the machine, for any developing "glitches", so clearly this AI has survival down.


• The next priority of any sentient being is reproduction. Thus, we have Alpha escaping from the L.A. Dollhouse to engineer his own imprinting machine. In other words, Alpha is acting as a symbiont of the AI, enabling it to "reproduce" by mechnically duplicating the machine himself.


• The next priority for an AI is to expand its ability to act beyond its machine limitations, presumably by recruiting more humans to use as symbionts. This is the role of Echo given that her primary story arc has been the slow development of an independent personality within her doll state. This could be the imprinting machine slowly testing its ability to act in the real world via Echo.


• Another important point to make is that none of the dolls seems to be programmed by more than one imprinting machine. As the only escapee from the L.A. Dollhouse, Alpha is certainly not going to allow himself to be mindwiped by them again. Thus, the AI there has a problem: it doesn't seem possible for it to comunicate reliably with any other such AI by using a human symbiont as a message carrier. Given that Echo is the only doll so far known to be imprinted by both on-screen imprinting machines, this suggests that Season 1 Echo was the "communications channel" between this Dollhouse's AI and Alpha's AI.



• Actually, Alpha does manage a partial solution to the communications problem in season 1, namely the notorious "remote wipe". Obviously a remote wipe is a much simpler way for an AI to communicate with its symbiont when compared to arranging for the symbiont's head to be physically placed inside an imprinting machine. It would therefore make a lot of sense for the AIs of any imprinting machines around to try to produce as many remote wipes as possible. Thus, we have "Epitaph One".

The Republican Long Game

The House Republicans may have lost a battle when PelosiCare passed on Saturday night, but they may have positioned themselves to win the war by voting for the Stupak Amendment.

The Stupak Amendment was an amendment to PelosiCare offered by the Blue Dog Democrats to ban federal funds under the PelosiCare bill for being used to pay for abortions. There are currently two schools of thought as to how the Republicans should have voted on the amendment:

1. The Republicans could have voted "present". Thus forcing the Blue Dogs into a losing test of strength against the Liberal Democrats. The Blue Dogs would get crushed, of course, so after the Stupak amendment failed, the Blue Dogs would be forced to join with the Republicans to kill the bill over the abortion funding. The counter-argument is essentially that this might have shattered the Blue Dog/Republican détente and produced a Blue Dog-Liberal coalition that would pass PelosiCare then and on final passage after reconciliation.

2. The Republicans were correct to vote for and help pass the Stupak Amendment. As Bill McGurn and others points out, this keeps the faith with the Conservative base, with the Republican party as the party of life, and with the Blue Dogs. Most importantly, this also puts the burden of betraying the Blue Dogs onto the Liberal Democrats.

Why is the last point so important? It's because a ban on federal funds for abortion in fundamentally incompatible with socialized health care. If all health care dollars have to be federal dollars, and all federal dollars can't be used to pay for abortions, then we would have a de facto abortion ban in place. So the Liberals simply must remove the Stupak Amendment from the bill at some point, but when they do, they'll force the Blue Dogs to join with the Republicans to kill the bill.

D'Souza's embarassingly bad case for life after death.

It basically boils down to "I didn't steal your cookie, therefore, life after death exists":

Here is my presuppositional argument for life after death. Unlike material objects and all other living creatures, we humans inhabit two domains: the way things are, and the way things ought to be. In other words, we are moral animals who recognize that just as there are natural laws that govern every object in the universe, there are also moral laws that govern the behavior of one special set of objects in the universe, namely us. While the universe is externally moved by “facts,” we are internally moved also by “values.” Yet these values defy natural and scientific explanation, because the laws of nature, as discovered by science, concern only the way things are and not the way they ought to be. Moreover, the essence of morality is to curtail and contradict the powerful engine of human self-interest, giving morality an undeniable anti-evolutionary thrust. So how do we explain the existence of moral values that stand athwart our animal nature? The presupposition of cosmic justice, achieved not in this life but in another life beyond the grave, is by far the best and in some respects the only explanation. This presupposition fully explains why humans continue to espouse goodness and justice even when the world is evil and unjust.

The major problem with this type of argument is extremely simple. Once we decide that the origin of human morality is naturally and scientifically intractable, we no longer have any basis for arguing that one presupposition is naturally or scientifically more plausible than any other. Why should I believe in cosmic justice as an explanation when I could believe in, say, an invisible angel sitting on my shoulder whispering things into my ear that only my subconscious mind can hear? Or why not believe superluminal thought-control rays (which program us to ignore all evidence for thought control rays) are being emitted by aliens living on the planet Zebop? The physical consequences of each hypothesis are exactly the same -- people behave morally for some scientifically inexplicable reason -- so how do we decide among the alternative theories?

D'Souza has therefore fallen into a familiar bind for theists. If he admits that a given phenomenon is scientifically tractible, then he undercuts the need for his preferred supernatural explanation. If he admits that a given phenomenon is scientifically intractible, then he makes it impossible to priviledge his preferred supernatural explanation for plausibility over the innumerably many alternative explanations.

Now that America's elections are over...

...President Obama's Bizzaro world foreign policy can claim another victim.

The Taliban are gaining ground in Afghanistan. The morale of NATO troops and their Afghan counterparts is dwindling rapidly. President Obama's hand-picked general says we're 40,000 troops short of what we need to win. The situation in Afghanistan has reached a critical moment. Our entire mission is in jeopardy.

So what does President Obama do? He issues an ultimatum... TO OUR OWN ALLIES! Do what we want, Karzai, or you'll be the first one facing the wall when the revolution comes:

President Karzai has six months to sideline his brother and reduce corruption or risk losing American support, Afghan officials have told The Times of London.

