…and how it’s affected by color.
Amnesia
…and the self that remains when memory is lost.
This is the concern of cryonicists: what is the nature of identity?
If you don’t have any recollection of your own past, are you still you? If you forget who you are, but have maintained a record of your life, when you go back and read it and refamiliarize yourself, are you “you” again? If so, why wouldn’t anyone who read it become “you”? And if that is “you,” then why not just clone yourself and educate the clone with your memories? Intuitively, it feels like it might be someone else who thinks it’s you, but it’s not really you. Of course, Star-Trek-like teleportation has the same problem — is the person who stepped out of the transporter you, or a physical copy of you with the same memories? Is that continuity sufficient? How does it differ from the you that went to bed last night and woke up this morning (or in my case, the several mes that woke up repeatedly during the night)? Is that the same continuity, or one different in kind?
I’m sure that I’ve told this story before, but years ago, at the California Science Museum in Exposition Park, there was a display on health and medical ethics and it had various questions to poll the visitors. One of them was:
You have an inoperable brain tumor. If a donor became available because their body had failed, would you accept a brain transplant to save your life?
An astonishing number of people said “yes.” Which means they apparently had difficulty with the concept.
Clueless Greens
We’re betting that this news won’t dent greens’ self-confidence. They will still insist that unless they are put in charge of the entire world economy we face disaster. The sad truth is that the more power they get, the more damage they do.
They don’t care about poor people. They don’t care about people at all, except themselves.
When Seconds Count
The FBI is years away.
Well, the head of the agency doesn’t even know how to use a computer.
It’s The Foreign Policy
…and yes, we are stupid (at least those of us who voted for Obama):
Since World War II, the world has survived and prospered to a remarkable degree under U.S. leadership. Nazism was defeated, followed by the downfall or reformation of equally murderous communist regimes.
Barack Obama’s deepest intention — emotionally and ideologically — is to change all that.
Forget objective reality. As Dinesh D’Souza demonstrated in his book and film, Obama’s psychological makeup — his heart — is influenced to a significant degree by a belief that America is a dangerous colonial power, that world leadership must be shared.
Yet “leading from behind” is a euphemism. There is no such leading.
Our near-certain next secretary of State, John Kerry, our only slightly less certain next secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, and our next CIA director, John Brennan, hold the same views as Obama, or are close enough to those views to be easily manipulated.
Besides the obvious expected policies, such as pushing Israel to make self-destructive concessions for a two-state solution the Palestinians have shown no evidence of wanting, this triumvirate will support Obama in undercutting numerous formerly bipartisan policies. Including, perhaps most significantly, the gutting of the defense budget.
They also will continue the administration’s bizarre Middle East policy that has resulted in the rise of Islamism everywhere from Mali to Egypt and beyond. And no matter the rhetoric we will most likely hear at confirmation hearings, Iran will get the message that serious American power is in actuality “off the table” when it comes to interdicting the mullahs’ march to nuclear weapons.
Outside of the usual Middle East hotspots, Russia and China are watching.
It’s feeling a lot like the thirties in ways other than the continuing sick economy.
[Update a couple minutes later]
…our concerns in respect of Senator Hagel aren’t about his views on the Jews. And we appreciate the fact that he served as an enlisted man in Vietnam, an experience we tend to credit (although neither is it dispositive). But we’ve been covering his antics for years, and where we’ve come out is that he’s just over his head in terms of policy. So he’s emerged as a shill for Israel’s most implacable foes. It doesn’t take a genius to comprehend what the mullahs in Iran are going to make of this nomination.
The same thing they made of Obama’s reelection. Plus this:
It looks like Mr. Hagel’s anti-Israel record is the very raison d’etre of the nomination. It looks like the nomination is about the President’s determination to block Israel from going to its own defense against a regime that, in Iran, is preparing, by its own account, an attempt to annihilate the Jewish state. Imagine what Mr. Hagel would be like if he actually did have a problem with the Jews.
Yes, imagine.
