What Sam Brownback Thinks About Evolution

Today's New York Times includes an op-ed column by Kansas Senator Sam Brownback explaining in more detail his views on evolution.

Brownback is a lawyer and not the dumbest guy in Congress, but as public intellectual credentials go, not only is he no Daniel Patrick Moynahan, he's not even Newt Gingrich. Whatever good it may do him politically, the column is an intellectual muddle.

First, Brownback sets the stage by asserting "the complexity of the interaction between science, faith and reason." That's a nice touch, actually. The problem is that "faith" is a very ambiguous term. Faith of what sort and in what, exactly? We might reasonably claim that scientists, themselves, have faith in reason (and in evidence and so forth), but it is certainly not the sort of faith of which Brownback writes. What he means to imply but does not outright say is faith in the truth of certain specific doctrinal beliefs he happens to hold to be true, so it isn't the existence or nonexistence of faith, per se, that is at issue here but faith as belief in the correctness of certain substantive claims. Brownback writes:

The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.

Let's dissect that. Why can't we "drive a wedge between faith [as Brownback understands it] and reason"? Because he wholeheartedly believes they cannot be contradictory? Why is that? Here he starts out reasonably well, noting that science and (Brownback's) faith address different questions; namely, questions about how nature operates and what he calls "spiritual truths." That's not so bad so far. If he had gone on to claim that their areas of concern were not complementary but incommensurable or merely that they bore no relationship to each other at all, rather like, say, there is no overlap between questions about auto mechanics and questions about music, I'd gladly agree with him. But he doesn't. What he does instead is simply assert his belief in God's agency. I don't happen to disagree with that belief as such, but the belief itself is no evidence or argument that scientific assertions and theological assertions cannot or do not contradict each other. As Brownback states it, it is merely a conclusion, an assertion of faith, actually, without any supporting argument or evidence. Viewed as an purported argument, it is entirely question begging.

Brownback then shifts from the notion that science and faith are complementary to the notion that faith supplements the scientific method "by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose." Certainly, religious beliefs can provide a context for and even, insofar as they are believed, a rationale for one's values, etc. But they are not the only possible such contexts or rationales, nor is it at all clear how any of these things supplements the scientific method any more than my discussing jazz with my mechanic supplements his ability to fix my car. What Brownback might have said is that, just as a knowledge of both mechanics and jazz lead to a fuller life, a life focused only on the sorts of questions science can answer is a less full life than one that includes other concerns. But that isn't what he said and what he did say, insofar as it is intelligible, is false.

Brownback tips his hand when he writes, "If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true." Implicit in this statement is that he does not believe, in particular, that our species evolved from other species (whether accidentally or not). This, of course, belies his purported belief that science and faith do not contradict each other, but we'll let that alone for now.

He goes on with the fairly typical Intelligent Design gambit of dropping the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis as evidence that real scientific questions remain unanswered in evolutionary theory. As others have written extensively, this is both true and irrelevant. What is especially relevant is Brownback's rejection of "arguments for evolution that dismiss the possibility of divine causality." This is the real heart of the matter and Brownback gets it exactly wrong.

I don't know a single scientist who believes as a matter of science that divine causality is impossible. I know some who do entirely reject the notion of divine causality as I know some who believe in it, but in neither case are they making a scientific claim and in neither case are their views at all relevant to evolutionary theory. The critical point here is that as far as the science of evolutionary theory is concerned, (1) its working hypothesis that divine causation is not necessary to explain how nature works has so far proved successful and (2) it is impossible, in any case, to either verify or falsify divine causation as we have come to understand what that assertion entails. I note, in passing, that some would claim the assertion is unintelligible or incoherent and, thus, incapable of being either true or false, but we'll leave that for another time.

Let's return to my mechanic friend who does not want to discuss why Miles Davis was one of the all time jazz greats but wants me to understand, instead, why I should get the oil changed regularly in my car and so explains how internal combustion engines work. He describes the pistons moving up in their cylinders, compressing gas vapors, then how the vapors are ignited, causing a controlled explosion pushing those pistons back down and, at the same time others on the crankshaft up, etc. He describes how the gears and such transfer that power from the rotating drive shaft to turn the wheels and so forth and why, therefore, the engine must be properly lubricated. Let's pretend I follow him but insist at every point in his explanation that this all happens because my personal deity, Mechano, makes it happen.

My mechanic, a more philosophically astute fellow than most politicians, points out to me that, while Mechano may indeed be the unseen force behind the workings of engines and motors, he does not need to believe in Mechano's existence to understand or to repair automobile engines. Maybe he does believe in Mechano, but none of the repair manuals and none of his training and experience have mentioned Mechano. In that sense, neither my nor his beliefs one way or the other about Mechano either complement or supplement his work. Whether they complement or supplement his or my life outside the area of auto repairs is another matter. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. In any case, this is the rough equivalent to evolutionary theory vis a vis Sen. Brownback's faith and this is why, again only roughly speaking, efforts to include non-evolutionary accounts of the origin of man in biology class curricula are met with the same sort of reaction I would get if I tried to pressure General Motors to include a chapter on Mechano in their service manuals.

There are any number of other problems with Brownback's column, but I'll just make one final point. He writes, "While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order."

Whether the final sentence of that claim is true or not, it is worth noting that one can be certain in one's convictions but nonetheless entirely wrong.

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P.S. -- John Derbyshire likens Brownback on evolutionary biology to Paris Hilton on partial differential equations. The Derb goes on, as I did not, to do a nice job of tearing apart the implicit "science" of Brownback's weaseling over "micro" versus "macro" evolution.

It's a shame about Plame, but all the same...

"What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not! They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?" -- Alex Leamus, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

I stand (sit, actually) at least somewhat corrected. My previous sense was that the Valerie Plame Wilson CIA status disclosure, the subsequent investigation of White House officials and prosecution of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, while great political theater, was of dubious legal or policy significance. I suppose I should reconsider in light of recent developments. I don't recall ever specifically stating that the question whether Plame was indeed a covert operative or what sort of work she was engaged in was part of my reasoning, which at least gets me off the hook of being embarrassed by Glenn Greenwald now; but I'm sure that some questions in that regard were at least in the back of my mind. (A dangerous, dusty and disorganized place, by the way.) So what now, given apparent confirmation of both her covert status and her work concerning "weapons proliferation issues related to Iraq"?

I wrote "apparent" and will make a tiny point at the risk of sounding like a Creationist demanding every last gap in our evolutionary history be plugged, and that is that the Unclassified Summary submitted by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is unsigned, undated and unauthenticated. Surely, Fitzgerald has made or will make appropriate representations to the judge regarding its bona fides, but I find it at least worth noting that the usual skepticism of the blogosphere regarding such things seems to have gone missing here entirely.

But let's assume now that Plame was indeed a covert operative, moreover, one whose ongoing work for the CIA was both of some importance (we still don't know how much) and badly compromised by the leak and, as a result, U.S. intelligence operations suffered. I agree with Greenwald and others that the extent to which the "bureaucrat desk jockey not covert operative" talking point spread throughout conservative talking head circles now appears pretty thoroughly discredited and (should be) embarrassing to those who pushed it or bought into it on, shall we say, faith-based grounds. It further makes Libby's situation far less sympathetic and intensifies the case for further investigation of Cheney and others.

Very well. I ask this now as what the lawyers call a plea in mitigation of my own obdurate failure still to get it. Aside from the technical legal violations involved in revealing Ms Plame's status, the general import of which is certainly a reasonable concern (we can't just go about outing our spies willy-nilly), is this story still anything more than simply further evidence that, like Le Carre's spies, politicians are "just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards"?

Because, frankly, I already knew that.

Constant Viewer: The Lives of Others

Constant Viewer rarely watches foreign language films, at least not in first release, and realizes this is a great failing. CV has never been comfortable reading subtitles and rarely finds such films aesthetically or emotionally satisfying as a result. For that reason and despite its almost universal praise, CV does not recommend seeing The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) on the big screen. The good news, however, is that it will probably soon be released on DVD. Of course, if you speak German or if subtitles don't bother you in the slightest, you can probably still catch it at the cineplex, too. Seeing it on a smaller screen later won't significantly diminish its merits, though, so CV would still lean towards waiting for the DVD release.