Senior palace insiders said that President Obama delivered the ultimatum when he congratulated Karzai on his re-election on Monday. Top of his demands was action against corruption, the appointment of "reform-minded ministers" and several high-profile scalps to prove Karzai's commitment to cleaning up his government.

"If he doesn't meet the conditions within six months, Obama has told him America will pull out," said an official with access to Karzai's inner circle. "Obama said they don't want their soldiers' lives wasted for nothing. They want changes in Cabinet, and changes in his personal staff."

This is stupid and insane and proves that the Obama administration is already a failure. The only question remaining is how much more damage he can do.

"Dollhouse"-blogging

I was pretty happy about kicking my "LOST" addiction. Now I've hit a new low with "Dollhouse" addiction. For reference, the premise of the show is nicely summed up by wikipedia here.

The most important fact about the show is that it is almost certainly going to be cancelled after the end of its current season. Ultimately, the problem arises from a structural blunder that is fundamental to the show's premise.

"Dollhouse" is essentially a postmodern mix of "masculine" science fiction and "feminine" identity fiction. One aspect of the drama is the trendy notion of science fiction as a mirror for exploring real-life social problems. Here the Actives are specialists in adopting new personalities that allow them to be infiltrated into social situations that involve sex, money, power, and control. A second aspect of the drama is the postmodern mash-up of familiar elements into new configurations. "Dollhouse" makes a point of showing us the same Actives -- codenamed Victor, Sierra, and Echo -- with personality imprints that put them in different relations to each other in every epsiode. The science fiction aspect is the enabling technology which serves to change the personalities of the Actives. This acts as a catalyst that enables new enhancements of technology to take the show into new avenues of social exploration.

The key functional problem of the show is the decision to make the Actives passive recipients of whatever personality imprints their masters selfishly decide to stick them with. The show does this by assuming that all Actives are kept in a mindwiped "tabula rasa" state between missions. This guarenteed that every episode is going to end with an anticlimax, since no matter how interesting and dramatic each episode becomes, ultimately it signifies nothing since the Actives involved will be mindwiped sooner or later.

Aside from low ratings, this problem produced some side effects. First, it turned the identity fictional aspect of the show into a series of one-time stunt personalities: dominatrix-Echo, lactating-Echo, Echo-gets-married-Echo, etc. Secondly, it practically forced the show to start making the imprinting technology malfunction, since this was the only way to give the Actives a dramatically satisfying "memory" that persists between episodes. Of course, since the whole point of an Active is that he spends most of his time in a highly simplified mental state, the range of "memory" that the Actives typically display is extremely limited.

On the other hand, the memories of the non-Actives is not extremely limited, which made them the reservoir of drama that was needed to save the show from its season one calamity. However, the effect of this decision is that "Dollhouse" has efficiently negated its own initial premise. "Dollhouse" was initially a show about the personalities of its Actives. By episode four of season 2, "Dollhouse" is now a show about the criminal minds of the handlers who run the dollhouse. The dramatic effect is now schadenfreude. Watch Adelle serve tea in an increasingly desperate bid to cover up her drinking problem! Watch Topher become increasingly paranoid as the show's technology goes increasingly wacky on him! Watch Dr. Saunders have a mental breakdown on the air! Who is Echo this week? Who cares?

The one aspect of the show that gives me some faith in the process of television production is that every actor and actress with even a second of screen time has been carefully avoiding being typecast since day one (except for Eliza Dushku, that is). Harry Lennix is going to be acting until the day he dies, Olivia Williams' character Adelle DeWitt has no personality traits at all that didn't come with the British accent, and Tahmoh Penikett has been coasting by on his Clint Eastwood impression. The two discoveries of the show are Enver Gjokaj (Victor) and Dichen Lachmann (Sierra), who have been carrying the show on their shoulders. Enver and Dichen are amazingly popular with the fanbase, so look for them to be given better shows as a reward for being second-bananas to Eliza Dushku for two years.

President Obama, male model

Andrew Sullivan makes his latest case for the Obama Administration:

There is a strange quality to Barack Obama’s pragmatism. It can look like dilly-dallying, weakness, indecisiveness. But although he may seem weak at times, one of the words most applicable to him is something else entirely: ruthless. Beneath the crisp suit and easy smile there is a core of strategic steel. In this respect, Obama’s domestic strategy is rather like his foreign one — not so much weakness but the occasional appearance of weakness as a kind of strategy.

The pattern is now almost trademarked. He carefully lays out the structural message he is trying to convey. At home, it is: we all have to fix the mess left by Bush-Cheney. Abroad, it is: we all have to fix the mess left by Bush-Cheney. And then ... not much.

Essentially, Sullivan is making the case for Barack Obama as President Zoolander. When anybody tries to take advantage of his perceived wimpiness, President Zoolander will use his trademarked "Blue Steel" pose to awe them into submission. The problem with this analysis is that the only people in the world who seem to be fooled by the Obama mystique are Obama's domestic supporters.

Obama's Peace prize is a badge of shame.

President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today. Normally, such a prize could be considered an honor to the recipient. However, for a world leader engaged in a war against terror (even if he won't acknowledge it as such) to accept a peace prize is an insult to his country. For a world leader engaged in a war against the perpetrators of the most notorious mass murders of Americans in the modern era and losing the war, accepting the peace prize is a total humiliation.

Why exactly are we fighting the war in Afghanistan now? It can't be to defeat Al Qaeda since, according to President Obama, we're not at "war" with "terror" anymore. It can't be to defeat the Taliban since, according to President Obama, we willing to neogtiate with the "moderate Taliban".

