Income Inequality

                                Income Inequality

Income inequality is a big deal in the press and among political panderers. "The issue of wealth and income inequality, to my mind, is the greatest moral issue of our time," said presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.)

Piketty and the Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez have estimated that, for the United States between 1979 and 2015, the top 1 percent's share of pretax income (including capital gains) increased from 9.0 percent to 20.3 percent. But in a 2018 paper, economists Gerald Auten of the U.S. Treasury Department and David Splinter of the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation came to a very different conclusion. To get a better measure of income, they accounted for all of national income, including unreported income, retirement income missing from tax returns, and income due to changes in the tax base that resulted from the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Their conclusion: Between 1979 and 2015, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent rose from 9.5 percent to 14.2 percent, and the share of after-tax, after-transfer income rose even less, from 7.2 percent to 8.5 percent.

What opinion is right? And how much of the world as we know it should we tear apart and restructure because of that opinion? And the larger question, whose right is it to make such a decision?

Happy Earth Day

                                                   Happy Earth Day

May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now" about the predictions from the time of the first Earth Day in 1970. These are some:

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis that threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China, and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980 when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.6 years).

14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000 if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” (Note: Global production of crude oil last year at 82.275M barrels per day (bpd) was just slightly below the record output in 2018 of 82.9M bpd, and about 50% higher than the global output of 55.7M bpd around the time of the first Earth Day).

15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
(reprinted by Perry)

Council of Europe

                              Council of Europe

The West, exclusively, is inundated with self-proclaimed noble organizations and pressure groups with self-proclaimed high ideals, for you. They are unelected, virtually limited to the most benign and liberal countries in the world, and generally unknown. They have no plans for Africa, China or Russia. They do, however, have plans for you.

Who are these guys?

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), which describes itself as "independent," is the human rights monitoring body of the Council of Europe -- not to be confused with the European Union. The Council of Europe is composed of 47 member states, including all of the 27 European Union member states. Its decision and policy-making body is the Committee of Ministers, made up of the foreign ministers of each of the member states. Its most famous body is the European Court of Human Rights. The Council of Europe, unlike the EU, cannot make binding rules on its member states. Last year it celebrated its 70th anniversary. The Council of Europe calls itself the "continent's leading human rights organization... All 830 million people living in this common legal space have an ultimate right of appeal to the European Court of Human Rights".

According to its 1997 Annual Report:

"The mandate of ECRI, as determined by the Heads of State and Government, is: to review member States' legislation, policies and other measures to combat racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and intolerance, and their effectiveness; to propose further action at local, national and European level; to formulate general policy recommendations to member States...

"ECRI is composed of members designated by their governments (one for each member State of the Council of Europe) on the basis of their in-depth knowledge in the field of combating intolerance. They should have high moral authority and recognised expertise in dealing with racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and intolerance. ECRI's members are nominated in their personal capacity and act as independent members."

And who funds them?

I don’t want people to die, but....

                     I don’t want people to die, but....

"I don’t want people to die. But liberals are not helping by pressuring young people to give up jobs, savings and hope of a brighter future as if it’s a sacrifice they should make without complaint or any expectation of repayment, just because it’s the right thing to do.

The conversation should solely be framed as this, “We are asking young people to give up a lot, and to save mostly older people. So how are we going to pay them back? What sacrifice will be demanded to make them whole?”

I appreciate how people want to seem moral and righteous. But I want to underline the “contract” part of “social contract.” It is not justice to make young people give up their futures. We need to repay them, with interest.

People’s fears about losing jobs, losing houses, and watching retirement savings disappear are not minor. And if we fail to take them seriously, they will start to listen to Trump and others who say we have to re-open the economy."

"Just because it is the right thing to do?" "Want to seem moral and righteous?"

This was written by one Amanda Marcotte who has a job. She works as a political writer for the left-leaning website, Salon. I suppose all this implies that the idealistic, self-sacrificing optimism of the young, embodied by Sanders, has moved on to easier, lower ground. She seems to think that political triage is a new idea but it is the basis of old people on ice floes, death camps, euthanasia and eugenics. It is actually not a partisan question, it is a question of whatever the future is substituting for religion. It is a problem only when the political influence extends over controlling life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Which is too far.

Intensity is not a substitute for insight, nor is force for thought. Control over things should be carefully considered. Let's start here: Let's not read the works of people who write books titled, Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself. And, when they write articles, let's not take them seriously.

Reactionaries

                              Reactionaries

According to Kohn, “At the end of the 19th century, in practically all civilized countries, the legal equality of all men was established, and in the backward countries the fight for civilization included the fight for the equality of all. This has never been known in history before."

But the demand for hierarchies continues. And in innovative guises. The old royal argument was Divine Right and the domestic safety of an iron rule. (The dangers of the king's international ambitions were another matter.) Now we are offered, not equality of opportunity and the equality before the law, but rather equal access to limited resources, a promise that demands conflict--and an organizer. And we are offered the prime reward of all philosophers of inherited history: Revenge.

