Category Archives: Political Commentary

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Trump’s Refugee Charlie Foxtrot

8 Comments

This is the sort of thing that I actually expected, given Trump’s history and statements. He’s never read the Constitution, he doesn’t care about it, and he doesn’t even care about the law. As Jonathan Adler writes, he may have hired “the best people” (and he does have many good picks), but he apparently relied on idiots for this:

Whatever one thinks of the underlying policy, the degree of administrative incompetence in its execution is jaw-dropping. . . .

Under normal circumstances, I believe that the policy embodied in the Trump EO is lawful under existing precedent and would survive judicial review. That is, I believe the executive branch may decide to identify specific countries from which immigrants and others seeking entry into the country must receive “extreme vetting” and that the President may order a suspension of refugees from particular places (as Obama did with Iraq in 2011). Despite some of the President’s comments during the campaign about wanting a “Muslim ban,” this EO does not come anywhere close to effectuating such a ban, as it largely focuses on countries that were previously identified as sources of potential terror threats.

I stress “under normal circumstances” because these are not normal circumstances. The cavalier and reckless manner in which this specific EO was developed and implemented will likely give judges pause — and with good reason. Courts typically give a degree of deference to executive branch actions under the assumption that polices are implemented after serious consideration of relevant legal and policy questions. Indeed, the more serious the government interest allegedly being served, the more serious one expects the government’s internal review to be (unless, of course, there are exigent circumstances necessitating immediate action, but that was not the case here).

I’d like to think that he’ll learn from this, but I doubt it. He completely lacks impulse control. The good news is that, at some point (particularly if he continues to ignore court orders), the real Republicans are likely to decide that Mike Pence will be a better president.

Meanwhile, while it was a huge screw up, it’s driven the Left completely around the bend:

Trump’s order is, in characteristic Trump fashion, both ham-handed and underinclusive, and particularly unfair to allies who risked life and limb to help the American war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it is also not the dangerous and radical departure from U.S. policy that his liberal critics make it out to be. His policy may be terrible public relations for the United States, but it is fairly narrow and well within the recent tradition of immigration actions taken by the Obama administration. . . . Trump isn’t making this up; Obama-administration policy effectively discriminated against persecuted religious-minority Christians from Syria (even while explicitly admitting that ISIS was pursuing a policy of genocide against Syrian Christians), and the response from most of Trump’s liberal critics has been silence.

And this is something I’ve been noting every day on Twitter:

If you are horrified by what you see Trump doing, is it because when Obama did things like that you just didn’t see? Or did everything look different because it was Obama doing them?

And yes, Obama is much more of a Big Brother figure than Trump could ever hope to be. But the Left is blind on this issue.

[Update a while later]

“Scrap this half-baked immigration order and start over“:

This isn’t anywhere close to rational anti-terrorism policy. This is, rather, incompetence and ignorance by a White House inexperienced in government and deliberately insulated from those with experience. If it is additionally tainted with bigotry or cruelty, that would make it worse.

“Half-baked” is too kind. The batter is still in the bowl.

[Update a few minutes later]

“The president tramples innocent people in his rush to fulfill an ill-advised campaign promise.”

[Late-morning update]

Separating fact from hysteria on the immigration order. There’s sure been a lot of hysteria.

History, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

Half A Century

15 Comments

Fifty years ago, three astronauts died on the launch pad in a ground test. It occurs to me that, like the Kennedy assassination, this was one more event that, had it not occurred, the moon landings may not have been successful. There were many problems with the program that weren’t seriously dealt with until after that disaster. It reinforces the reality of how unlikely the success of Apollo was, and why it’s foolish to think we can replicate it half a century later.

Meanwhile, Commercial Crew is delayed again. Because it’s more important to not lose an astronaut than to end our dependence on the Russians, even though at this point, we should have no confidence in their systems. While crew flights use Soyuz, not Proton, they both use the third stage that just failed on the Progress mission. And they seem to have systemic problems in their aerospace industry.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s a piece from the WaPo.

[Update a while later]

Andrew Chaiken asks, did it have to happen? They were being very sloppy. They hadn’t had any problems with pure O2 in Mercury or Gemini, so they ignored the issue. I’d forgotten the name Marty Cioffoletti; he went on to work on the Shuttle, and I worked with him occasionally in Downey in the 80s.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is a useful bottom line, that I’ve been thinking about this week, in the context of the book:

A month after the fire, NASA’s director of manned spaceflight, George Mueller, said in a Congressional hearing that NASA’s experiences with Mercury and Gemini “had demonstrated that the possibility of a fire in the spacecraft cabin was remote.” Mueller’s words lay bare the false logic that, in the pressure to meet President Kennedy’s end-of-the-decade deadline for a lunar landing, had skewed the thinking of nearly everyone at NASA: It hasn’t bitten us, so we must be okay. This fallacy would strike NASA again, with the O-ring leaks that brought down the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 and the broken-off chunk of foam insulation that doomed its sister ship Columbia in 2003.

It’s nice to think that if we only spend enough money, and take enough time, we can ensure that no one ever dies, but as I write in the book:

No frontier in history has ever been opened without risk and the loss of human life, and the space frontier will be no different, particularly considering the harshness and hazards of it. That we spend untold billions in a futile attempt to prevent such risk is both a barrier to opening it, and a testament to the lack of national importance in doing so.

Those men died because we were in a rush, because what we were doing — beating the Soviets to the moon — was at the time considered important. But now, “safety is the highest priority.”

