Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Law, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Disappointing Libertarian Ticket

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I agree with Tim Carney; they seem to be running against conservatives more than in favor of liberty:

Weld and Johnson held their first post-nomination joint interview on Tuesday, on liberal network MSNBC. “We’ve never bought into this anti-choice, anti-gay…sense of the Republican Party,” Weld said, as his first comment to the national television audience.

The message was clear: We don’t need those backward Christian Right bozos as much we need as you MSNBCers.

Johnson has sent similar signals, suggesting that his love of liberty is second to his revulsion to religion. In January, for instance, Johnson said he would make it a federal crime for women to wear the Burqa, the full-body covering worn by women in certain strains of Islam. Johnson recanted a day later, while continuing his warnings about the threat of Sharia — Islamic law — in the U.S.

This spring, Johnson pushed aside freedom of conscience. When asked in an Oregon about laws and lawsuits requiring caterers to participate in gay weddings, Johnson took the big-government side — for coerced baking in the name of gay rights. When later asked about this anti-liberty view, Johnson made the standard liberal conflation between selling off-the-shelf cupcakes to a gay customer (which is straight-up discrimination against a person) and refusal to participate in a ceremony (which is a freedom of conscience issue, a freedom of association issue, and often a free speech issue).

The dress-code libertarianism and bake-me-a-cake libertarianism Johnson has embraced isn’t libertarianism at all — it’s left-wing social engineering enforced at gunpoint. Coming from Johnson and Weld, it reeks of raw identity politics. The only consistent theme is that religious people are bad.

Yes. It’s disgusting. This sort of thing is why I’ve never been a Libertarian, despite the fact that I’m generally libertarian.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Political Correctness

7 Comments

It’s the main issue driving support for Trump:

when “respectable” people won’t talk about things that a lot of voters care about, the less-respectable will eventually rise to meet the need. That’s what Trump’s doing. And a lot of people are cheering him on not so much because they’re fans of Trump personally as because they’re happy to see someone finally stand up to the PC bullies.

I agree. His willingness to ignore the faux political pieties that have protected corrupt Democrats (most of all, the Clintons) from criticism is pretty much the only thing I like about him. He’s a bloviating vain, lying asshat and con man, and will probably be a terrible president, but at least he’s forcing the media to finally do their job.

[Update a while]

Trump states the obvious about the leftist (not “liberal”) media.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Era Of The Expert

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When it comes to putting them in charge of our lives, it’s the era of the expert failure:

The additional power that is being granted to experts under the Obama administration is indeed striking. The administration has appointed “czars” to bring expertise to bear outside of the traditional cabinet positions. Congress has enacted sweeping legislation in health care and finance, and Democratic leaders have equally ambitious agendas that envision placing greater trust in experts to manage energy and the environment, education and human capital, and transportation and communications infrastructure.

However, equally striking is the failure of such experts. They failed to prevent the financial crisis, they failed to stimulate the economy to create jobs, they have failed in Massachusetts to hold down the cost of health care, and sometimes they have failed to prevent terrorist attacks that instead had to be thwarted by ordinary civilians.

Ironically, whenever government experts fail, their instinctive reaction is to ask for more power and more resources. Instead, we need to step back and recognize that what we are seeing is not the vindication of Keynes, but the vindication of Hayek. That is, decentralized knowledge is becoming increasingly important, and that in turn makes centralized power increasingly anomalous.

Insufficient opportunities for graft in that.

Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Supersonics

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I’m up at ArmstrongDryden today, getting an overview on NASA’s low-boom supersonics program. The focus seems to be entirely on noise reduction, but I’ll be interested in hearing what they’re doing to reduce wave drag.

Kevin McCarthy is here (I spoke to him briefly about some space regulatory issues), but he hasn’t spoken.

[Update a few minutes later

The QueSST aircraft has an L/D of 6 at Mach 1.4, in response to a question from me. In response to my question about what they’re doing about wave drag, the answer is “that’s a question for another day.” Peter Cohen from Langley actually shouted that from the back of the room, to my amusement.

Law, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

In A World Of Self-Driving Cars

36 Comments

…we’ll still need the Miata.

Yes. Two counterpoints, though.

First, I don’t think I’d be able to read or write while being driven; in my experience that can make me car sick. I have to be in control.

Second, I very much fear that in a world of self-driving cars, it will be considered socially irresponsible and dangerous to drive yourself, and probably made illegal.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society, War Commentary

“Violent Extremists”

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They’re not “on the run” as the president says; they’re on the march:

“Today we worry about more than just terrorist cells — we worry about full-fledged terrorist armies as they capture territory and enlist thousands to join their ranks.”

In Syria and Iraq, McCaul said the world is witnessing “the largest global convergence of Islamist terrorists” in modern history.

Note: In “modern” history. This really has been going back for centuries. They just have better weapons now, and weaker-willed foes.

Business, Health, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Antibiotics

5 Comments

In light of the news earlier this week of the discovery of a resistant strain of E. coli, this looks like good news from Harvard:

Erythromycin, which was discovered in a soil sample from the Philippines in 1949, has been on the market as a drug by 1953. “For 60 years chemists have been very, very creative, finding clever ways to ‘decorate’ this molecule, making changes around its periphery to produce antibiotics that are safer, more effective, and overcome the resistance bacteria have developed,” says Dr. Myers, Amory Houghton Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. “That process is semisynthesis, modifying the naturally occurring substance.”

In contrast, the process described in the Nature study involves using “eight industrial chemicals, or substances derived from them,” according to Dr. Myers, and manipulating them in various combinations and then testing the products against panels of disease causing bacteria. This allows us to make new “new compounds in fewer steps than was previously possible.”

For a host of reasons, from the difficulty of developing antibiotics to the relatively low return on investment they offer, by 2013 the number of international pharmaceutical companies developing antibiotics had dwindled to four. And in each 5-year period from 1983 through 2007, the number of new antibiotics approved for use in the U.S. decreased, from 16 at the beginning of that period to only five by its end.

One thing that has complicated antibiotic development is a perceived reluctance by federal agencies to fund the research. In fact, Dr. Myers says, his new antibiotic development system would have been impossible without support from a Harvard alum and his wife who are interested in science and Harvard’s Blavatnik Accelerator Fund, which provided support for the initial creation of Myers’s company Macrolide Pharmaceuticals.

“I was making a presentation to a group of visiting alumns interested in science and one, Alastair Mactaggart, asked me about funding. I told him I had no funding because at that time we didn’t, and he followed me back to my office and said, ‘this is ridiculous: we have to do something about this’.”

Gee, it’s almost as though the government is completely incompetent at its core functions while busying itself with things that are none of its business.