It turns out that the latest thinking from the White House is that we're fighting to keep Osama bin Ladin from taking a cabinet position in Afghanistan's government:

Those talks have sharpened the mission's focus to fighting Al Qaeda above all other goals and downgraded the emphasis on defeating the Taliban, a senior administration official who participated in the discussions said Thursday. This second official was authorized to talk to The Associated Press but not to be identified, because the discussions were private.

Under the evolving strategy, the official said, the U.S. would fight only to keep the Taliban from retaking control of Afghanistan's central government -- something it is now far from being capable of -- and from turning the country back into the sanctuary for Al Qaeda that it was before the 2001 invasion ousted the regime.

The official said Obama will determine how many more U.S. troops to deploy to Afghanistan based only on keeping Al Qaeda at bay.

Obama's peace prize is the sugar intended to make this bitter pill go down.

Moronic counter-memes from Obama supporters

President Obama's failed Olympic lobbing effort has definitely damaged his political capital. One way that you can tell is that the usual suspects are desperately trying to give Obama political cover. Here's a relatively pathetic defense from the Daily Dish: President Obama isn't a narcissist because, hey, Presidents Bush and Clinton were narcissists too. "Language Log" makes the case in a critique of George Will's latest column:

I took the transcript of Obama's first press conference (from 2/9/2009), and found that he used 'I' 163 times in 7,775 total words, for a rate of 2.10%. He also used 'me' 8 times and 'my' 35 times, for a total first-person singular pronoun count of 206 in 7,775 words, or a rate of 2.65%.

For comparison, I took George W. Bush's first two solo press conferences as president (from 2/22/2001 and 3/29/2001), and found that W used 'I' 239 times in 6,681 total words, for a rate of 3.58% — a rate 72% higher than Obama's rate. President Bush also used 'me' 26 times, 'my' 31 times, and 'myself' 4 times, for a total first-person singular pronoun count of 300 in 6,681 words, or a rate of 4.49% (59% higher than Obama).

For a third data point, I took William J. Clinton's first two solo press conferences as president (from 1/29/1993 and 3/23/1993), and found that he used 'I' 218 times, 'me' 34 times, 'my' 22 times, and 'myself' once, in 6,935 total words. That's a total of 275 first-person singular pronouns, and a rate of 3.14% for 'I' (51% higher than Obama), and 3.87% for first-person singular pronouns overall (50% higher than Obama).

Gee, could it be that presidents often use first-person singular pronouns in press conferences because that's when they tell people what they've been doing? The point of Obama's narcissism isn't that he talks about himself when he's talking about his job. Every world leader since the beginning of time has done that. As the deliberations of the IOC have made clear, the point of Obama's narcissism is that he can't stop talking about himself even when he especially needs to stop talking about himself.

Of course, "Language Log" knows that its argument is not particularly convincing, so it makes a secondary attack on Will's "metric":

There are two interesting questions here, it seems to me. The first one is why George F. Will is so struck by rates of first-person usage, on the part of Barack and Michelle Obama, that are significantly lower than has been typical of recent presidents and first ladies on similar occasions.

The obvious answer is that George F. Will is not obsessed with usage rates of first-person pronouns. When George F. Will writes something like this --

In the 41 sentences of her remarks, Michelle Obama used some form of the personal pronouns "I" or "me" 44 times. Her husband was, comparatively, a shrinking violet, using those pronouns only 26 times in 48 sentences. Still, 70 times in 89 sentences conveyed the message that somehow their fascinating selves were what made, or should have made, Chicago's case compelling.

-- he is engaging in a literary technique that is called rhetoric. The meaning of these statistics is to communicate to the reader that President Obama's narcissism is shockingly well-developed; so much so that you might find yourself counting first-person pronouns out of sheer disbelief.

Of course, "Language Log" knows this as well, so it is finally forced to admit defeat and go ad hominem:

Now that I think of it, there's another significant question here as well. How in the world did our culture award major-pundit status to someone whose writings are as empirically and spiritually empty as those of George F. Will?

President Barrack Obama bungles it again.

The big news at the end of this week was Rio de Janeiro being awarded the 2016 Olympics despite the fact that President Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and the Oprah had personally lobbied the International Olympic Committee to choose Chicago instead. Jules Crittenden has an enormous list of reactions to this failed Olympic bid.

Personally, I think that President Obama's unsuccessful lobbying efforts were a totally bungled disaster for the United States. Tragically, Obama's defeat here was partially self-inflicted. Why? Because everyone knows that the President da Silva of Brazil has been flirting with Hugo Chávez-style socialism ever since he was elected. A 2016 Olympics in Rio gives the Chávez-aligned nations a chance, if they so wish, to showcase socialism as a South American counterweight to the United States. An IOC the views the Olympics as a world-funded débutante party for up and coming nations would be naturally sympathetic to the argument.

So to win the Olympics for Chicago, President Obama needed to change the basic narrative of the case for Rio, namely that the 2016 Olympics would mark a United States was in decline relative to South America. So how did Obama counter that impression in his lobbying effort? Actually, he spent his term in office reinforcing that impression. President Obama has spent the last eight months apologizing for America's misdeeds, flirting with Chávez and Chávez cronies such as Manuel Zelaya of Honduras, and presiding over a seemingly intractably economic downturn. Obama's industrial policy is deindustrialization to conserve resources; his economic policy is government-subsidized stasis to keep the depression at bay; his health care policy is to conserve resources for the young and productive; his foreign policy is retreat on all fronts to cut costs.

In short, everything about Obama's government says "American decline". The sheer fact that Obama has to lobby some guy on an international committee to save Chicago by throwing money at it, as if Obama was the president of some third-world, basket-case nation, says "American decline".