Constant Viewer does not believe this film deserves the lavish praise it has received. It is a very good film, a movie definitely worth seeing, but CV can't help but harbor suspicions that any foreign language film so thoroughly understandable to the average American film goer (and, hence, reviewer) makes that viewer feel all clever and international and thus disposed to a favorable review. The fact is that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's writing and directing is painfully linear and obvious almost to the point of being insulting. The dialog beats the viewer over the head with whatever plot or political point is being made, and while there are several nice and unexpected twists along the way, there is nothing really special or tricky or "artistic" about the acting or directing or story line. Any viewer failing to get the plot or the message here would have been bewildered by the storyline of a Pokemon movie.

Of course, another way to look at all of that is that it is art to conceal art and that Donnersmarck and the cast have done an entirely credible job with an entirely competent and workable script -- the story of the increasingly intertwined lives of an East German playwright and his actress lover with that of a Stasi (secret police) officer assigned to spy on them. But it is the absurdity of the final days of the East German state that make the movie worth seeing, whereas no one ever said, for example, that what makes Citizen Kane great is how much one learns about William Randolph Hearst.

For the perennially ax grinding sorts among us, there are no doubt analogies to be made between the bathetic spy vs. spy nightmare of the DDR and post 9/11 PATRIOT Act America. But don't kid yourself. Unless you have ever been to East Germany before the system collapsed or to any of the other Soviet satellite states during the Cold War, you haven't a clue what it was really like. CV was in East Berlin once before the end of the regime and then again a few months after the Wall came down. The first trip was the most eerie of my life. It physically felt like the exact opposite of the scene in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door and steps into a world of color. Crossing Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin, all the color in the world washed out into a dull, lifeless gray almost instantly. It showed at once in the poorly lighted streets and unmaintained buildings and in the faces and body language of the poorly dressed and unkempt people on the streets. East Berlin was the closest thing to the walking dead in a limbo of perpetual dusk I have ever witnessed.

And it was the most prosperous and flourishing showcase of the entire Soviet socialist world.

And for Christmas, Everyone Gets a Pony!

Barack Obama is now making a plan for universal health care a campaign promise in his bid for the presidency.

Details, such as they are, are reported by the AP (with my emphasis added) as follows:

Under Obama's proposal, everyone would be able to obtain health insurance, and the Illinois senator would create a National Health Insurance Exchange to monitor insurance companies in offering the coverage. In essence, Obama's plan retains the private insurance system but injects additional money into the system to pay for the expanded coverage.

Those who can't afford coverage would get a subsidy on a sliding scale depending on their income, and virtually all businesses would have to share in the cost of coverage for their workers. The plan that would be offered would be similar to the one covering members of Congress.

His package would prohibit insurance companies from refusing coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

"My plan begins by covering every American. If you already have health insurance, the only thing that will change for you under this plan is that the amount of money you will spend on premiums will be less," Obama said. "If you are one of 45 million Americans who don't have health insurance, you will after this plan becomes law."

In addition to broadening coverage, Obama called for a series of steps to overhaul the current health care system. He would spend more money boosting technology in the health industry such as electronic record-keeping, put in place better management for chronic diseases and create a reinsurance pool for catastrophic illnesses to take the burden of their costs off of other premium payers.

His plan also envisions savings from ending the expensive care for the uninsured when they get sick. That care now is often provided at emergency rooms. The plan also would put a heavy focus on preventing disease through lifestyle changes.

In all, Obama said, the typical consumer would save $2,500 a year.

Obama conceded that the overall cost of the program would be high, while not providing a specific number.

"To help pay for this, we will ask all but the smallest businesses who don't make a meaningful contribution to the health coverage of their workers to do so to support this plan," said Obama. "And we also will repeal the temporary Bush tax cut for the wealthiest taxpayers."

Sounds great, doesn't it? Hey, if you already have insurance, your rates as a consumer (never mind your rates as a taxpayer) will go down, and if you don't have it the government will pay for it. Where's the (yet uncalculated) extra money going to come from? Why, from rich and greedy businesses (don't worry, their prices and profits will magically remain the same) and the "wealthiest" taxpayers (everyone but the poor) and from everybody's lifestyle changes!

My only question is this: Who is the Hillary Clinton operative planted inside Obama's headquarters working to ensure his defeat?

Housekeeping Notes -- May 2007

The blog is two months old today. I continue to get random visits from around the globe, amusingly enough often following the foreign visitor’s search for information on Foley catheters which I once mentioned in a piece about House MD. There must be some cosmic symbolism to that. Thanks to links from such sites as Reason’s Hit & Run, memeorandum and Unqualified Offerings (to name but a few) the site has moved from invisible to merely obscure.

There have been many big stories I have, for various reasons, not written about, and I continue to intersperse the political and current events topics with human interest stories, odd news, movie reviews and assorted nonsense, occasionally of a somewhat personal nature. Purely political blogs probably gain more credibility more rapidly, but if life is not a business (and it isn’t) neither is it a campaign. Besides, not even my ego is yet so vast as to presume I have something worth saying about every breaking story.

The freedom to write whatever one wants whenever one wants is both addictive and dangerous. I don’t believe that whatever one posts on the internet is really preserved for all time (witness the loss of my earlier writing at Inactivist and many extensive comments at Left2Right), but there is little doubt future historians will have a field day poring over the various eccentricities of our contemporary computer assisted logorrhea. If there is one thing bloggers suffer from it is the absence of sane, objective editing. Not only would it be an advantage to have some other eyes proofread for composition and other mechanical errors, it would be lovely to have someone one trusted who could say “Fergawdsakes, Ridgely, you can’t seriously intend to publish that, can you?” before hitting the Post key. On the other hand, the blogger is free to ignore or override his inner editor as the professional journalist is not free to override the real version.

I’m basically a wordsmith, or at least fancy myself as such, so I’ve tended to keep the blog text oriented, using pictures sparingly. For the time being, I am refraining from the popular trend of posting video clips on the blog for the same reason, although I will link to such clips as appropriate. I have a Quine-like preference for desert landscapes, not only in my ontology but in my web design, so I intend to retain the sparsely furnished look here. I am, however, modifying the current page to include two weeks of postings, as I have found stories remain relevant at least that long and people do not like searching back pages and archives any more than necessary.

My thanks to those slowly growing numbers of you who have supported this blog with your readership. Questions and comments are, as always, most welcome.

-- DAR

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Retired Header ‘Quotes’:

March 2007 – “Pay no attention to that man behind the veil!” – the Wizard of Rawls
April 2007 – “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one may still post on the internet.” – Ludwig Blogenstein

Anamnesis

Although May 30th is its historical date, chosen specifically because it was not the date of any significant Civil War battle, we officially celebrate Memorial Day today. Unlike President Bush, I think it better not to use the occasion to argue politics.

My father was a World War II veteran, a sailor serving in the Aleutian Islands. My Uncle Ed was a soldier “over there” in France during World War I. He once showed me a box of decorations his grandfather had received for service as a Union soldier during the Civil War. A cousin by marriage was a Korean War POW and spent the rest of his life in a deep alcoholic depression. They are all dead now, though none died in military service.

My father’s family dates back to the 1600s in Maryland and the genealogical records show family service in the Revolutionary War and probably every military conflict thereafter. My mother’s family records were lost over time or destroyed during the Civil War, but suffice it to say there have been Smiths in Virginia for a very long time and they were all a scrappy lot. Of course, I never knew any of those men and thus I have no memories of them.

The war of my generation was Viet Nam. When I turned eighteen, I first had a student deferment from the draft and then a high lottery number, and then the war was over and so was the draft. Although I worked for several decades for the Army, Navy and Air Force, I never served in uniform and it is hardly the same thing. As for my cohort, there isn’t a single name on the Viet Nam Memorial of someone I knew. The few early deaths among friends in my generation were caused by diseases, accidents and drug overdoses. There is one ironic and tragic exception. One member of my high school graduating class joined the Marines, served in Viet Nam and returned safely only to be shot to death a short time later in his own home in a dispute with a family member.

Of the men of my generation who did serve in Viet Nam and came home safely, by the time an ungrateful nation stopped spitting at them and calling them baby killers they no longer felt inclined to share their experiences in that war except perhaps among each other. Too often, it seems, not even then. If there really are such things as lessons from Viet Nam, I don’t know what they are.

Memorial Day having started as Decorations Day in tribute specifically to fallen Union soldiers of the Civil War, it was met at first with resistance in the South and accepted there only after more wars and more war dead to which, as in the Civil War itself, the southern states contributed their share to the vast charnel houses of war. In the South of my childhood generally and in our family particularly, Memorial Day became a day of remembrance for all the dead, and I would drive with my father on Memorial Day to a cemetery in D.C. where he and I would tidy up the grave of my paternal grandmother, Ida.

