Unbelievable !!!!

From the New York Times International Edition

Imagine this cartoon with an African-American face on the dog. Or a Muslim face. Or an Asian face. Or the face of a woman, say Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar. Can you imagine the absolute howl of outrage from the liberals?  But it's a Jewish face (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), so the venerable New York Times thought that was OK.  Unbelievable!!

The Times has been steadfastly antisemitic for years now, spinning even Palestinian atrocities to make it seem like they were Israel's fault.  But really, this is beyond the pale even for them.

And notice the deafening silence from the "woke" generation! 

So what’s a voter to do??

It looks like the upcoming 2020 election, like the 2016 election, will be another in which I would want to mark the “none of the above” box on the ballot.

On the Republican side, Trump has in fact done a few things that needed doing and that the Obama administration, for whatever reason, couldn’t bring itself to face. Dealing with China’s unfair trade practices, for example. Or getting real about the crumbling state of the US military in the face of growing Chinese military power, especially their growing sea power. Or getting real about the intermediate range missile treaty, which Russia has been violating for years and which China didn’t even sign. And he has made moves, like loosening regulations, that have given the economy a badly needed boost after the long and depressing 2% growth and uncomfortably high unemployment and flat working class wages of the Obama years. Not that Democrats will give him any credit for it.

Trump was elected to be a bull in the china shop by people who thought Washington elites were ignoring their problems (which they were!). He has done his job well, badly disturbing the ruling Washington insider groups and their media acolytes and driving many of the experienced State Department types into retirement – not much of a loss considering the messes in the Middle East they led us into in their supposed wisdom. And you have to admire the man for pushing on ahead despite unprecedented, vicious and unremitting attacks by the Democrats and especially by the bureaucratic “deep state”, whose power and perks he threatens.

Still, a toilet bowl brush is useful to clean out a dirty toilet, but one doesn’t necessarily want to use that same brush to clean the rest of the house. Trump is personally offensive, and clearly something of a sociopath (though to be fair, Hillary was also a sociopath, just of a different flavor). I think Trump’s first term has been a necessary, if messy, shakeup of Washington politics, but I don’t know that I want another four years of it.

As for the Republican party itself, I have no idea what it stands for these days. It certainly doesn’t stand for fiscal responsibility or smaller government, whatever candidates may say on the campaign trail. And I simply can’t support its unremitting attacks on women’s rights to control their own reproductive systems, a clear attempt to use legislation to foist their own religious beliefs on the rest of us.  This is not a party I want running the country over the next decade.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have been suffering “Trump derangement syndrome” since the 2016 election, and seem unable to get over it. Anything Trump proposes they oppose, even if they were for it under Obama. They oppose his wall, even though Obama built the first 700 miles of it with the full support of Democrats. They oppose his rapprochement with Russia, even though Hillary tried the same thing (remember her disastrous “Russian reset”) with the full support of Democrats. They have been acting like spoiled children deprived of their favorite toy.

Rather than facing the fact that they lost the 2016 election through their own  incompetence and poor candidate, they keep feeling that somehow the election was stolen from them; that they were “entitled” to win. And because of this, they seem to feel they are justified in resorting to the dirtiest form of street fighting possible. Even the intelligence agencies and the FBI seem to be in the business of leaking anti-Trump information to the press these days.

Moreover, the activist liberal wing has morphed from a commendable sensitivity to racism and sexism into a form of thought police as rigid and brutal as any in Soviet Russia or Iran’s Islamic State. Anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest is set upon by the twitterverse and the media and subject to an online lynching. They even eat their own, if one of them makes the slightest mistake. This is most evident in the shameful behavior of students at some colleges, and the equally shameful refusal of college faculty and administrators to make a stand for free speech and the value of civilized debate – supposedly a liberal value and the whole point of the college system.

And finally the Democratic party seems to have gone off the deep end on the left,  proposing outlandish things like “free” college for everyone (just who is paying the professor’s salaries then?), or “Medicare for all”, or a petrochemical-free world by 2050. Either they are too naïve or too dumb to understand the challenges (which is certainly true of some of them), or they will promise absolutely anything to get elected, even if they know it is impractical. This too is not a party I want running the country over the next decade.

So what is a voter to do?????

