Media Criticism, Political Commentary

They Should Have Thought Of That Before They Released The Memos

7 Comments

The Democrats don’t have a waterboarding exit strategy:

For Democrats…the damage could be significant. Nancy Pelosi already has lost a great deal of credibility from her changing stories. Dozens of other Democrats, including such senior Senators as Jay Rockefeller, apparently also were briefed on the interrogation methods and either were silent, approved, or encouraged the policy.

The irony is that a full blown investigation and hearings will turn mostly on what the Democrats knew, and when they knew it. The Republicans mostly couldn’t care less if they were “blamed” for keeping the country safe even if it necessitated waterboarding the mastermind of 9/11 to prevent further attacks. When faced with sacrificing a city versus using harsh interrogation methods, most voters would opt for harsh interrogation.

That the Democrats have more to lose is demonstrated by the looming fight between Democrats in Congress and the CIA. The Democrats are complaining that the CIA is out to get them through selective leaks of documents. These are the same Democrats who cheered when the CIA leaked information damaging to Bush administration policies. So that complaining is going to go nowhere.

Other foot, meet shoe. Frankly, I find this hilarious.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Medicare Is Going To Bankrupt Us

7 Comments

…therefore, we need universal care. Megan McArdle, on the insanity of that “argument”:

I hear this argument quite often, and it’s gibberish in a prom dress. Any cost savings you want to wring out of Medicare can be wrung out of Medicare right now: the program is large and powerful enough, and costly enough, that they are worth doing without adding a single new person to the mix. Conversely, if there is some political or institutional barrier which is preventing you from controlling Medicare cost inflation, than that barrier probably is not going away merely because the program covers more people. Indeed, to the extent that seniors themselves are the people blocking change (as they often are), adding more users makes it harder, not easier, to get things done.

It’s not an argument. It’s sophistry in the service of socialism.

Philosophy, Science And Society

A Canine Turing Test

30 Comments

Jonah Goldberg writes about one of his favorite subjects today (no, not that one) — dogs:

Charles Darwin, a true secular saint of the modern age if ever there was one, loved dogs unreservedly. And, in The Descent of Man, he marveled at the ability of dogs to love back. He noted how even “in the agony of death, a dog has been known to caress his master.”

But even Darwin was a sucker, apparently. Eric Zorn, a writer for the Chicago Tribune, recently mocked a local woman, Jess Craigie, who dove into near-freezing waters to save her dog from drowning. Zorn wrote, “Note to Jess Craigie: Your dog still doesn’t love you.”

Zorn’s source for this dog slander is Jon Katz, who despite his name has written mostly wonderful stuff about dogs. Zorn uses an unfortunate quote from Katz to peddle the fashionable notion that dogs are, in the words of science writer Stephen Budiansky and others, “social parasites.” According to this theory, canines are evolutionary grifters that have fooled humans into believing they are our friends. “Dogs develop very strong, instinctive attachments to the people who feed and care for them,” Katz told Zorn. “Over 15,000 years of domestication, they’ve learned to trick us into thinking that they love us.” (In his book Soul of a Dog, Katz is far more nuanced about the nature of canine affection, suggesting a quid pro quo of food for love. Here, Katz is out of the bag.)

Emphasis mine.

It seems like the age-old hubris that man is so unique that other animals can’t think, or have emotions, or even feel pain (Descartes believed that the obvious distress of the animals that he was vivisecting was just reflexes, and had nothing to do with actual sensation). Of course, some take this to the absurd length of believing that human infants are insensate as well, and used this to justify surgery without anesthesia on them even in in recent decades.

But ultimately, we can’t know with any certainty what’s going on in another creature’s head, be it a dog, a baby, or even our closest loved ones. We have to make assumptions based on external behavior. The brilliant computer programming pioneer Alan Turing understood this, and decided to assume that if someone, or something, acted as though it was intelligent, and self aware, that it probably was. Thus he came up with the famous Turing test to judge whether or not a machine entity had achieved sentience and even sapience. Unless we’re sociopaths or extreme autists, we make this assumption every day with people with whom we interact.