Although my father was eligible for burial in Arlington Cemetery, my parents chose to buy adjoining cemetery plots not far from my childhood home. They are buried there together now for many years, though I have visited less than a half dozen times since my father’s death nearly twenty years ago. I know exactly where their graves are and exactly what their marker looks like. I see it in my mind as I write these words. Am I a disloyal or disrespectful son for not going there more often to actually witness once again the site of their mortal remains? I don’t know. I know only that I don’t go and that, for whatever reason, I sometimes feel guilty as a result, but my memory of my parents does not require that I be there.

As for the official purpose of Memorial Day, remembering those who died in military service to the nation, the point I was making implicitly above is that, unlike my memory of my parents, I have no actual memories at all of any such people. I can honor them, but I cannot literally remember them. You cannot remember someone you never knew, and I have never known anyone who died in military service.

That might strike the reader as a sort of fustian way of being dismissive of Memorial Day or of its purpose, but I don’t mean it as such. I note it because it simply will not do to pretend that my relationship with those men and women is at all the same as that of those who really knew and loved them. I am incapable, as it were, of anamnesis.

Anamnesis, like its better known cousin amnesia, derives from ancient Greek and translates roughly as memory or remembrance. It finds its first significant usage in Plato’s epistemology, his notion that knowledge derives from recollected memory of the forms or ideals; but it is also a critical concept in Christian theology and it is that sense I mean here. It is the sort of memory distinguished from the act of remembering obscure names or dates or facts of any sort but the memory instead that washes over us every time we see or think of someone we could never forget; a parent or child or spouse or lifelong friend.

It is that deeper, richer sense of memory and not merely the sense of remembering, say, that I once owned a blue 1966 Karmann Ghia or the lyrics to “Yesterday” or even the name of the girl I had a crush on in elementary school (Patty) that Jesus’ words at the Last Supper, “Do this in remembrance of me” is meant to covey. We can honor those we have never known with rites and rituals or decorations and parades and monuments. We can understand the significance of their sacrifices and be appropriately grateful. But we cannot remember strangers as others can or once could, and we should remember that, too.

SHOES! SHOES! SHOES!

Social construct theory be damned, men and women are different. "How different," you ask? I have no idea. All I know is that, for example, no (straight) man would ever look at an unadorned window and either on his own or at the urging of his other straight male friends think "You know what? That window needs a treatment. Perhaps if I hung some folded cloth around the top and sides..."



So, too, even fashion conscious men do not care nearly as much about shoes as women, on average, do. Not even fashion conscious gay men. In fact, men who care as much about shoes as women do are called fetishists. By comparison, women who care as much about shoes as male shoe fetishists do are called, um, women. Furthermore, they both care only about women's shoes.



Men's shoes, on the other hand? Meh. Go figure.



Thus, in my never ceasing efforts to build this blog up one reader at a time, I once promised a certain Susan W-G I'd eventually get around to writing something about "the shoes." As it happens, there is exciting shoe news around the globe these days, with two major stories sweeping the media.

First, at long last someone has invented "Sensible shoes for work that become killer heels at night" or, in other words, adjustable heel shoes. This is a wonderful, practical idea and it is absolutely guaranteed to be an utter and complete financial and market failure. Of the various women I have known who care about shoes at all (my wife, by contrast, could care less except that they be comfortable and presentable), not a single one of them would consider buying one pair of shoes when they could, instead, buy two or three. Part of the very appeal of fashion and "killer heels" is that they are, by definition, impractical.



The second story requires a bit of background. Big box specialty stores are all the rage these days, including home improvement stores, furniture stores, electronics stores, clothing stores and, yes, even shoe stores. The earliest such big box specialty store, however, that I can recall was Toys R Us. As anyone who has ever taken a child to Toys R Us knows, even in these modern, egalitarian times around 80% to 90% of all toys are aimed at boys. Specialty big box clothing and shoe stores are, simply put, the revenge of the little girls once they've grown up. Sure, there's a tiny Men's section tucked away somewhere in the back corner with the clearance items, but the overwhelming preponderance of the merchandise is for women. Fair's fair, after all.

Historically, urban department stores were the first "big boxes," some upscale and some downscale; but there, too, the clothes and shoe departments for women have always been several multiples of the floor space devoted to men's apparel. Now, in what must surely be a new and historic moment for women's shoes, Saks Fifth Avenue announces that its new 8,500-square-foot space on the eighth floor of the flagship store in Manhattan will soon have its very own zip code. Not the entire store, mind you, but just the shoe department. Yes, come August, customers will be able to send mail specifically to 10022-SHOE for the Saks shoe department. A grateful shoe buying nation will no doubt remember to include adequate postage.



Even though I'm just a guy who, like most guys, pretty much wears the same two or, at most, three pair of shoes until they're completely ruined and who then and only then goes out grudgingly to buy a new pair just like the old ones, I say it's high time shoes got the recognition they so richly deserve!



There now, promise fulfilled. Other readers are welcome to suggest their own favorite topics. Maybe I'll, um, cobble together something for you, too!

"Trust me, I'm an expert."

Bryan Caplan certainly is getting a lot of press these days. Not necessarily good press, mind you; but as any publicist will tell you, bad press is better than none at all when you’re hawking a new book. Writing in that font of all economic wisdom, the New York Times, Princeton associate professor of politics and international affairs Gary J. Bass reviews Caplan’s book and writes as follows:

To the exasperation of the libertarian-minded Caplan, most Americans do not think like economists. They are biased against free markets and against trade with foreigners. Absurdly, they think that the American economy is being hurt by too much spending on foreign aid; they also exaggerate the potential economic harms of immigration. In a similar vein, Scott L. Althaus, a University of Illinois political scientist, finds that if the public were better informed, it would overcome its ingrained biases and make different political decisions. According to his studies, such a public would be more progressive on social issues like abortion and gay rights, more ideologically conservative in preferring markets to government intervention and less isolationist but more dovish in foreign policy.

If the public doesn’t know how to think, is there a solution? Caplan has some radical medicine in mind. To encourage greater economic literacy, he suggests tests of voter competence, or “giving extra votes to individuals or groups with greater economic literacy.” Until 1949, he points out, Britain gave extra votes to some business owners and graduates of elite universities. (Since worse-educated citizens are less likely to vote, Caplan dislikes efforts to increase voter turnout.) Most provocatively, perhaps, in an online essay Caplan has suggested a curious twist on the tradition of judicial review: If the Supreme Court can strike down laws as unconstitutional, why shouldn’t the Council of Economic Advisers be able to strike down laws as “uneconomical”?

Let’s back up a bit, shall we?

One of the reasons physicians enjoy a vastly better reputation than lawyers or economists is that there is no medical specialty dedicated to protecting the interests of viruses or cancer. Ethical issues abound in modern medicine, but physicians still treat patients one individual at a time and the life and health of each patient is of paramount and often exclusive importance. We might invoke a distinction and say that there is usually no serious conflict of interests between what we might call positive medicine and normative medicine – the health and physical well being of the patient comes first even if the physician has good reason to believe that the world would be a better place without him. Moreover, as far as other competing interests are concerned, even Peter Singer’s addled and adoring minions have not yet taken up the cause of the interests of malignant cells.

Lawyers also labor for the most part at what we might call the micro level, representing one party’s rights and interests to the exclusion of and often in opposition to the interests of others. Well, they can go get their own lawyers, can’t they? Still, like a life threatening disease, litigation is often a zero sum game and, win or lose, the parties to the dispute can’t help but notice that there are lawyers fighting for the ‘cancerous’ interests of their opponents. Part of the bad reputation lawyers suffer comes, ironically enough, from the professional ethics of the profession that requires the lawyer, once retained, to be a zealous representative and advocate of his client’s interests. Whatever qualms he might have about the plight of the sympathetic tenant about to be evicted from her apartment, his client landlord nonetheless has legal rights, too, and it is his lawyer’s obligation to see to their enforcement and protection. Still, helping to oust widows and orphans on to the streets isn’t an optimal public relations strategy.

Economists, by contrast, tend to work at the macro level as advisors to policy and decision makers who, in turn, take personal credit for decisions that work out well and blame their advisors when they turn out badly. Still, like lawyers and physicians, economists have a certain expertise noneconomists do not have. Their knowledge is far from perfect or complete, but they nonetheless really are useful in figuring out how best to achieve certain sorts of results. They are especially good at advising on questions of economic efficiency and the effect of incentives on behavior.