A cautionary tale

The Democratic presidential candidate field seems to have two main proposals to sell: 100% renewable energy and "Medicare for all". It sounds wonderful, and no doubt millions of voters will fall for it. I have already suggested in a previous post looking at Mark Mills’ excellent paper The “New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking” to inject some reality into the first proposal.

With respect to the second proposal, universal government health care, I recommend reading tonight's Washington Post article Why Vermont’s single-payer effort failed and what Democrats can learn from it. 

The article speaks for itself, but I would just note two additional things: (1) we already have a government health plan for veterans, the Veteran's Administration. If you have been following that grimy story over the past few years, you might be a bit leery of having the government handle your own health care. And (2) estimates for the cost of "Medicare for All" (which candidates seem to avoid mentioning) from independent experts puts the cost at somewhere between $2.5 trillion and 3.5 trillion a year, or roughly as much as the government now spends yearly on everything, and we are already financing much of that with yet more borrowing.

Not that Republicans have anything more attractive to offer (or anything at all to offer??), but these Democratic ideas are simply impractical, lovely as they sound on the campaign trail..

Recommended: The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking

Democratic presidential candidates are signing on to the “Green New Deal” and a number of municipal authorities have set the goal of running on 100% “green” energy by 2025 or 2030. It sure sounds nice, but is it real? I suggest reading Mark Mills’ paper The “New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking”. Mills is a physicist, and he argues, in excruciating detail,  that the laws of physics, let alone the realities of economics, make these blue sky promises just that - nothing more than empty promises.  

In fact, as I have argued before, the only possible way we could get to 100% “green” energy anytime in the next half century or so would be to vastly expand the number of nuclear power plants in the country, and given the American public’s irrational fear of nuclear power, that isn’t likely to happen. (Irrational? There have been less than 300 recorded deaths worldwide from nuclear accidents since nuclear power was invented half a century ago.  By contrast, the estimates are that between 7500 and 52,000 people A YEAR die in the USA alone from power plant pollution. Which should we really be worried about???)

On differing views

I belong to an informal group of about a dozen people, about half of each gender, most of whom meet once a week at a friend’s house for morning coffee and a free-flowing discussion about world events, local issues and anything else that comes up. A couple of people in this group live elsewhere and contribute via email. Everyone is highly educated, but apart from that we represent a wide diversity of national and cultural backgrounds, life experiences, subject specialties, political views, etc.

Now in the highly partisan, highly divisive, highly hostile and critical atmosphere of today’s American culture, this group is unusual in that we seem to have quite amicable and respectful explorations of differing views and opinions, in which many of us change our minds, modify our views, or come to a new understanding of others. It got me to thinking about how one approaches people with differing views.

A typical reaction in America today on meeting or reading the writings of someone with a different political or cultural view is to dismiss them at least as ignorant or uniformed or misinformed, if not outright evil. But if one thinks about it, the all-too-common statement “I can’t see why anyone would be so [dumb, ignorant, misinformed, etc] as to believe that” is really in fact a statement about our own ignorance. Clearly they do believe what they believe, and they believe it for reasons which seem perfectly sound to them, and if we can’t see why they believe what they believe then clearly that reflects some profound ignorance on our own part.

One can react to this basically in three different ways. One can dismiss them and their views out of hand. That is the most comfortable reaction and what most people seem to do and it just leaves us bound in our own ignorance, perhaps feeling falsely virtuous from our supposedly “superior” understanding of the world.

One can argue with them, but that just pits our own cultural and life experiences, assumptions and biases against theirs, and since each of us is arguing from within our own different cognitive and emotional framework, arguments seldom change anyone’s mind or accomplish anything useful. Still, many people seem to love the emotional high and virtuous feeling that arguments give them.

Or one can freely admit one’s ignorance and explore with them respectfully and with an open mind just why they believe what they believe. It is important to do this from a serious commitment on our own part of wanting to learn and understand the other’s views, rather than as just an exercise in gathering ammunition for our next assault on them. One needs to begin with the assumption (obviously true if one thinks about it) that they may well be right and it is we who are wrong because of our own ignorance or assumption or biases or cultural and life experiences.  It’s amazing what one can learn about other people’s lives, other people’s experiences, other people’s assumptions and biases, and other people’s cultures with this approach. And it is amazing how often that new understanding will modify one’s own views.

Of the three approaches, only the third is productive, only the third reduces our own ignorance. Too bad it is so rarely deployed.