I would say that the old saying about ducks contains multitudes of wisdom, and if it walks and quacks like a loving dog, Occam would suggest that we assume that Fido (or in his case, Cosmo) loves us, in his own dog-like way. And while I’m sure that Jonah would be appalled at the notion, I’m sure it applies to cats as well (again, in their own way). Jessica sleeps on us, she nuzzles us, she gently taps my cheek when she wants to be fed, she never deliberately scratches me, even when I’m doing something she doesn’t like (like giving her a bath). While she spends much of the day ignoring us and doing other things, and doesn’t need the constant reassurance and attention that a dog does, she is the most affectionate and adoring cat I’ve ever had, and I’m sure that she has a sense of comfort and completeness when we’re around, and if it’s not love, what is it? I don’t think she’s faking it.

I think that where Katz and his fellow deniers get off track is that the animals didn’t evolve to pretend to love us. That would be a lot of work, evolutionarily speaking, it seems to me. It would require the ability to deliberately deceive, which is a higher cognitive function, and one that apes have but that I’ve never seen cats or dogs exhibit (unless Katz’ theory is true, of course). It makes a lot more sense to think that we have simply bred them over the millennia to love us, selecting the friendlier ones for breeding, and discarding those without affection for us. Just as telling the truth is easier than telling a lie, because you don’t have to keep your stories straight, the easiest way for something with less intelligence to appear to love is to actually love — no act required.

So when someone says that animals don’t love us, they only pretend to, I don’t know what that even means. It sort of reminds me of the old joke that the Iliad wasn’t written by Homer, but another ancient Greek poet of the same name. They have evolved to love us, and we have co-evolved to love them, and why question it any further?

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Choking Off Recovery

14 Comments

One of the disengenuous tactics of the Democrats in support of Porkulus was to imply that conservative economists agreed with it, and in fact they actually lie about this. For instance, the other day, I heard Governor Rendell defending Arlen Spector’s vote on it by saying that. But what conservative economists agreed on was that some sort of stimulus was needed, not that legislative atrocity. One of the economists slandered thus was Martin Feldstein, who has a piece in the Journal today on the potentially disastrous effects of upcoming tax cutsincreases on the economy.

The current outlook for an economic recovery remains precarious. Although the stimulus package will give a temporary boost to growth in the current quarter, it will not be enough to offset the combined effect of lower consumer spending, the decline in residential construction, the weakness of exports, the limited availability of bank credit and the downward spiral of house prices. A sustained economic upturn is far from a sure thing. This is no time for tax increases that will reduce spending by households and businesses.

As Tigerhawk notes, “You cannot spread wealth that hasn’t bee created in the first place.” But so-called liberals think that wealth is something that just happens, and that all that need be done is to properly distribute it.

Political Commentary, Space

Make Or Break Time For NASA

3 Comments

I have some recommendations for the new Augustine Commission, over at PJM.

[Afternoon update]

Just to clarify for Mark (who as usual misunderstands my point), when he writes:

Is it really NASA’s job to do something like commercial transportation that should be built–well–commercially?

The answer is no, and I didn’t say or imply that it was. It is NASA’s job to provide basic technology and incentives to private industry for them to provide transportation services, though. NASA should be a good customer, and purchase commercial services (like propellant from depots, and rides to various locations, including from earth to orbit). If the private sector had any confidence that NASA would be such a customer, it would be able to raise the funds itself for development of the infrastructure. Though it wouldn’t be unreasonable for NASA to build the first depots itself, to reduce technical risk for the later private investors. This would be the closest equivalent to the Interstate Highway System analogy. What it shouldn’t be doing is developing launch vehicles. We have plenty of those, with better ones in prospect if NASA will provide a sufficient market for them.

[Bumped]

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Keep Bleeding The Patient

15 Comments

The Democrats want to return to the days of bad loans and too-easy credit:

Am I missing something here, or have our elites already erased from their consciousness the fact that easy credit and the lack of responsible budgeting by consumers contributed mightily to our current economic mess? In the fourth quarter of 2008, 13.9% of consumers’ disposable income went to servicing credit-card debt, reports the Wall Street Journal. No shortage of credit there.