Note, however, that efficiency is, itself, a normative concept and, more importantly, that what sorts of behavior should be encouraged or discouraged is, except in terms of economic efficiency, a question beyond the positive knowledge of economics. Most of us agree that, all other things equal, efficiency is a good thing. Waste not, want not, as our mothers used to say. Whether economic efficiency is of paramount importance, however, or whether some of those other considerations should take precedence in matters of public policy is a question about which economics itself can shed no light.

Milton Friedman famously drew the distinction between positive economics and normative economics – between how the cause and effect of economics in fact works and how we should use that knowledge, arguing that economists should attend exclusively to positive economics. (Ronald Coase, in turn, famously noted that Friedman’s most widely read article to that effect was essentially normative.) Disputes over Bryan Caplan’s thesis need to take the distinction into account.

Unlike the general public whose opinions regarding free trade or immigration may well be the product of little more than ignorance and bias, professional economists insofar as they are applying positive economic theory to the question of the impact of trade or immigration on the economy tend not to differ wildly in their conclusions. There is no serious dispute over the basic mechanics of price theory among economists and even the major disputes of the past century over macroeconomics are far less in dispute than they were fifty years ago.

Thus, for example, in Christopher Hayes’s review of Caplan's book the other day when he mentioned hundreds of economists who supported a raise in the minimum wage, it would have been far more intellectually honest to note as well that those economists were not denying the general truth that a raise in the minimum wage will increase unemployment but only that under current economic conditions such effect would be minimal and outweighed, in their opinion, by other factors. But the other factors here are critical, for at least some of those economists were making normative claims, not merely positive ones – they were saying, in effect, “we prefer to accept the minimal bump in unemployment (among, for example, teenage part-time workers) in return for other effects we favor.”

This is a complicated topic about which I may feel compelled to write more. For now, however, this is the bottom line. If there were, in fact, clear and overriding economic goals and principles adopted by the nation as the economic equivalent of our constitutional principles, having a supreme court of economists overrule politically motivated legislation that violated those principles might not be such a bad idea. But, of course, we don’t.

Most people, if they understood economics better, would be inclined to support free markets and open immigration unless the effects of those policies adversely affected them in particular (e.g., if they were among the few to lose their jobs as opposed to the many to enjoy lower prices). Still, some people who do understand the economics involved nonetheless still prefer protectionism over open markets; that is, they are willing (for us all) to pay the price of bad, that is, inefficient economic policy.

Those of us who prefer economic efficiency should be more candid in admitting that fact and, more to the point, that any such view contrary to the purely economic view is “irrational” in only a very crabbed and technical sense. By the same token, those who favor bad economic policy for whatever other normative reasons they might believe or assert should be sufficiently honest to admit as much, as well.

Maybe, just maybe, if both such sides were more candid about such matters the voting public might be a little better informed and a bit less “irrational,” too. I wouldn’t worry about the public becoming too “rational,” however. After all, in their roles as private citizens and voters, many professional economists can be every bit as “irrational" as the rest of us.

Who Isn't Afraid of Democracy?

Writing in the "progressive" In These Times, Christopher Hayes asks the provocative question, Who's Afraid of Democracy?

I am. So, almost certainly, is Hayes, although he is unlikely to admit it. You should be, too.

Hayes's article focuses on George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. The issue Caplan addresses is how it can be that individuals acting as consumers and producers behave as the sort of rational, self-interested actors classical economics both presumes and predicts and yet as voters can and do frequently favor political policies such as, for example, minimum wage laws, that are clearly irrational from an economic perspective. Caplan's position as described by Hayes is that people act rationally as consumers because they directly and visibly experience the consequences of their decisions, whereas acting as voters they are rationally aware that their individual votes are inconsequential and thus feel free to vote for objectively irrational policies. Whether that is an accurate description of Caplan's position or not, it is a rational position.

Hayes's problem with that position, however, is that "it quickly leads to some very dark places," such as considering a requirement that people pass a basic economics test as a prerequisite to vote. Given that Hayes considers a recent bit of economic research suggestive "that we are all, more or less, intuitive socialists" and describes Caplan as being willing "to embrace the darkness [and] articulate in lurid detail the obscene id of Chicago-school, Grover-Norquist-style, free market fundamentalism," the prospect of Hayes, himself, voting suggests to me that there may be something to this notion of an economic literacy test after all.

Hayes also indulges in some muddled counterargument about economic consensus and the comparative value of public opinion versus economic expertise almost too silly to bother mentioning. Here, in any case, is Hayes's real objection. He writes, "Given a choice between democracy without free markets or free markets without democracy, many conservatives would gladly choose the latter."

Hayes is obviously happy to include libertarians without qualm or qualification into his over-broad definition of conservatives, but insofar as his topic is the sort of economic "conservativism" that is the hallmark of libertarianism versus "progressive" economic theory, perhaps that isn't unreasonable or unfair. The critical point, however, is not whether there is some per se ideological preference for markets over democracy insofar as they might lead to different results, but whether democracy is itself an intrinsic or a merely instrumental good. If democracy is an intrinsic good, well then, that's that. If merely instrumental, however, then it is entirely appropriate to ask what the limits of its instrumental value are and whether there are better alternatives. There is a reason why, for example, neither Mr. Hayes nor I decide what to order in a restaurant by a show of hands from the other customers.

Restaurants aside, without speculating too much about Hayes's own political or economic views, I suspect it is fair to assume that he, too, would contend that there are serious problems with democracy understood simply as majority rule. Even liberals and progressives understand the tyranny of the majority problem, perhaps better than many conservatives do, though far worse than libertarians do. So it simply won't do for Hayes to tut-tut the notion that at least some things are too important to us as individuals to permit a mere majority of others to vote them away. And if we are agreed at least to that extent, then we end up, as the old joke goes, merely haggling over the price; that is, Hayes's list of inalienable rights might differ from yours or mine, but unless he is willing to embrace the non-"elitist" notion that a majority (or even super-majority) vote to, say, reestablish slavery would be just hunky-dory, then he too must at least in principle fear unmitigated democracy.

If so, then how do we decide which rights are inalienable? Obviously, majority vote won't do. At least the "economic conservative," i.e., the libertarian has an alternative solution; namely, to the maximum extent possible, leave individuals alone to decide for themselves what to do with their liberty and their property. Surely, that is at least part of the background from which Caplan might well suggest that market solutions are often preferable to political solutions.

It is not, of course, an entirely unproblematic solution. But one might still ask what sort of solution Hayes thinks is preferable and how he ethically justifies his preferred solution. Perhaps intuitively?

Constant Viewer: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

First things first. Constant Viewer is constantly harping about movies running over two hours. Well, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End runs 168 minutes, well over two hours, but it doesn't feel long, so CV will hold his tongue. (Actually, a very difficult thing to do, anatomically speaking.) Sure, it could easily have been trimmed, but let's face it, we're talking about a movie based on a Disney theme park ride here, and the third such movie at that. We're talking, in other words, almost literally about a "sit back and enjoy the ride" movie, and sit back and enjoy it you will.

That said, there's little point in dwelling over tedious business like, oh, say, plot. Still, here's the plot outline: Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), Will Turner (Orlando Bloom)and Elizabeth Swann (Keria Knightley) must sail off the edge of the map to find Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and fight one last decisive battle. Complications ensue.

But you're not going to see At World's End because of the plot; you're going to go for the action scenes and special effects, for closure from the last two Pirates (the second of which was disappointing) and, most importantly, for yet another fix of Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow. Depp is one of the most interesting and talented actors of his generation and would have become a major star, anyway, but the first Pirate flick gave him a much wider audience. Appropriately so, because he made that movie entirely his own. Besides, the camera loves him and he's a natural in front of it. That's not to say Depp doesn't work at his craft, but only that he's working with gobs of talent and screen presence, neither of which mere training can recreate or replace. His Jack Sparrow, as a result, is an entirely believable unbelievable character. Okay, so it isn't Hamlet, but neither is Hannibal Lector, if you get CV's drift here.

Really, the film's only true weak point is that Depp is nowhere to be found in the early part of the movie and, once found, isn't around as much in the rest as fans might have wished. CV understands there are all sorts of plot threads that don't concern Sparrow directly and CV is even willing to believe there must be some people who care what happens to Knightley's and Bloom's characters. CV simply isn't to be counted among them.