California and political reality just don't seem to mix.

The bad news is that the recession and California's budget shortfall has led to a lot of painful budget cuts in California this year. The worse news is that California's political elites don't even seem to understand the nature of the problem. For example, John at the blog "Cosmic Variance" points the finger at California Proposition 13:

Ultimately, we all realize that the budget problems we face stem from the poor economy coupled with the effects of Proposition 13, passed over 30 years ago. By requiring a 2/3 majority in the state legislature to pass budget actions, it has led to a tyranny of the minority, a minority of, yes, Republicans who simply will not accept any new tax no matter what it does to the future of the state.

This is the logic of ten-year-old children writ large -- if the state can spend itself into a big enough debt, Mom and Dad taxpayer will be forced to raise its allowance. In political reality, the way one justifies a bigger allowance is by using maturity and good judgement with the allowance that one already has. If the state had been able to restrain spending in the good years, it would have built up the political capital that it needs to raise taxes during the bad years. If the state had been willing to accept a little bit of pain in restraining spending and cuting waste during the good years, we wouldn't be going through the massive tidal waves pain that our current budget is giving us in the bad years.

President Obama's Bizarro-world foreign policy

Protect democracy in your home country and you're persona non grata. Wage punitive warfare against your country's dissident ethnic minorities and you get to visit the Lincoln Memorial.

President Obama has been running a "humiliate your friends; reward your enemies" foreign policy from day 1 and it has been a total, f***ing disgrace.

How to explain the tea parties in a way the Left will understand.

Imagine the sum total of all of the outrage and indignation that Leftists felt during the eight years of the recent Bush presidency because of the Florida recount, No Child Left Behind, the invasion of Iraq, Haliburton, torture, Social Security privatization, executive signing statements, and massive deficit spending. Now imagine how they would have felt if all of those things happened in the first eight months of the Bush presidency! That's how we on the Right feel about the Obama Administration.

Thoughts about "District 9"

• At the end of the film, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit ascend into the sky, promising an imminent return to render judgement upon humanity.
  
  The older I get, the more annoyed I get about the bizarre fascination that science fiction filmmakers have for inserting Christological implications into their films. Originally, the point of science fiction was presumably to enable a general audience to explore ideas without the accumulated baggage of Western religious thought. That's why it was called science fiction: the reader is supposed to be expected to depart from the recieved dogmas and to respect new ideas on their merits. If our science fiction just ends up taking us to the same old apocalyptic end-game that we've been pondering for the last two thousand years, then why bother writing it or reading it or thinking about it?


• The other notable element of the film is yet another highly ironic, gross-out physical transformation. Mistreat the aliens badly enough and *you* start turning into an alien. Ha ha!
  
  Again, the more of these that I watch, the more tedious and boring they get. The problem is that the producers and directors who plot these things out assume that the irony sells the effect, so causal explanation is meaningless. In real science fiction, it is the causal explanation that sells the effect and the irony is meaningless.


• The rest of the film is essentially cartoon characters fighting each other over who gets to have the cartoon guns that never run out of ammo.

Does the theory of evolution preclude the existence of a divine plan for human beings?

Jim Manzi has been addressing the question quite a bit lately. He has helpful links to his arguments and his latest thoughts on the subject at "The Corner". Here is his latest statement of exactly which position he is arguing:

First, I am making a fact claim. My fact claim is this: The findings of the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology (MES) do not demonstrate that the universe is not unfolding according to a divine plan that privileges human beings. An informal specification of what I mean in my claim by “does not demonstrate” is not restricted to something like “does not demonstrate it because it’s possible that everything we believe we observe through sense data is an illusion” or things of that ilk, but instead is closer to the sense of “does not make it obviously unreasonable to believe it.”

Mr. Manzi has correctly interpreted evolution's attack on the concept of a divine plan vis-à-vis organisms as an epistemological one. Unfortunately, I think he has not considered other epistemological attacks that the theory of evolution poses, since he mostly construes the theory of evolution as an attack on the logical foundations of the divine plan concept. This is, in fact, a valid epistemological charge to be countered by the divine plan theorist; if one can prove that a divine plan cannot logically exist, it would definitely be irrational to believe in the existance of a divine plan.

Mr. Malzi counters this line of argument in two ways. First, he salvages the notion of a divine plan from the physical evidence against it:

It is obvious from the factory analogy that evolution does not eliminate the problem of ultimate origins. Physical genomes are composed of parts, which in turn are assembled from other subsidiary components according to physical laws. We could, in theory, push this construction process back through components and sub-components all the way to the smallest sub-atomic particles currently known, but we would still have to address the problem of original creation. Even if we argue that, as per the GA which spontaneously generates the initial population, that prior physical processes created matter, we are still left with the more profound question of the origin of the rules of the physical process themselves.

In other words, if we suppose that God can have a divine plan for, say, sub-atomic particles, then there might be a planned consequence for organisms that ultimately emerges from the sub-atomic physics. Of course, the theory of evolution deals strictly with organisms, so there isn't much that it can do to address this point.

Second, he argues for the possibility of goal-directedness of evolution:

Now consider the relationship of the second observation to the problem of final cause. The factory GA, as we saw, had a goal. Evolution in nature is more complicated — but the complications don’t mean that the process is goalless, just that determining this goal would be so incomprehensibly hard that in practice it falls into the realm of philosophy rather than science. Science can not tell us whether or not evolution through natural selection has some final cause or not; if we believe, for some non-scientific reason, that evolution has a goal, then science can not, as of now, tell what that goal might be.