Inflation
…since the Republic was founded. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that it accelerated about the time we abandoned the Constitution.
[Update a few minutes later]
Paul Krugman, economic soopergenius.
She Did Everything Right
…and he still drove away.
It is not the government’s decision how we should defend ourselves from criminals. There is no more fundamental human right than the right to self defense.
Want To Reduce Mass Shootings?
Stop abandoning and abusing boys:
For boys, the road to successful manhood has crumbled. In many boys’ journey from a fatherless family to an almost all-female staff elementary school such as Sandy Hook, there is no constructive male role model.
Adam Lanza is reported to have gone downhill when divorce separated him from his dad. Children of divorce without enough father contact are prone to have poor social skills; to struggle with the five D’s (depression, drugs, drinking, discipline and delinquency); be suicidal; be less able to concentrate; and to be aggressive but not assertive. Perhaps most important, these boys are less empathetic.
When I mentioned after the shooting that it might have been prevented with more male teachers and school employees, it wasn’t just about whether or not they’d be better able to defend — it was also about the terrible atmosphere and war on boys in the schools, in which the mostly-female education establishment tries to make them act like girls, to the point of drugging them to change their behavior. Particularly if you have a son, it seems that more and more, sending kids to public schools is a form of child abuse.
I’m willing to bet that this issue won’t even be discussed in Biden’s post-Newtown recommendations, though. Doesn’t fit the anti-gun narrative.
“Death Never Takes A Holiday”
Wayne Hale continues his remembrances of the tragic events of ten years ago. This is the nut of the piece:
Sometime after Bob left my office, Linda and I had another short phone conversation in which she told me that Bob was an excitable guy. I had to agree; he was pretty excited. But it seemed to be justified, rather than a reason to downplay the concern. Then she delivered the sentence that would define the rest of the tragedy; a sentence that was repeated as common wisdom by almost every senior manager that I talked to over the next two weeks: ‘You know, if there was any real damage done to the wing, there is nothing we can do about it.’ As unsettling as that was, I had to agree; going back to the first shuttle flight it had been well known that there was no way to repair the heat shield in flight. Nobody, not even me, thought about a rescue mission. Why would we?
It reminds me of what I wrote at the time (or rather, a few days after the Columbia was lost):
Imagine that you’re an engineer at JSC. The Shuttle is up, and there’s no way to bring it back except the way it normally comes back — a hot entry, just as it was designed for. There’s no other way of getting the crew out of it, and there’s no realistic way to get supplies to them to extend their mission to buy time until you can some up with some way to save them. If there’s a problem, you have no realistic options.
Now, you’re asked to make an assessment, in the absence of any data except a launch video showing some insulation hitting the vehicle, as to whether or not the damage could be catastrophic. Others around you, whom you respect, are saying that it won’t be. You have a bad feeling, but you can’t prove anything with the available data.
What do you do? What’s the benefit, given that there’s no action that can be taken to alleviate the problem, in fighting to get people to recognize that we may have a serious problem?
Moreover, suppose that we do believe that there’s a problem.
Do we tell the crew? What can they do, other than make peace with their God and say goodbye to their families? Think about the scene toward the end of the movie Apollo XIII.
“Gene, we think they may be entering a little hot.”
“Anything we can do about it?”
“No.”
“Then they don’t need to know, do they?”
It would make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to perform their experiments, knowing that they may be doomed at the end of it, and much of the results destroyed along with them, so if it turns out to be a false alarm, we ruined the mission.
It’s not hard for me to see how a group of smart people, all in the same situation, could reach a consensus that there’s not a problem.
The real problem is the fact that we send Shuttles off into the wilderness naked, with too few options.
This is also part of the theme of my book.
Like God, Like Acolyte
This is amusing.
Charles Radley subscribed me to the Space-Based Solar Power Facebook group some time ago (not at my request, but there’s not enough traffic on it that I really care). Apparently, like his climate “scientist” heroes, he will brook no dissent from the creed — he seems to have banned me. Here are the screen shots of the exchange, in case he decides to delete my posts as well.