Otherwise, there's plenty to enjoy. Many buckles get swashed and daring gets done, the sea battles and special effects are splendid and CV found himself almost willing to forgive the gratuitous allusions to current events in the opening scene and Knightley's politically correct heroics later on. The supporting cast is wonderful, even including a cameo role by Keith Richards, claimed by Depp to be part of his inspiration for the Sparrow role (the other part being that suave romantic, Pepe Le Peu). CV couldn't say whether make up was required for Richards's part or not.

Go, see the movie on the big screen. It's a big screen movie. Buy the large popcorn and soda, though. It's a long ride to World's End and back again. Better get some nachos, too.

Clinton Fatigue Nostalgia

Reading reviews of two new books about Hillary Clinton is like watching the trailers for a long anticipated sequel to a blockbuster movie. Or maybe like tuning back in to one's favorite soap opera after having kicked the habit for a few years. In either case, all the familiar characters are back, just as we left them.

[Broken link originally of Spy Magazine cover of Hillary as dominatrix]

Of course, there are the headliners, themselves. First and (at last) foremost, there's Hillary. Never really out of the spotlight, having parked her political career in a senate seat, a perfect platform to do a bit of damage control here, a bit of political horse trading there. Seeing to it, for example, that the Democrats ran a sure-fire loser in 2004, lest she have to wait too long to make a run for the White House herself.

And then, too, there's "our Bill." Tanned, rested and ready for... well, for the Big Show, for another chance to play in the World Series or Super Bowl of politics. As was always the case, what Hillary really cares about is the power, but what Bill cares about even more than power is politics, itself. Put differently, what Bill cares about most is the game; what Hillary cares most about is the score. Tell the truth, who doesn't want to see the master player of our age back on the field of dreams?



But our two stars aside, how long has it been since we read of Susan McDougal in her stylish orange jumpsuit or Monica Lewinsky in her stylish blue, well, you know; Web Hubbell or Vince Foster thumbing through the odd stack of FBI files sitting on a coffee table in the Rose Law Firm; Dick Morris or Gennifer Flowers? God, how we've missed them all! Alas, some are gone forever, but there'll be more. There'll be more. Attracting and then, as need be, disposing of colorful second bananas, bit players and one-episode walk-ons is mother's milk to the Clintons -- they are our Arkansas Sopranos and we hunger for more episodes.



Already, the familiar refrains, the set pieces of stage business are being rehearsed. The Clintons' response to the new books?

The Clinton camp hopes to brush off the books as mainly rehashing old news. "Is it possible to be quoted yawning?" asked Philippe Reines, her Senate spokesman. If past books on Clinton were "cash for trash," he added, "these books are nothing more than cash for rehash."

Old news! Yes! It's just like deja vu all over again, isn't it? Oh, the memories!

But seriously, folks (as the comics say), here's why Hillary Clinton will be our next president, painful though it is for me to write those words. Yes, she has extraordinarily high personal negatives; yes, Barack Obama currently enjoys much positive press and, yes, so long as he doesn't declare his candidacy, so does Al Gore. But much of Obama's currently favorable image derives from his being a charismatic cypher. Already he has begun to fumble a bit on the campaign trail and if there is any damaging information to be revealed, any weaknesses whatsoever to be exposed or exploited, rest assured the Clinton camp will get the job done.

Frankly, I think Gore is too happy in his current role as media darling to run again. Indeed, I think he has come to believe he can be more effective as a private citizen promoting his Global Warming agenda than he could be as president, and that may well be right. Gore never cared as passionately for political office as he has for environmental issues, and it shows. I'd explain why Edwards is an even bigger cypher than Obama, but why bother?

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is, without question, the most ruthless office holder in contemporary American politics. She's Dick Cheney in drag, if pantsuits count as drag. And our man Bill, a sui generis force majeure in American politics if there ever was one, is Karl Rove's political equal any day. Besides, the Clintons' front men are right, it is all old news, at least for now. If there was a shred of evidence that Hillary was performing satanic rituals or that Bill was considering a sex change operation or that Chelsea had picked up a crack habit the American Spectator would have been all over it in a New York minute. We really do know all the bad stuff about Bill and Hillary, including even the rarely false bad stuff. What other candidate still in the running can that be said about?

Finally, say what you will about Romney or McCain or Giuliani or the seven dwarfs, no Republican candidate can both secure the nomination and run far enough away from the negative baggage of the Bush Administration to win in 2008. It can't happpen; it won't happen.

On the other hand, losing the White House could be the best thing that could happen for the Republicans, who desperately need to free themselves from the neoconservative shackles of the Bush era, Iraq especially included. It is, after all, an accident of history that Bush became a wartime president and thus a strong president. Neither he nor his various lackeys, henchmen and underlings could have managed to drag the Republican party into the profligate pork addicts and empire building warmongers they have become in the past six years had it not been for 9/11. In a sense, that may have been the greatest damage the terrorists managed to inflict.

I don't say that with any partisan agenda. I dislike the Republican Party as much as the Democratic Party and have supported Republicans in the past only insofar as I saw them providing needed counterweight to the excesses of the Democrats. Historically, they have, between the two of them, represented too little difference politically for my tastes. Still, at least once upon a time it could be said that the difference was that the Republicans let you keep your money and property in return for controlling your private life while the Democrats did the opposite. Now they have converged to the point where both would equally steal our freedoms and our wealth, quibbling only over the details. For the good of the nation, one party or the other must literally reform. As it is at least temporarily in the ascendancy, that party won't be the Democrats for now.

A Republican Party that abandons and rejects the Bush era can regain Congress even as it loses the White House. And nothing would do more to make that happen than seeing Hillary Rodham Clinton sitting in the Oval Office.

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SPECIAL CLINTON NOSTALGIA BONUS: A Clinton era flash from the past -- the late, great Michael Kelly's I Believe.

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An Unrequested Response to QandO's Mr. Franks

I have some tenuous connection with QandO, having been invited by Jon Henke to participate in the first incarnation of the now defunct Inactivist, so I pop over there now and then and check things out. At the moment, Memeorandum is linking to a series of questions Dale Franks raises under the title Questions for Our Liberal Friends. I don't see myself as a liberal or a conservative, but they are good questions deserving some sort of answers from both sides of the political spectrum as well as from outliers like myself. Since I now find myself on the withdraw sooner rather than later side of the question, I thought I'd take a whack at addressing his questions.

First, I'm wondering what you think the result of an American withdrawal would be? And we really have to ask that about two spheres, the internal Iraqi results, and the effect on America's security.

Addressing the second point first, my guess is that the long term effect would be good for America's security. Personally, I do think there is something to the "keep the terrorists shooting at us over there" argument, but it's not a reasonable long term strategy. I do buy into the "blowback" theory -- that is, that the primary motivating factor among Islamic terrorists is the continued U.S. military presence in the Middle East (followed closely by U.S. support for Israel); thus, I think any significant reduction in that presence bodes well for a reduction in terrorist activity. Our presence in Iraq, however, is but one piece of that problem.

The first part of the question presupposes that a U.S. troop withdrawal now versus a withdrawal later would lead to different results. ("Now" meaning sometime within, say, a year.) I'm not so sure. To me, the best analogy to Iraq is Yugoslavia. Once the strong dictatorship is overthrown, be it Tito or Hussein, the resulting civil war among the ethnic and geographical factions that were, after all, involuntarily united in the first place is probably inevitable. The better question, if that is true, is what sort of support, if any, the varying factions (e.g., the Kurds) should continue to receive.

Do you reject the "you broke it, you bought it" idea?

I take that to mean something along the lines that the U.S. has created the current situation in Iraq and is therefore now obligated to stay the course to fix things. Yes, I do reject that notion as here applied. If I thought a continued U.S. military presence in Iraq, albeit with some sort of finite endpoint, was more likely than not to resolve matters, I might think otherwise; but as I do not, the question resolves to one of sunk costs and cutting losses.

Do you think the Iraqis will find a way to cobble their state together? Do you think it will descend into a civil bloodbath? If so, then why don't we have any responsibility to try and prevent it? Compare and contrast with Kosovo and Darfur. What if Iraq turns into a Taliban-like cesspool, and becomes a base for terrorist operation against the US in the same way Afghanistan was?

No. Yes. Because one does not have a moral obligation to attempt to prevent the inevitable. I have already compared Iraq to Yugoslavia. I think Darfur muddies the waters here unnecessarily and should be considered as a separate topic. Finally, the answer to "what if" type questions is "we'll see." Do I think the U.S. did the right thing by invading Afghanistan and wiping out, at least temporarily, the Taliban? Yes. Does that mean the U.S. should remain in Afghanistan forever? No. Does it mean the U.S. should take appropriate retaliatory action whenever and wherever Taliban-like cesspools provide safe havens and bases of operations for terrorist attacks against the U.S. Hell, yes.