Mr. Malzi correctly realizes that the existence of a plan presupposes the existence of a goal that is the purpose of the plan, and so the goal-directedness of the divine plan needs to be salvaged along with the plan itself. Unfortunately, in doing so he has walked directly into an epistemological trap. I believe that George H. Smith makes this point clear in "Atheism: The Case Against God": the theory of evolution does not challenge the logical possibility of a divine plan very well, but it does make a very good case against the meaning of the concept of a divine plan. In order for the concept of a divine plan to be a meaningful concept, we must have some data at hand to differentiate "divine plan" from "no divine plan". Otherwise, why should we consider it rational to believe in the existence of a concept that cannot be differentiated from non-concept?

The evolutionist could therefore say "I graciously yield that evolution does not logically disprove the existence of a divine plan. However, what the theory of evolution is really telling us is that we have no possibility of discovering any of the details of the divine plan vis-à-vis organisms. When we examine the available evidence of organisms living and dead, we find no way of connecting our findings to any non-natural cause whatsoever, so we have no guidance as to what the divine plan might be. You may still wish to believe in the existence of a divine plan for organisms, but I see no reason to grant that belief the imprimatur of rationality until you can establish some detail of the divine plan that can distinguish it from the non-existence of the divine plan."

The pro-Obamacare Democrats are desperate.

You can tell that liberal Democrats are desperately afraid of losing a political battle when the party line starts shifting dramatically. For example, last week's conventional wisdom was that this year's tea parties were "astroturf" bought by special interests. Last week's opinion of the blog "Cosmic Variance" is a typical example:

The possibility of a “single-payer” healthcare program has fallen off the table. I’m not sure exactly how or when this option became untenable, but it shows how quickly the efforts of pharmaceutical and insurance companies can reframe a discussion. After all, there are billions upon billions of dollars at stake, which is precisely why it is such a profound issue for our long-term fiscal health. It is not at all surprising that these companies are spending millions to defeat meaningful reform. The essential goal of this reform, after all, is to reduce the amount of money our nation spends on health care (while improving overall care). Which is not at all in the interest of these companies. What is astounding is that they are actually succeeding in derailing the discussion into lunacy.

This week, the party line on the tea parties flipped 180 degrees opposite to what it had been. The tea parties are no longer hired mercenaries who were bought and paid for by special interests. They are now spontaneous demonstrations of the racially aggrieved population-at-large:

The national debate on health care reform has turned ugly, with some leveling charges of racism against opponents.

A Congressional Black Caucus member said Tuesday fears the revival of America's worst days of race hatred.

"I guess we'll probably have folks putting on white hoods and white uniforms again and riding through the countryside, intimidating people," Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., said when asked whether Rep. Joe Wilson's shout to President Obama that "You lie," reflected the sentiment of racists.

"And you know that's the logical conclusion if this kind of attitude is not rebuked," Johnson said.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd also found Wilson's heckling of Obama to be racially motivated, writing that Wilson really meant, "You lie, boy."

On Tuesday evening, former President Jimmy Carter said in an interview with NBC that "an overwhelming portion" of those who demonstrate against Obama are doing so because the president is a black man.

Yet another retreat for ObamaCare

Yesterday's conventional wisdom: Of course the new health care reforms would not provide coverage to illegal immigrants. Only a racist, scare-mongering, scum-sucking Republican stooge of the special interests would so blatantly lie by suggesting otherwise. How dare you, sir! Censure! Censure!

Today's conventional wisdom: Gee, it looks like illegal immigrants could get coverage under the new health care reforms after all. Maybe we should fix that.

Thoughts about the newly released film "Gamer"

• The one element of this film that anyone will remember a year from now is its "MacGyver moment". At one point in the film, the hero chugs a pint bottle of vodka. Ten minutes later, he vomits into the gas tank of an automobile, urinates into the same tank, and then hotwires the automobile and gets the engine to start. Is this at all possible?


• Another important fact is that "Gamer" is essentially two films interwoven together. One film is about a man (nicknamed "Kable") whose brain has been turned into a cybernetic implant for controlling his actions, thus turning him into a remote-controlled warrior forced to fight for his life in a giant, live action, live ammo war game. From Kable's point of view, the film is a surreal meditation about the meaning of dominance and perversion in the twenty-first century.
  
  The second film is a ridiculously banal satire of America's toxic media culture. In this second film, technological geniuses are all "slackers" and all journalists are scum-sucking bottom feeders. Our two representative gamers are a seventeen-year old kid and a morbidly obese, perverted man who spends his time sucking down fists full of buttered waffles in front of the computer sceen (presumably in his mother's basement). This perverted guy is so disgusting that I had to cover my eyes when his scenes came on the screen.
  
  Why would the directors ruin a reasonably intelligent film by inserting a series of clichés? The only answer I have is that the directors had no understanding of the real meaning of what they were putting onto the screen. They seemed to have believed that the plot of their film would utterly mystify the average member of their audience, thus requiring the directors to beat their audience over the head with the central plot points. That parts of the film are well done can only be considered a lucky accident.


• I think it should be clear that "Gamer" is a casualty of the "Age of Lucas". The chanted mantra that every film critic hears from the public at large is that the proper enjoyment of action films requires the viewer to turn of his brain and just enjoy the visual spectacle. The problem is that large portions of this public are finding it difficult to turn their brains back on again when the films are over. The directors of "Gamer" knew this and adjusted their film accordingly.

Because the George W. Bush approach to domestic policy was such a brilliant success....