Apparently the self-righteous glow that comes from forcing capitalists to make bad bets on preferred victim groups is too strong a legislative addiction to be reined in by the prospect of further economic collapse.

The problem was that it was never in their consciousness to begin with. They find it politically convenient to lie to us and themselves (as they did throughout the campaign) that the problem was caused by “deregulation” and “tax cuts.”

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

War Atrocities

41 Comments

Over at The Corner, Jonah Goldberg is having a discussion about intentionality. I think this is a little off:

Whether it was necessary or not is a serious debate, but I am personally at a loss to understand why the shortcut of firebombing Dresden was less outrageous than waterboarding some SS offficer would be. Likewise, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki involved the deliberate killing of civilians. It was deemed necessary, and in my mind justifiable, to avoid (i.e. shortcut) the deaths of American and Allied soldiers via a conventional invasion.

Not exactly. The civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were collateral casualties. The actual targets were military facilities and arms factories.

Bill Whittle has a devastating video riposte to Jon Stewart’s historical ignorance on this issue.

As an aside, had Roosevelt still been alive that summer, the war might have dragged on for much longer, because his policy was unconditional surrender. He had already probably extended the war in Europe with this policy, because if he had accepted terms from Mussolini, they might have been able to take Italy at much lower cost of life. The extended weeks of negotiations entailed by the Italians’ unwillingness to accept unconditionally gave the Germans time to occupy Italy, which resulted in a bloody conquest, whereas a surrender with terms could have resulted in a more rapid Allied takeover with few casualties, and more reserves for attacking Germany from the south much earlier than Normandy.

Roosevelt wouldn’t have allowed the Japanese to (among other things) keep the emperor, and he might have run out of bombs before the Japanese would have surrendered (they only had three, and it would have taken a while to make more plutonium) and had to invade.

Truman was more reasonable. He just wanted to end the war, and would have been happy to let them have a dozen emperors if that’s all they wanted.

So FDR extended the depression by meddling in the economy right up until the war started, at which point he left it alone to focus on the war (and of course with able-bodied men in uniform, the unemployment rate finally dropped). Then he meddled in the war and probably lengthened it as well (and it would have been even worse had he not died in the spring of ’45). One wonders in the cases of both Wilson and Roosevelt how long they would have remained in power if they hadn’t been struck down by their health. Truman tried to tinker with the economy after the war, but the Republican Congress wouldn’t let him, so the economy finally recovered completely, after fifteen years.

[Update a few minutes later]

This seems a little related. Will Barack Obama apologize for World War II?

Political Commentary, Space

Competition

15 Comments

There’s a good analysis in comments over at Space Politics about the COTS-D situation (comment by “TANSTAAFL” at 9:32 this morning):

SpaceX clearly over-reached with their lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill in the last year. I believe that Elon’s large ego is getting in the way — going up on the Hill and (in effect) saying “Just give me the money and I will eliminate the gap” was not an effective message strategy.

Not even the advocates of COTS-D want to just hand Elon the market. He gave the opponents ammunition, and lost many of his allies. It was an ill-advised strategy.

If Elon had lobbied, instead, for a COTS-D initiative that would fund many competitors, it probably would have had a different result.

In reality, there are multiple “real” competitors. Boeing bid COTS-D in the last competition. SpaceDev (now owned by Sierra Nevada) has a COTS-D concept. There is at least one serious, credible (and well funded) COTS-D competitor that is not publicly known. Under the right circumstances, even tSpace and Rocketplane Kistler could re-emerge if NASA seriously funded COTS-D.

IMO, if this nation is serious about substantially reducing “The Gap”, we could (and should) have a COTS-D competition with 4-5 winners. This nation should adopt a portfolio investment approach to diversify risk, and to increase competition and innovation.

If the Ares 1 costs $44 Billion, why can’t we take $2-3 Billion of the savings, and apply that to COTS-D? That amount of money would get us 4-5 well-funded competitors. That would be an exciting competition.

It sure would.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!