Do you think that the Iraqis can build a stable, functioning democratic state? If not, why? Are they just not suited for Democracy as a people? If so, what are their deficiencies?

Ever? Sure, why not? In the near future? No. As individuals, we are all suited for democracy. As cultures, separated by long historical rivalries on tribal, ethnic, religious, etc. differences, I doubt the various populations of Iraq are collectively capable of sufficient peaceful coexistence for the sort of democracy I suspect Mr. Franks has in mind to work. Again, witness the breakup of Yugoslavia.

The other half of the question is what effect will it have on American security? Will it embolden terrorists? Will our withdrawal make it more or less likely that terrorists will begin marshaling forces for another 9/11 style attack? Why?

I think I've replied to some of that already. One problem with these questions and these sorts of discussions, however, is that neither "side" has adequate information. Has the Bush Doctrine worked in terms of preventing subsequent 9/11 type attacks or was 9/11 a one-off in the first place? I don't know. Neither does Mr. Franks and neither does anyone else, especially those of us who do not have access to classified intelligence information.

On the Global War on Terror more generally, will a withdrawal from Iraq help or hinder that effort? Or do we need to make an effort at all, other than some Special Ops stuff here and there, and intelligence, prevention, and law enforcement operations otherwise? What would be the US's military role after a withdrawal from Iraq? Does the US military actually have much a role beyond repelling an invasion?

As previously mentioned, I supported and continue to support U.S. military operations of the Afghanistan Taliban "cesspool" variety. Personally, I would never preemptively rule out any U.S. military operation or deployment of military power. For that matter, based on what the public was told, I supported the Iraq war at the beginning and might support a preemptive use of military force in the future. Whether that is consistent with a generally libertarian point of view doesn't bother me in the slightest. On the other hand, I don't see America's options when it comes to international terrorism or international policy generally to be limited to the sort of either / or dichotomy implicit in the question. Surely we can consider options in between an entirely isolationist, "guns at the border" U.S. military policy and one of the U.S. as "global cop on the beat," especially when much of that "beat" views the "cops" in question rather like U.S. urban minorities have historically viewed the police as merely being enforcers for "the Man."

Are we doomed to fail at achieving anything worthwhile in Iraq? Why? Is it something organic to Iraq, or simply a problem with the current president? Would another administration be able to achieve some reasonable level of peace and stability?

To quote T.E. Lawrence, nothing is written. That said, it cannot be unreasonable to believe that the Middle East will view any new U.S. administration as an opportunity for change. Change for the better or for the worse? Who knows?

Oh, yeah, and one final question: What if you're wrong?

Yes, we all need to answer that question, don't we? Well, that again depends on how wrong and with what consequences. I'm not making a cheap comparison here to Mr. Franks, but let me invoke the psychology of the drug addict or alcoholic who, as miserable as he may be, nonetheless fears life without the known risks and rewards of his addiction. The dangers of the unknown are more frightening than the dangers of the known, but that's no argument for avoiding a change when the evidence indicates change is called for.

Is that the case here, new and unknown risks included? I think so. I'm not sure either side in this dispute can, as Mr. Franks desires, "show his math." Would a relatively quick withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq be painless? Of course not. Pain, per se, isn't the issue. Reasonable people can reasonably disagree even now about the various pros and cons here, but is whistling past the graveyard really worse than standing silently at the graveyard, waiting in the certain knowledge that more dead are on the way if we continue to act as we have?

At Least Now We Know Why They're Pink

It sounds like the log line for the next John Waters movie -- Gay flamingos pick up chick. "A pair of gay flamingos have adopted an abandoned chick, becoming parents after being together for six years, a British conservation organization said Monday," reports the APF. Of course, Andrew Sullivan was one of the early bloggers to cover the story.

I admit to almost invincible ignorance when it comes to animal homosexuality. I mean, I've known lots of gay men and a few lesbians over the years (sure, I've know even more than I know about -- I'm just talking about the ones I knew were homosexual), but aside from these suspiciously recent press reports of allegedly homosexual behavior in animals, this is not a topic I've paid much attention to since I stopped watching the adventures of Yogi Bear and Booboo.

If, in fact, Carlos and Fernando, the flamingos in question, are gay, then following Sullivan's lead I think this raises all sorts of interesting theological issues. I suppose, for example, homosexuality among non-humans could still be considered theologically "disordered" and thus contrary to the will of God. One would be hard pressed to call whatever occurs naturally to be unnatural, however, and the theological nexus between sin, original or otherwise, and free will would seem at the very least to be a bit strained. Indeed, I'm not sure it makes any sense whatever to talk of sinful animals. Yes, I know, the notion of sin among humans is problematic enough for many people, but we're just doing a bit of conceptual analysis here.

On the other hand or wing, as it were, when Carlos and Fernando are referred to as a "gay" couple, does this really mean what, well, what one assumes it means when we're talking about people? I mean, what sort of sex lives do "straight" birds have, for that matter?

Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in Slimbridge near Bristol (a Wodehousean name if there ever was one) representative Jane Waghorn claims that gay flamingos are not uncommon. "If there aren't enough females or they don't hit it off with them, they will pair off with other males," she said.

Of course, if there aren't enough females in, say, prison... well, you know. So there's my question. Were Carlos and Fernando living the avian equivalent of La Cage aux folles these last six years or were they and are similar "gay" flamingo couples merely playing The Odd Couple?

Top Ten Reactions to "Covert" Iran Destabilization Plans

ABC News reports that the CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert "black" operation to destabilize the Iranian government. With apologies to David Letterman, here are my Top Ten reactions:

10. “A coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation,” huh? I wondered what Karl Rove was up to these days.

9. Thank goodness no one in Iran has internet access or reads English.

8. Upon learning that Elliot Abrams has provided advice regarding the covert operation, Iranian leaders have apparently hired Daniel Ortega in response.

7. Shouldn’t that be covert “African American” operation?

6. It was either this or Cheney was going to take Iran quail hunting.

5. It isn’t true that in deference to President Bush’s alma mater the campaign is named “Operation Mullah Mullah” or that Bush is referred to in the plan as “Cheerleader One.”

4. Rudy Giuliani has preemptively criticized Ron Paul over the insulting notion that the Iranians might object and retaliate.

3. In related news, share prices for the Acme Flammable American Flag Company rose 23% on heavy trading.

2. Leaked reports of other “nonlethal presidential findings” include 87 cents in loose change and a Smirnoff Preferred Customer courtesy card in the president’s jeans.

1. Osama who?

Does This Mean Stallone Will Be Banned From Competitive Acting?

"Nothing is over! Nothing!" -- John Rambo

Among the many things Sylvester Stallone and I have in common must be counted a very limited talent for acting, aging flesh and the desire to self-medicate. The last, alas, cost Stallone fines and court costs amounting to around $13,000 after a guilty plea in Australia to possession of 48 vials of the human growth hormone Jintropin and four vials of testosterone.

I, by contrast, only wanted some antibiotic eye drops but ended up instead with a lingering eye infection and several unnecessary trips to an opthamologist.

Stallone, like several other old lions of his generation's action hero stars (notably, Bruce "I see old people" Willis's soon released Take the Blue Pills and Die Hard, or something like that), has been racing the reaper to complete his valedictory outing as Rambo. While his recent Rocky Balboa wasn't nearly as bad as I, in my affected and uncredentialed role of Constant Viewer, expected it to be, there was still something mildly bathetic about the sixty year old Stallone lumbering into the ring for one last round. Well, time and tide and all that.

"I will not be without these. I cannot be without these," Stallone said when discovered with the goods, and I can well understand why. Why the hell should he be without them? If the man is vain enough and deluded enough to want to pump himself with steroids and such to play the heroic lout one more time, I say more power to him. It's his career and his life, fergawdsakes!

And by the way, while Stallone's geriatric action heroics are easy to ridicule, Stallone is a very good screenwriter and director in his genre and the original Rocky easily deserved its Oscars as much as any of Frank Capra's legendary melodramas ever did. It is worth remembering that Stallone became the third person ever to be nominated for both acting and writing in the same year for Rocky, following Chaplin for The Great Dictator (1940) and Orson Welles for Citizen Kane (1941). Call that declining standards, if you will, but that's pretty damned good company. So, also, Bruce Willis turned out to be (or become) a much better actor than his Moonlighting mugging or early John McClane machismo would have led me to believe.