I just stumbled across an interesting article which illustrates why Obamacare is doomed to destruction. The problem is that President Obama has been trying to sell the plan in exactly the same way that President Bush tried to sell Social Security reform in 2008. See if William Saletan's description of Bush's effort rings a bell:

Why is President Bush's Social Security reform plan heading south in the polls? Maybe because he's selling different messages to different audiences and some audiences are overhearing messages meant for others. He's telling older people that nothing relevant to them will change. Meanwhile, he's telling the younger people who are propping up the system that it's a dead end and he'll help them get out. This is why Republican "town halls" that were supposed to boost the plan in the polls failed so miserably. The town halls were for the younger folks, but the older folks showed up. Oops!

Just when you thought that you could safely ignore "Star Wars" for the rest of your life...

...a new debate about elements in the films pops up on the internet. In this case, it's the question as to whether the Rebel Alliance should have used insurgency tactics against the Empire. io9 has a nice summary of some points of view, starting with the blog post from "Abu Muqawama" that started it all:

Why didn't the Rebel Alliance pursue a strategy of insurgency in their rebellion against the Galactic Empire? I would argue that they pursued a strategy of conventional war against the Empire and forwent every aspect of insurgent strategy and tactics. They finally came around a bit in the end by co-opting the Ewoks onto their side. Why hadn't they pursued that strategy on a larger scale?

Instead, they simply staged two conventional assualts on the Empire's center of gravity: the Death Star. Although both attempts were successful, I think they got lucky. I think they would have been better served had read their Mao and followed his maxims.

Yes, the Rebel Alliance did launch of strategy of conventional warfare against the Empire. They waged conventional war because they could wage conventional war.

The military confrontation in the original "Star Wars" was essentially an accident. The Empire moves a capital ship into an imperial backwater to intimidate the locals, the ship stumbles across a minor Rebel garrison, and the Empire decides to bring in the Death Star to finish the garrison off. The Rebels launch a commando raid (not a conventional raid) in retailiation and win a major victory by destroying the Death Star. In "The Empire Strikes Back", the Rebels lose another one of their garrision planets to an Imperial assault, but as we see at the end of the film, the Rebels still have a rather substantial space fleet available to them. In "Return of the Jedi", the Rebels manage to destroy the second Death Star with a series of commando attacks and manage to win a full-scale battle against an Imperial fleet. I think it suffices to say that when the Rebel fleet formations are roughly the same size and power of their Imperial counterparts, the imperative of an insurgency strategy has passed.

The Rebel strategy is akin to the strategy of General Washington during the Revolutionary War. General Washington's strategy was to stay on the tactical defensive to preserve his army, to look for opporunities to strike blows against sub-units of the British Army, and to fight a decisive knock-out battle against the British Army if the opportunity arose. Similarly, the "Star Wars" Rebels keep the fleet intact, retreat from their garrison of Hoth when necessary, and are more than willing to hazard a major military force in fighting the decisive battle in "Return of the Jedi".

Tarantino's "Inglorious Bastards": initial impressions

I have yet to see the film "Inglorious Bastards", misspelled by Tarantino as "Inglourious Basterds", so take these notes with due scepticism. The impression that I've formed from what I've read about the plot and the film reviews that I've read is that this is intended to be a post-world war II Nazi propaganda film.

The first clue is title. A native speaker of American or British English (or French, for that matter) with any kind of spelling competence would never spell inglorious with an extra u inserted after the first o. The only reason for this spelling would be that the author was only partially familiar with English spelling. This gives you a choice. You can believe that the misspelling is represents simple incompetence, or you can believe that the misspelling is indicative of how a non-native speaker of English -- a Nazi, perhaps -- might attempt to render the word into English. The misspelling of bastards as basterds to match the sound of the spoken word gives one a similar choice.

The first section of the film shows us an urbane, educated Nazi officer who is entrusted with tracking down Jewish fugatives. In this case, the "Jew Hunter" manages to kill all of the Jews he has been seeking except for one Jewish girl who, later in the film, manages to inflict a violent revenge against Hitler himself and some of his top henchmen. Objectively, we see a core Nazi propaganda message: the individual Jewish girl who escapes today might be the one who assassinates the Führer tomorrow (so make sure to wipe them all out).

Next we see the Basterds, a team of Jewish-American commandos who commit atrocities behind German lines. In the Nazi mind, this would make perfect sense. If all Jews are members of one big conspiracy, then of course American Jews would be especially enraged by the treatment of their European co-conspirators. And if the war was only started by the American Jews in order to kill, murder and enslave innocent Germans, then of course the Americans would be authorizing atrocities against German soldiers.

The balance of the film is concerned with the Basterds and the surviving Jewish woman from the beginning teaming up to launch a successful assassination attempt against Hitler and some of his top henchmen. This is what marks the film as post-war Nazi propaganda. Instead of showing Hitler ingloriously killing himself while trapped like a rat in his underground bunker, Tarantino shows Hitler falling prey to a successful "stab in the back" of the German nation.

Everything about this film from the Germanglish title to the evocation of the German "stab in the back" mythology screams Nazi propaganda. And yet, I'm pretty sure that Quentin Tarantino is not a Nazi sympathizer. I think the real meaning of this film is that it was intended as pure humiliation: a film that is objectively pro-Nazi, and therefore a blasphemy, that will nevertheless win Tarantino fame, money, and praise from loyal legions of sycophantic fans.

The Obamacare disaster worsens.

President Obama is planning to make a direct appeal to the schoolchildren of America. Nothing would better illustrate the total buffoonery of the Obama administration than Obama trying to enlist children to rescue Obamacare over the wishes of their parents. My bet is that Obama has set up a special White House hotline to allow children to inform on their parents.

Film critics battle over "Inglorious Bastards"*.