Hopeless gestures

I see that Democrats are still having trouble letting go of their “Russian collusion” delusions about Trump, despite the special prosecutor declining to indict Trump or any of his associates on those charges, though he did snare a number of associates on other unrelated charges. Democrats in the House have embarked on two other hopeless efforts to prolong the agony though.

1.  House Democrats have demanded that the IRS supply them with copies of President Trump’s taxes for the past six years. This will of course fail, if for no other reason than that Trump can refuse and all Congress can do is hold him in contempt of Congress and ask the Department of Justice to prosecute him, which a Republican DOJ can simply choose not to do. And if they take him to court the legal process, including appeals, will stretch well beyond even a second term, and therefore be moot even if they won (which they might not). Democrats surely know this, so clearly this is just a base-pleasing media maneuver, not a serious attempt.

In any case, even if he provided them with copies of his tax returns, it would be illegal for the House to make any of the contents public, which of course would be the whole point of trying to get them in the first place.  Tax returns are by law confidential, and revealing any of the contents would subject the person who revealed them to prosecution. So this whole effort is just political theater.

2. House Democrats are demanding to see Muller’s entire un-redacted report.  They will fail, for a perfectly good reason.  By law grand jury testimony and materials are secret. Nothing a grand jury sees or hears can be made public unless it is embedded in an indictment. There is a perfectly good reason for this – if a prosecutor doesn’t think there is a crime, or at least a winnable case and chooses not to file an indictment, that prosecutor is not allowed to try to “get” the  person under investigation anyway by leaking dirty laundry from the grand jury hearings. By all accounts almost every page of Muller’s report contains information from the grand jury, so the House Democrats not going to get to see it, not least because everyone knows perfectly well that the Democrats will leak to the press, probably out of context, anything they think might hurt Trump.

Once again, Democrats understand this, so the attempt is nothing more than another piece of political theater.

I would like to see a resurgent Democratic party emerge to balance Trump’s excesses, but all I see from Democrats thus far is short-sighted, mean-spirited trench warfare and a lot of incompetence. Given that, I would give Trump better than even odds of being re-elected to a second term, not based on any brilliance on his part, but rather on the continuing incompetence and short-sightedness of the Democrats. Nancy Pelosi, I think, understands this, which is why she is trying – with only moderate success – to damp down the unrealistic proposals of her House members. But some of her fellow Democrats in the House are apparently so lost in their anti-Trump rage that they can’t think strategically about what is needed to win upcoming elections.

As near as I can tell, our political systems is just as dysfunctional as the British one right now.

More on intelligence

A few more comments on intelligence, prompted by various responses to my last post:

1. The more intelligent one is, the higher the probability on average of doing well. But the correlation is by no means perfect. There are lots of other attributes that matter – personality, persistence, willingness to work hard, willingness to take risks, etc, etc. Mensa is an organization that only accepts people who score in the top 2% of intelligence tests – yet not every Mensa member is highly successful. For some the only distinction in their lives is that they managed to qualify for Mensa.  On the other hand there are plenty of people who wouldn’t score especially high on an IQ test, but who are brilliant at what they do.

2. Intelligence is different than wisdom. There are plenty of people who are brilliant in some field, but not very wise. And there are people who are of average intelligence, but who are unusually wise. The intelligent know lots of things. The wise know what matters and what doesn’t. Of the the two wisdom is probably the more valuable, and also probably harder to find.

3. IQ tests are designed to make distinctions in the middle range, where most of the people fall. They are by design not very good at making distinctions out in the tails, where there are not many people and so not many samples. The difference, say, between an IQ score of 135 and 145 might just be one or two questions which the subject happened to get right or wrong, or a few seconds difference in completing a task. So people who compare their scores out in that range are on thin ice. It may be that all one can really say with confidence is that they are a lot brighter than average.

4. As I mentioned before, IQ tests are only a rough measure of intellectual ability. Human intelligence is multi-factor, meaning it has lots of parts. Everyone has met people who are brilliant in some field, say math, yet hopeless in other fields. Indeed, we are all that way – good at some things and hopeless at others. IQ tests take a sample across a few of these various factors and compute a rough measure of intelligence.  It’s enough to sort out army recruits effectively, which was its original purpose, but it is by no means a comprehensive assay of an individual’s mental abilities. We don’t know enough about human intelligence to build such a comprehensive test.