Anyway, enough of this Hollywood hoopla. Let's get back to the real topic which is drugs and me. (Me! It's all about me!) Being both lazy and stupid, I left a pair of extended wear contact lenses in for too long and ended up with an infection in one eye. Now, I admit it might not have been a mere infection. All sorts of things could have been wrong with my left eye, but an infection was by far the most likely problem, it having happened to me before and the prescribed treatment being antibiotic eye drops and refraining from wearing contacts for a while.

As it happened, being lazy and stupid and knowing I was due for an eye exam shortly anyway, I did nothing and, as will more often than not happen, my immune system kicked in, my eye felt better though not entirely well, and I decided to just leave the contacts out and wait until it was time for the regular exam. Now, had I been able to run down to the pharmacy to buy a bottle of antibiotic eye drops in the first place, the infection would have healed faster and that would have been that. Of course, as I said, it might not have been a bacterial infection, in which case the eye drops would have done no good (but no harm, either) and I would have known to seek medical attention at once. But you can't buy antibiotics without a prescription, dagnabit!

I know, I know. Antibiotics abuse is a public health problem, and some people are allergic to some antibiotics and so on and so forth. But if you can buy topical antibiotic creams and soaps and if you can buy tetracycline for tropical fish, ferchristsakes, then you damned well ought to be able to buy antibiotic eye drops without a prescription.

When I finally saw the doctor some weeks later, he noted the still mildly infected area and guess what? He prescribed antibiotic eye drops! Plus, of course, a couple of return visits to check the course of the treatment -- treatment which I could easily have self-administered weeks earlier at far lesser risk to my eye.

Okay, so I'm stupid and lazy and cheap and physician-resistant, as well. But they're my eyes and I don't need or want to be saved from myself. Or, if I do, it still isn't the business of the state to do so. (Who, oh who will save me from the state?) If I want to run the risk of self-prescribing the wrong medication, it's my own lookout. Yeah, I know. Literally, in this case.

Same with Stallone. If it's that bloody important to him to have one last fling as an action hero and it takes controlled substances to permit him to do it, why the hell should Australia or the U.S. or any other state prohibit him from doing so?

"There are no vegan societies for a simple reason: a vegan diet is not adequate in the long run."

So writes Nina Plank in an op-ed column in today's New York Times, discussing the death of 6 week old Crown Shakur, whose vegan parents fed him mainly soy milk and apple juice. The infant weighed 3.5 pounds and died of starvation. His parents were subsequently convicted of murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty.

I don't know Plank's qualifications, though I assume the Times vetted her before running the piece. Further, while I am definitely omnivorous, I have no problem with vegetarians of any sort so long as the ones who refrain from eating meat on what they believe to be moral grounds refrain as well on prudential grounds from trying to argue the point with me. If free range tomatoes are your cuisine of choice, more power to you as long as we're talking only about what you, personally, choose to eat.

The case of Crown Shakur's death, however, points dramatically at what are and properly should be the limits of social tolerance of parental authority over children. That isn't a controversial notion among either liberals or conservatives; they differ for the most part only in the sorts of personal liberty they enthusiastically wish to prohibit. It is, however, a controversial notion among too many libertarians.

Too bad. Reasonable people can reasonably disagree whether, say, corporal punishment ought to be illegal or what minimal level of education parents should be responsible to ensure their children receive or even whether certain vaccinations or other medical attention should be required.

But there is no such thing as a reasonable case for permitting parents to starve their infant children to death. None whatsoever. And those who would argue on ideological grounds for complete parental control over children, unfettered by state interference, are on an equal moral footing with those whose merely different ideology could result in this sort of senseless and entirely avoidable death.

Constant Viewer: Credentials? We ain't got no credentials. We don't need no credentials. I don't have to show you any stinking credentials!

Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author's (or filmmaker's or painter's) entire body of work, among other qualities.

Thus sprach Time film critic and book reviewer Richard Schickel, who makes the other salient observations that Edmund Wilson and George Orwell were better critics than most (all?) bloggers trying their hand at it and that, presumably among many others, Philip K. Dick and Cornell Woolrich are currently enjoying inflated reputations or would enjoy them if they were still alive. These things are true. Constant Viewer readily admits them.

Schickel goes on to say:

[W]e have to find in the work of reviewers something more than idle opinion-mongering. We need to see something other than flash, egotism and self-importance. We need to see their credentials. And they need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion.

Here, alas, he loses CV on several grounds. First, he conflates reviewing with criticism; that is, were he writing about criticism his position would be far more defensible. Second, by his own standards, much of professional (read: paid) reviewing fails utterly as well. Schickel might not mind that so much, but CV hazards the guess that were he to dredge up some of Schickel's work from the mid 1960s it wouldn't fare all that well by those standards, either. CV, um, asserts this opinion having never read much of Schickel's work under the principle that anyone who doesn't get better at what he has done for over forty years should have packed it in long ago.

Criticism aside, a film or book reviewer's work is little more than an aid to the prospective viewer or reader. Here are the credentials required to be a useful film reviewer: be consistent in your tastes and write what you believe. Readers will fairly quickly discover after several reviews whether and where you can be trusted to share their tastes or not. Knowledge of film making and of the principle cast and crew is useful but not essential. People do not read reviews to educate themselves generally or to improve their taste. Their question is "Will I like this movie?" Just about everything else in the review is posturing; entertaining posturing, maybe, but posturing nonetheless and specifically film reviewing posturing as film criticism. CV knows of one reviewer who apparently doesn't know his aperture from a hole in the ground as far as film making or film history credentials go, but if this guy likes a movie, chances are very good that CV will like it, too. Maybe not for the same stated reasons, but that makes no difference in his value as a litmus test.

Sure, an informed and talented reviewer can occasionally accomplish the loftier goals to which Schickel would have him constantly aspire. But Schickel fails to understand how his elitist perspective and attitude (the latter of which CV largely shares) nonetheless fails to support his implicit conclusion that this internet free-for-all is a bad thing. Yes, most blog reviews suck. But so do most paid reviews, a fact Schickel all too quickly acknowledges.

Maybe Ernie the car parts guy has something worth saying and maybe he doesn't. Chances are he doesn't, but so what? Maybe Ernie will turn into a decent reviewer if he keeps at it long enough. The notion that all real writers find publishers or that, at the very least, they keep writing despite rejection after rejection is, one notes, a notion held almost exclusively by published writers. Let Ernie have his fun, even if it is little more than "cocktail-party chat."

Chances are good that more people decide which film to see or book to read next from cocktail party chatter than from Mr. Schickel and his ilk's reviews or criticism. Chances are even better there's a good reason why.

It Takes One To Know One

I owe to Jimmy Carter the debt of having learned always to hedge my bets when it comes to such titles as Worst President Ever. Carter, after all, followed the detestable Richard Nixon, during whose administration I naively assumed I would never live to see a worse president. Among his many other negative accomplishments, Carter's own feckless administration almost single-handedly set the stage for most of the problems the United States has faced in the Middle East since the 1970s. Being a worse president than Richard Nixon was no small feat, but Carter managed the job almost effortlessly.



For a number of years after his utterly failed single-term presidency was finally put out of its misery, Carter earned wide praise as the best ex-president in U.S. history. His do-gooding was relentless and some of it, I freely admit, did some genuine good. In recent years, however, and especially after he finally won his long campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize, Carter has become a cantankerous, quarrelsome old coot, routinely sticking his self-righteous proboscis on the world stage where it no longer has any legitimate business. As self-appointed U.S. Ombudsman, Carter's criticisms of U.S. domestic and especially foreign policy exceeded Clinton's rumored sexual conquests a long time ago, also no mean feat.

Now Carter has publicly blasted the Bush Administration as the "worst in history" in international relations. And guess what?

I agree.

It just goes to show that, just like in sports, records are made to be broken. I just hope I don't live long enough to hear George W. Bush say some subsequent president is the worst ever and have to agree with him, too. God help us all if that should ever happen.

Giving Less Than Your All

As promised or, depending on your point of view, threatened, I want to revisit Steven E. Landsburg’s new More Sex Is Safer Sex, this time addressing his contention that, given certain assumptions, it is preferable for a person to give his entire charitable contribution to whatever he deems the most worthy charity rather than parcel out his charitable contributions among various worthy charities. (Title reference: Landsburg discusses this in his chapter, "Giving Your All.")