The new totalitarian tribalists, like their Marxist and Nazi intellectual ancestors, reject the innovative ideas and achievements of the 18th and 19th centuries. Those ideas gave dignity and respect to individuals and cultivated a social, economic and political climate and institutional setting of peaceful self-fulfillment and collateral social advancement. The tribalists want to return to the animosities, indignities and cruelties that characterized most of human history before then. Indeed, they want to feed them.

There has never in history been a reactionary movement the size of that of the last 100-150 years where the astonishing advancement of human dignity and rights--and their concomitant advances in wealth creation--have come under fire. Nor have such reactionary beliefs been centered so uniformly in institutions of higher learning. Nor have reactionaries ever claimed that such advances--material included--were inherently wrong.

There is a story about a man imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge during the Year Zero campaign, when the government tried to push Cambodia back to pre-modernity, a time of "no families, no sentiment, no expression of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music: only work and death." He knew the animosity the regime had to learning so he survived for years in the camp by pretending he was an idiot.

That might help now.

Arguing With Zombies

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future
by Paul Krugman  

Every so often in this mendacious world, someone will reveal what they really think. What really instigates tariffs?  Is the democracy we so widely praise really nothing more than anarchy?  Why do people really spend hundreds of millions of dollars to be elected to run a country? Those questions are less likely to be answered but when a political commentator comes clean, it is worth the read. For example, Paul Krugman's new book. It was reviewed recently in The Atlantic by Kelsey Dake and it is hard to believe his family let him publish it.

"What drives a dazzling academic—the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics, no less—to turn his New York Times column into an undiscriminating guillotine for conservative foes?" Dake asks. Understand, Dake substantively agrees with Krugman; what he questions is his style, his sounding like "a bloodthirsty Robespierre." 
Dake argues that Krugman was an evenhanded commentator until he joined the NYT in 1998 when he began to realize 'Republicans lost respect for facts and data, turning politically neutral technocrats into involuntary foes. “In 21st-century America,” Krugman writes, “accepting what the evidence says about an economic question will be seen as a partisan act.” '

'Commentators in this post-evidence, post-truth environment find themselves “arguing with zombies,” to cite Krugman’s book title. They confront “ideas that should have been killed by contrary evidence, but instead keep shambling along, eating people’s brains.”

Faced with these alarming undead adversaries, Krugman has concluded that politically neutral truth-telling is not merely impossible. It is morally inadequate. He duly sets out four rules for engaged public intellectuals. First, they should “stay with the easy stuff,” meaning subjects on which experts have achieved consensus: This is where an authoritative commentator can improve public understanding by delivering a clear message. Second, they should communicate in plain English—no controversy there. Third, and a bit more edgily, Krugman insists that commentators should “be honest about dishonesty.” If politicians deny clear evidence, they should be called out for arguing in bad faith. Finally, Krugman proclaims a rule that flies in the face of traditional journalistic tradecraft: “Don’t be afraid to talk about motives.”'

Krugman offers, as an example, climate change. 'Republican leaders have repeatedly ignored the solid expert consensus on climate change. Given that this consensus has been clear for more than a decade, it is fair to conclude that Republican leaders are consciously making false statements—in other words, that they are liars. Guessing at their motives seems risky but not totally unreasonable. Conceivably, they might be lying because they don’t want to irk voters with the news that hamburgers and pickup trucks are cooking the planet. But Krugman is basically right that “almost all prominent climate deniers are on the fossil-fuel take.” To state the matter plainly, conservatives lie about this issue because they are paid to lie. Or, in Krugman’s broad and snarling formulation: “Republicans don’t just have bad ideas; at this point, they are, necessarily, bad people.”'

Note that Dake's criticism is not that Krugman is being simplistic, or bigoted, or inaccurate or demagogic. He is not saying that honest disagreement can be overwhelming when presented in the public field, and so good, honest, dissenting positions might be lost. Nor is he saying that the extreme responses that are offered might be equally dangerous to the species as a whole, too dangerous to be applied without absolute certainty in a very uncertain science. No. Dake's complaint is that Krugman's position is impractical: 'By branding Republicans as “bad people,” he reduces the chances of swaying them.'

But, presumably, this sacrifice is necessary as the dishonest are not open to argument. Thus the ferocity of Krugman's style. Krugman does not see himself as a commentator, he has become Jeremiah. He is not hoping to persuade; he is simply screaming. The discussion is over, the results handed down from on high. Krugman is as certain--and as liberated--as Torquemada. The opposition is no longer a dissenter or opponent, he is the enemy. And, the greatest wound of all, he deserves no say, no consideration, no hearing. He is not just wrong, he is tainted. Spoiled. Dissent is a pathology.

"Resistance is futile," as the Borg say.

Well, at least the democracy knows where it stands.

The IPCC Special Report

Sandra is pretty mad about global warming. So is the Nat Geo and Sandra sent this article on global warming from National Geo. It is a pretty wild-eyed.

(This is representative: "The IPCC’s Special Report lays out various pathways to stabilize global warming at 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius). These solutions all require unprecedented efforts to cut fossil-fuel use in half in less than 15 years and eliminate their use almost entirely in 30 years. This means no home, business, or industry heated by gas or oil; no vehicles powered by diesel or gasoline; all coal and gas power plants shuttered; the petrochemical industry converted wholesale to green chemistry; and heavy industry like steel and aluminum production either using carbon-free energy sources or employing technology to capture CO2 emissions and permanently store it." This is directly from the report.)