[Update a while later]

[Mid-morning update]

OK, I had forgotten that the Outer Space Treaty was opened for signature on the same day. It didn’t get as many headlines.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Another Amicus Brief

2 Comments

This one is from Steve McIntyre:

In the end, an objective review of these reports quickly reveals their flaws and omissions. As The Atlantic has noted, competent investigations into these issues could “have been a first step towards restoring confidence in the scientific consensus. But no, the reports make things worse. At best they are mealy-mouthed apologies; at worst they are patently incompetent and even wilfully wrong.” Given this accurate assessment, the reports cannot serve as the basis for a “clear and convincing” finding that the Appellants had serious doubts about the alleged falsity of their statements.

It nicely complements the one from Judith Curry. I’m told to expect one more from the other amici who supported us the last time; they got an extension until Monday.

Business, Culinary, Economics, Health, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society, Weird

Pig-Human Organ Farming

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“…doesn’t look promising yet.”

[Update a while later]

On the other hand, there’s this: They’re figuring out how to make store-bought tomatoes taste good. But we have to encourage them:

Consumers, known to gravitate towards the least expensive option, will have to vote with their wallets to keep flavorful tomato options on market shelves.
“The next time you’re in the store, you might consider paying a little more for a more flavorful tomato,” Klee says. If you do, you might find that the tomatoes of the future taste a little sweeter.

As someone who does shop price on tomatoes, I’ll have to try that. Lately I’ve been using fresh where I used to use canned, partly to avoid the extra salt (though you can get canned with no salt added). I may try better ones in my next tomato sauce.

[Update a few minutes later]

Forget growing organs in pigs; we may be able to 3-D print them soon.

Business, Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Paleo Diet

9 Comments

Gee, so it turns out that it won’t kill you after all:

Even short-term consumption of a Paleolithic-type diet improved glucose control and lipid profiles in people with type 2 diabetes compared with a conventional diet containing moderate salt intake, low-fat dairy, whole grains and legumes.

The biggest nightmare for Big Pharma is that we can treat Type 2 diabetes (which seems to be a diet-related “disease”) with an improved diet.

Law, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Lawsuit Update

1 Comment

Tomorrow is the deadline for filing amicus briefs on our behalf. Judith Curry has filed another one. I haven’t read it yet, but I expect it to be good.

[Update a while later]

Reading through it, it would seem to make a strong case for her own defamation, though she’s above that.

[Update late morning]

Some thoughts on “alternate facts” in the climate debate:

My tweet asked the climate scientists on my feed whether they agreed with the statement specifically the use of the word “all”. My expectation was that a reasonable core of climate scientists would agree that Dr. Mann had overstepped the science. This was not the case. Instead, what I got was overwhelming support for Dr. Mann with not a single non-skeptic initially commenting negatively. It was as if Dr. Mann was the pope and the climate community his congregation. Nothing he said could be considered to be anything less than the truth, even if it took huge convolutions of logic to make it true. In the last couple weeks the term “alternative facts” has entered our lexicon. Well in the next few paragraphs I want to unpack Dr. Mann’s “alternative fact” and see if it is indeed defensible. Then I will go into what I feel this means for the climate change debate.

RTWT.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Future Of The Democrats

6 Comments

No, it is not inevitable that their “south will rise again”:

Why are the left’s public demonstrations more impressive than its voter turnout? Because there are a whole lot of Democrats in the large population centers where such demonstrations are generally held. People can join a protest simply by getting on the subway; it’s an easy show of force.

But there are a lot of small towns in America, and as Sean Trende and David Byler recently demonstrated, those small towns are redder than ever. Effectively, the Democratic coalition has self-gerrymandered into a small number of places where they can turn out an impressive number of feet on the ground, but not enough votes to win the House. Certainly not enough to win the Senate or the Electoral College, which both favor sparsely populated states and discount the increasingly dense parts of the nation.

The Senate map in 2018 is brutal for Democrats. If Democrats want to get their mojo back, they’re going to need to do more than get a small minority of voters to turn out for a march. They’re going to need to get back some of those rural votes.

To do that, they’re probably going to have to let go of the most soul-satisfying, brain-melting political theory of the last two decades: that Democrats are inevitably the Party of the Future, guaranteed ownership of the future by an emerging Democratic majority in minority-white America. This theory underlay a lot of Obama’s presidency, and Clinton’s campaign. With President Trump’s inauguration on Friday, we saw the results.

Why was this such a bad theory? Let me count the ways.

I hope that the shock treatment of Trump will ultimately result in at least one party with actual liberal values, as opposed to the divisive, violent, race-baiting mess that is the modern Left that has largely hijacked the Democrats.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Yes, if the economy grows during Trump’s presidency, his opposition will dwindle.

[Update a few minutes later]

This related piece on the Democrats’ plight is from a couple weeks ago, with a bonus Space Shuttle analogy (not sure how apt it is).

[Late-morning update]

Trump’s revolution has been a long time brewing:

As Amity Shlaes shows in her 2008 book The Forgotten Man, that term, which Franklin Roosevelt applied to the man on the breadline in the Great Depression, “the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” more properly applies to those unhappy-if-silent taxpayers who funded the New Deal’s social-welfare schemes. And these are the forerunners of the Tea Partiers, another key class of Trump voter: the widow on a fixed income whose property-tax payment helps house a public-sector retiree comfortably but whose inexorable rise is making her own paid-off home unaffordable; the retiree whose IRA savings the Great Recession eroded or who can no longer get an adequate income from safe bond investments, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s policies; the small businessman or farmer ruined by undemocratic government regulation lacking even the pretense of due process; the ex-soldier abandoned by a dysfunctional Veterans Administration; the parent disgusted with public schools that impose ideologies she abhors on her children, while leaving them inadequately educated; and all those sincere believers in God or traditional values whom Obama dismissed as clinging desperately to outmoded pieties, as the arc of history, which the elite professor-president claimed to understand and direct according to his politically correct enlightenment, swirled them down the drain.

Honestly, it seems to me that it’s been brewing my entire adult life.