Here is the basic logic of the argument. Begin with the key assumption that among the various charities under consideration, they are all sufficiently large and address sufficiently large problems that, however much your contribution may be, it will nonetheless represent only a very small increase in their endowments and, when spent, similarly address only a very small part of the problem they seek to solve. Landsburg uses CARE and the American Cancer Society as examples, so I will, too. The thinking here is that your $10 or $100 or $1,000 isn’t in and of itself going to be the determining factor in finding a cure for cancer, nor will it feed all the hungry children in the world.

Let’s say you plan on contributing $1,000 to charity and, as a preliminary matter, thought you’d make your contributions in $100 increments. If you deem feeding hungry children a better cause than cancer research, then your first $100 will go to CARE. Landsburg’s argument, in the proverbial nutshell, is that however much good your $100 did to feed one or more hungry children, the number of hungry children is vastly larger, the other children (metaphorically) waiting in line to be fed next are equally deserving of your charity and so your next $100 should go to CARE for the same reasons your first contribution did.

The size of the problem and of the charity is critical. Looking at small scale charitable contributions, e.g., should you contribute $100 toward fixing up a playground for children or toward fencing in a neighboring dog park (my examples), even if you like dogs more than children, at some determinate point the fencing gets paid for and it makes sense to contribute to the playground as well. That is, as Landsburg claims, you can make a real dent in small scale problems whereas your contribution, viewed in isolation, cannot make such a dent in the overall problem of world hunger or medical research.

So far, so good. Of course, we’re simplifying matters here by considering only two charities, whereas the world is filled with other possible objects of your charitable attention. (The Ridgely Early Retirement & World Cruise Fund springs to mind here.) In principle, however, you could rank the worthiness of every such charity and one would eventually come out on top. If you really couldn’t decide which of your top two charities was worthier, Landsburg says “flip a coin and give everything to the winner. If the two causes are equally worthy, sending $200 to either is just as good as sending $100 to each – and it will cost you just one postage stamp instead of two.”

Well, no. Landsburg “does the math” in an appendix to make his point. The math is good; the assumptions underlying the math, not so good.

Landsburg’s argument depends on distinguishing between the satisfaction, however derived, one gets by giving to charity and the good such contributions do for others. Analytically, that makes perfect sense. Insofar as we are capable of drawing that distinction and focusing solely on the latter, the math works out just fine. Unfortunately, however, his “defense of pure reason” (which is more Spockian than Kantian) presupposes that people are capable of arriving at moral conclusions by reason alone; that is, that they are capable of and should be willing to set aside the self-serving motives of charity and to do the research required to crunch the numbers.

In fairness, Landsburg acknowledges both the reality and usefulness of self-serving motives and the limits to which one can, should or will incur the search costs of ferreting out charitable bang-for-buck. But it seems to me he significantly underestimates them both. As with voting, information costs can be formidable and so there is a real element of rational ignorance involved in deciding among charities for most of us. But, okay, let’s say that putting in some time and effort sorting out charities is legitimately a part of our overall charitable contribution.

It may be true that, having thus invested a reasonable amount of time and effort into investigating not only, as in Landsburg’s oversimplified model, the endowment of the American Cancer Society and CARE but also their relative overhead costs, likely other sources of income (Landsburg says it shouldn’t matter if I know you are also going to give $100 to CARE, and he’s right. But what if I discover that some billionaire has just left his entire estate to CARE the day before I write the check. Might not that matter? Assuming you were dumb enough to contribute to NPR in the first place, might not Joan Kroc's $200 million contribution a few years ago have rationally swayed your coffee mug purchasing "membership" elsewhere?) and so forth, I determine that $200 to one is as good as $100 to each. Oh, and forget the stamp, they send pre-franked envelopes and there’s always the internet to give through, anyway.

Well, then, it would be irrational (and in that strictly utilitarian sense, immoral) at that point for me not to consider self-serving reasons why I might wish to split my contributions. I would, as economists say, have failed to maximize utility, would in effect have decreased the net wealth of the world by not taking my own happiness into account. To tart up the point with a bit of slightly misused economics jargon, once I truly am indifferent regarding the two charities in terms of the good they will do for others, it certainly doesn't follow that I should be indifferent as to other distinguishing factors.

I further question the underlying assumption that there is anything approaching an objective answer to the question: which is better, curing cancer or feeding hungry children? Landsburg blithely sets up the dilemma as one of blind instinct versus logical analysis, but logical analysis gets us to interpersonal utility comparisons and all sorts of other messy concerns. There is such a thing as the illusion of objectivity, too; and one of the most notorious sorts of such illusions is the mathematical formula which, upon close enough inspection, turns out to be using unmeasurable or incommensurable factors. I admit, however, that these concerns would require a more extended consideration than I am giving them here.

Viewed as a matter of economic logic, Landsburg’s key insight is that among two unequally worthy major charities, the marginal utility of one’s subsequent contributions to the most worthy would not be decreased sufficiently to justify giving to the second charity instead. Sure. It’s a great exam question, but it may still be highly questionable considered as real ethical advise.

Wolfowitz's Possible Successors?

Milton Drysdale:

Pros: Extensive experience providing banking services for gun wielding semi-literates.

Cons: Miss Jane Hathaway, real brains behind Drysdale's success, fled to undisclosed location in 1967 with accomplice Jethro Bodine after bank examiner discovered fifty million dollars missing from Bank of Beverly Hills vault.


Rich Uncle Pennybags (a.k.a. Monopoly Man):

Pros: Holds two Get Out of Jail Free cards. Once won second prize in a beauty contest. Snappy dresser.

Cons: Tendency to tear down residential housing to build luxury hotels.


Gordon Gekko:

Pros: "Greed is good" motto reduces Invisible Hand and rational self-interest theories to terms underdeveloped nation populations can understand.

Cons: Sharp dealing reputation inconsistent with high moral standards insisted upon by World Bank for all non-Third-World personnel. Hideous taste in neckties.


Scrooge McDuck:

Pros: Favors fiscal and monetary policies designed to discourage runaway inflation.

Cons: Insistence on gold backed currency and tight credit limits money supply growth in pace with expanding economy.


C. Montgomery Burns:

Pros: Gay friendly employer. Understands importance of safe, clean, reliable source of energy. Comfortable with monopoly ownership typical of kleptocracies.

Cons: Victorian attitudes may prove offensive to post-Colonial regimes. Preference for nuclear power poses weaponization risks.

Ron Paul: "Double Plus Ungood?"

Well, the good news for both Mitt Romney and Ron Paul is that their New Hampshire Zogby Poll numbers have both roughly tripled from January to May. Of course, that's an improvement from 13% to 35% for Romney and a change from 1% to 3% for Paul, but, hey, you gotta take your good news where you find it.

Over at Unqualified Offerings, Jim Henley thinks Paul's libertarian-in-the-punchbowl act (a.k.a. to Michelle Malkin as a "9/11 Truthist" or to FOX News more generally as "the Invisible Man") may actually enjoy enough blowback to remain "viable late into the primary season." Covering his bases (as I would, too), Jim notes Paul may well flame out long before then, too.

The interesting question to me at this point is whether Paul's continued presence is helping or harming either the front-runners or the Republican party's prospects in general.

Julian Sanchez probably should be working on a PhD in philosophy rather than wasting his formidable intellect vivisecting the conceptually challenged follies of the Republican Idol lineup. Nonetheless, as G.E. Moore once said of Wittgenstein's "dissertation," Sanchez is fully qualified for Talking Head gigs, even if only of the self-produced variety, as here.

Julian suggests that Paul may at least make campaign b.s. more difficult for the front-runners and the other wannabes, who "have a vested interest in preserving a certain level of ambiguity," as when he noted that "enhanced interrogation techniques" was just so much New-Speak for torture in the last 'debate.'

Maybe. I fear such distinctions without differences will continue to be uttered by the candidates because, with or without Paul to call b.s. to such tactics, they resonate with a public deeply desirous of someone who will get the "dirty but necessary" job done but who also will spare them the gory and thus blame-sharing details. (I say this, by the way, as one who does not believe torture never works or can never be morally justified. However, having taken such a position, I think it would indeed be immoral to then try to hide from what an ugly thing it is.)

In any case, unless the Republican Party is willing to thin the herd of all the declared candidates to pretty much the top three at this point, excluding Paul would be a bad move. Not only because of the potential blowback from Paul supporters and sympathizers but also because, truth be told, truth has nothing to do with these 'debates," as the positive reaction to Giuliani's attack on Paul's 9/11 blowback comments so clearly demonstrates.