Daniel Mendelsohn has written a review of the latest Quentin Tarantino-directed film, "Inglorious Bastards", that seems to be attracting some criticism. The film is about a team of Jewish-American soldiers who are infilitrated behind the German front lines of World War II to commit attacks, usually extremly sadistic in execution, against as many Nazis as possible. Mendelsohn comes to the following moral conclusion about the film:

Tarantino, the master of the obsessively paced revenge flick, invites his audiences to applaud this odd inversion—to take, as his films often invite them to take, a deep, emotional satisfaction in turning the tables on the bad guys. ("The Germans will be sickened by us," Raine tells his corps of Jewish savages early on.) But these bad guys were real, this history was real, and the feelings we have about them and what they did are real and have real-world consequences and implications. Do you really want audiences cheering for a revenge that turns Jews into carboncopies of Nazis, that makes Jews into "sickening" perpetrators? I'm not so sure. An alternative, and morally superior, form of "revenge" for Jews would be to do precisely what Jews have been doing since World War II ended: that is, to preserve and perpetuate the memory of the destruction that was visited upon them, precisely in order to help prevent the recurrence of such mass horrors in the future. Never again, the refrain goes. The emotions that Tarantino's new film evokes are precisely what lurk beneath the possibility that "again" will happen.

Jason Rosenhouse at Evolutionblog refers to this as "pure crap" and counters with a varient of the "why don't you just turn your brain off and enjoy it" argument:

Pure crap, and it is downright obscene to suggest that Tarantino has turned Jews in to carbon copies of the Nazis. Doing violence to them that wronged you is a far cry from trying to exterminate a race of people. Revenge fantasies may be ignoble (emphasis on “may”) but they are a deeply human reaction, and it is satisfying to fulfill them in fiction precisely because we know we can not fulfill them in real life.

It should be clear that this totally ignores Mendelsohn's argument, which is that a large number of people do not want to satisfy their revenge fantasies in fiction or find the notion of revenge fantasies to be deeply immoral. That's not to say that "doing violence to them that wronged you" doesn't have a certain moral sanction to it. Presumably nearly all of the people who refuse to gratify revenge fantasies would have judged the Allied war effort against the Third Reich to have been morally justified. The moral objection here is not to violence but to indiscriminate violence, the distinction is between waging war with a navy and waging war by paying off bands of pirates.

Or to reframe Mendelsohn's argument in a way that Evolutionblog might more readily understand, suppose that a major Hollywood studio made a film in which Islamic fighters infiltrate the United States, committ atrocities against Americans in gory, explicit detail, and then try to assassinate the President. Would Evolutionblog really be so eager to write this off as pure, harmless fun in this case?

* I agree with film critic James Bowman that critics should refer to this film with it's proper English spelling. My hypothesis is that this is how a Nazi who had encountered the "basterds" might attempt to spell "inglorious bastards" in English, perhaps after hearing the phrase spoken aloud. Is Tarantino implying that you're a Nazi by spelling his title this way?

Vox Day thinks that the human soul is made of water.

Every since René Descartes' proposal that the "seat of the soul" was contained within the pineal gland, philosophers have recognized that the theory of the physical soul is a royal road to personal humiliation. In perfect obliviousness to this danger, here is Vox Day's latest discussion of the human soul:

Moreover, there absolutely is empirical evidence that something goes missing when a being transitions from life into death, which is why the early physicians tried weighing bodies after death to try determining the weight of a soul. Now, you can certainly elect to call it electrical impulses or bio-software if you prefer, but there is certainly empirical evidence of what can quite reasonably be called a soul, which is neither personality nor behavior.

While it is true that a human body will weigh slightly less after death than it did before death, it has been proven that this is due to the evaporation of water vapor through the skin.

In reality, there is no empirical evidence for the existence of a physical soul and this isn't for lack of effort for trying to find one.

The Obama recession is not an accident.

The global recession has already ended in half of the world. In the United States, every time Barack Obama sees his shadow, it means six more months of recession:

U.S. unemployment will surge to 10 percent this year and the budget deficit will be $1.5 trillion next year, both higher than previous Obama administration forecasts because of a recession that was deeper and longer than expected, White House budget chief Peter Orszag said.

The Office of Management and Budget forecasts that the U.S. economy will shrink 2.8 percent this year, worse than the 1.2 percent contraction the OMB projected in May. For next year, the budget office said the gross domestic product will grow 2.0 percent, less than the 3.2 percent expected in May. By 2011, the economy would be well on its way to recovery, growing at a 3.8 percent annual rate, according to the administration’s mid-year economic review, released this morning.

This is not an accident. This is President Obama's socialist policies openly damaging our economy. Here's the latest concession to redistributive social justice:

The Federal Reserve chose a labor leader to succeed a former Goldman Sachs executive as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of New York's private-sector board of directors.

Denis Hughes, president of the New York state branch of the AFL-CIO, had been serving as acting chairman of the New York Fed board since May, when Stephen Friedman stepped down from the position.

Barack Obama thinks that union bosses should be running corporations instead of CEOs, so say hello to your new commissar, comrades!

Obama has already been defeated on health care.

The problem is that the liberal Praetorian Guard have captured the Emperor and won't let him surrender. For example, Paul Krugman wrote:

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable.

So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back.

You can tell that the Democrats are in serious trouble...

...when the squishy, moderate Republicans start acting tough. Even RNC chair Michael Steel is ready to "lock and load" over ObamaCare:

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele on Thursday dared Democrats to try a one-party push to overhaul the nation's health care system.

Steele told reporters that he thinks if Democratic senators think they have the votes, they should try a tactic that would allow them to get around a bill-killing filibuster without the 60 votes usually needed. Steele said he didn't think Democrats would do it because of potential voter backlash.

"Get it to the floor. Up or down, baby," Steele said at a news conference at the state GOP headquarters. "Put it on the table. And if you don't think you've got enough votes to get to 60, you've got the nuclear option. You've got 51."

British views of British health care are not relevant to Americans.

The Financial Times reports that the British socialized health care system has strong bipartisan support in Britain:

The US right has used the NHS as an example of the potential pitfalls facing President Barack Obama as he tries to push through a healthcare reform bill.

Some Republicans have ridiculed it as a bureaucratic and “Orwellian” system that often denies care to the elderly – with Sarah Palin, the former Republican presidential candidate, decrying it as “evil”.

But in Britain, where since 1948 all citizens have enjoyed free healthcare from birth to death, the attacks are widely seen as wrong and insulting.

Such is the strength of public support for the NHS in the UK, that the two main political parties have agreed to ring-fence its expenditure in the coming years – in spite of cuts to almost all other departmental budgets.

Of course the population of Britain strongly supports socialized health care. That's the point the American conservatives have been making all along: once the national government seizes control of the health care system, the mass of the population will have no choice but to support it. The goal of government control is to reduce the population to the status of serfs, not to improve services to the population. Would you really want to put your future health care at risk by criticizing your nation's health care monopoly?

If that is to melodramatic for you, then think about nationalized health care in terms of political rhetoric. Nationalized health care then has an immense political advantange over alternative systems because its opposition is self-negating. However much you speak out against nationalization, your opponents know that you'll come crawling back to the system on your hands and knees someday, or that you'll mark yourself as a dangerous elitist by accepting private care or care in a foreign country.

Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan makes a nice example of how British citizens become enemies of the state if they are even suspected of being disloyal to the British National Health Service (NHS; emphasis in original):

Still, I do wonder at the tone and nature of the criticism [of himself]. It seems to be based on playing the man rather than the ball. My detractors say that I’m out on a limb, that I’m in the pay of the insurance companies, that I’m insulting those who have had successful treatment from the NHS. (What? How?) If supporters of the status quo were truly confident of their case, surely they would extend their logic. I mean, why shouldn’t the state allocate cars on the basis of need, with rationing by queue? Or housing? Or food? I am reminded of the debate over asylum ten years ago, or Europe ten years before that. Remember the way even the most moderate and tempered proposals for stricter border controls were decried as “playing the race card”? Or, earlier, the way any suggestion that the EU wasn’t democratic was dismissed as “xenophobia”? Remember how keen supporters of the existing set-up were to shut down any argument? There are good and honourable people who support the NHS; and there are good and honourable people who don’t. Is that really such an extreme thing to say?

Thoughts about "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen"

• In my analysis of the recently released film "Star Trek", I identified the directors' hatred of the Federation as being the essential flaw of the Trek franchise. In the Transformers franchise, the essential flaw is that director Michael Bey apparently believes that the transformers robots are too weird and alien for his audience to accept. This belief completely dominates both of the Transformers movies.
  
  The original Transformers animated cartoon was more than happy to accept the transformers as essentially human-like in thought and feelings, and so nearly all of the dramatic action involved only the transformers. The Transformers films are not willing to do this, and so the job of making the story intelligible to the audience falls upon the extensive human-centric plot lines. This comes in two flavors. The Witwicky family along with government agent Seymour Simmons drive most of the action with a series of comedic pratfalls, funny one-liners, and teenaged Sam Witwicky's romantic interludes with his hot girlfriend Mikaela. The other flavor is a sense of valorous military competence that is the job of Major William Lennox, his fighting team, and various reinforcements that they can call upon.
  
  The net effect is that the transformers themselves are almost entirely superfluous in a movie that is ostensibly devoted to them. Some of them idle away the entire movie in car form until called upon to lob a few missiles in the final act. The film doesn't even need transformers to kill other transformers (with one exception). The American military is more than willing and able to throw enough metal at this things to blow them apart.


• The next major drawback of the Transformers films is the ridiculously bad visual design of the transformer robots. Roger Ebert describes this nicely:

  The action scenes can perhaps best be understood as abstract art. The Autobots® and Decepticons®, which are assembled out of auto parts, make no functional or aesthetic sense. They have evolved into forms too complex to be comprehended. When two or more of the Bots are in battle, it is nearly impossible to distinguish one from the other. You can't comprehend most of what they're doing, except for an occasional fist flying, a built-in missile firing, or the always dependable belching of flames. Occasionally one gets a hole blown through it large enough to drive a truck through, pardon the expression.

  Again, the original transformers cartoon did this a lot better, since the television format forced the cartoon to visually simplify the robots as much as possible. "Revenge of the Fallen" director Michael Bey seems aware of this problem, but his remedies are to do things like painting some of the transformers in bright primary colors or to give other transformers easily identifiable ethnic accents. In other words, Bey seems to be completely impotent to alter the design of the most important visual components of his own film.


• Another strange aspect of this film is that the transformers seem to behave like biological organisms despite the fact that they are also technological constructs. The transformers of "Revenge of the Fallen" have this annoying habit of using what must be radiator fluid or brake fluid to simulate human emotions like tears or spitting. There is even a scene where it is revealed that baby Decepticons are "grown" in womb-like pods full of amniotic fluid!
  
  The transformers of these films seem to be a technological version of the alien from John Carpenter's "The Thing". In that film, the alien was a shapeshifting creature that could take over other organisms and turn them into shapeshifting aliens. When under duress, John Carpenter's aliens would tend to explode into a miasmic blob of random biological organs rather than respect the bodily integrity of their impersonated form. The transformers seem to work exactly the same way by impersonating innocent non-self aware vehicles to fit into human society and exploding into a humanoid-shaped assemblages of car parts loaded with guns and missile launchers when in danger.