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/ipcc-report-climate-change-impacts-forests-emissions/

​

Climate change impacts worse than expected, global report warns www.nationalgeographic.com The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the world is headed for painful problems sooner than expected,as emissions keep rising.

​

And she wrote:

And President Trump does not agree by pulling out of the Paris agreement..and we were warned about this at least ten years ago..what sort of world do we leave for our children and their children..

Sandra

​

I wrote back,

Hi Sandra,

The ten year disaster predictions are beginning to look like the Russian Five Year Plans.

But, regardless of what you think about the Paris Accords, there are very straightforward solutions to carbon production in the world. The first, second and third worlds could all contribute.

First, the Americans. The Americans have dropped their production dramatically over the last years, more than anyone else, but could go further by attacking the major carbon producer, the military. So a retraction of American military usage would be a step. Start there.

Second, deforestation. Preventing slash and burn techniques in farming areas--especially Brazil--would be a start. Outlawing primitive areas' use of coal, wood and peat sources would also help. That's two.

Third, coal fire plants. There are coal plants going on line every several weeks in India, every week in China. The Paris accords admitted those two countries would not curb their coal plant expansion--expansion--until 2030. 2030! So, they could stop that.

That would be three terrific steps right there. (I am sure there are other simple steps that could be taken and achieved simply by government fiat--without the reactionary Americans--like outlawing meat-eating, killing methane producing farm animals, curtailing travel and shipping, limiting military maneuvers, planting forests, killing carbon producing wild life; all are simple, achievable, minimally-intrusive objectives.)

On the assumption that Trump is too idiotic to do the first, we'll just have to rely on the good intentions of the other two groups. It would probably be more than we need, but we can achieve these goals without the Americans. All we need is the rest of the world's commitment. So I am sure it will work out just fine.

Love to all,

Jim

​

And a couple of notes on Paris Accords:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2017/06/accord2.html

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2017/06/trumping-climate.html

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Accords steeleydock.blogspot.com The Paris Accords Trump is said to be considering leaving the Paris Climate Accords. I do not know his reasons but reasons are often fore...

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2016/04/carbon-decisions.html
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Accord2 steeleydock.blogspot.com Sandra has noted, critically, that I have not condemned Trump's exit from the Paris Accords. What is interesting about the Accords is why ...

Is it really unreasonable to be suspicious of all this?

Voldamort

There is some outrage out there. Some is against Trump. (Some is Pro-Trump.) But it is there. And has been.

In 2008, candidate Barack Obama, when he was campaigning in Columbia, Missouri,  before the election announced, "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." The crowd went wild. Why? What did he--and they--see that we had to put aside. And what was to replace it? What in the nation needed fundamentally reformed? And if it so obviously needs reformed, why can we not just say what it is? And if it is so obvious, why don't I know what it is anyway? What is wrong with the educational system and the Press that I don't know this essential problem? Or is it simpler; was he so self-absorbed that he--and they--thought that his election itself, his being president by itself, would inherently change the country?

This is clearly the "Problem That Cannot Be Named."

Or is this more of a Rorschach Test where each disaffected can see his own concern in the vague image?

And, since he was elected, has that fundamental transformation occurred?

Bourdain and Red States

"The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.
I’ve spent a lot of time in gun-country, God-fearing America. There are a hell of a lot of nice people out there, who are doing what everyone else in this world is trying to do: the best they can to get by, and take care of themselves and the people they love. When we deny them their basic humanity and legitimacy of their views, however different they may be than ours, when we mock them at every turn, and treat them with contempt, we do no one any good. Nothing nauseates me more than preaching to the converted. The self-congratulatory tone of the privileged left—just repeating and repeating and repeating the outrages of the opposition—this does not win hearts and minds. It doesn’t change anyone’s opinions. It only solidifies them, and makes things worse for all of us. We should be breaking bread with each other, and finding common ground whenever possible. I fear that is not at all what we’ve done."
(from Anthony Bourdain’s interview with Reason Magazine in December 2016)

Parody

Parody and Satire

Alex Baldwin has been on the cover of Vanity Fair. He has become a Trump caricature on SNL. Everyone knows Tina Fey and her Palin doppelganger.

The first usage of the word parody in English cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is in Ben Jonson, in Every Man in His Humour in 1598: "A Parodie, a parodie! to make it absurder than it was." The next citation comes from John Dryden in 1693, who also appended an explanation, suggesting that the word was in common use, meaning to make fun of or re-create what you are doing.

Vladimir Nabokov made a distinction: "Satire is a lesson, parody is a game."

What we are seeing now as entertainment is a very sly distortion of parody into satire, where something funny is presented as having inherent meaning. Imagine a high school where everyone began to lisp like one student, or limp like one student. Imagine a school where the white 90% of the student body came to class in black face. Parody, yes. Funny, no. The point of attack, the subject of the humor is belittling  in nature, cruel in intent and overwhelming in its volume. And there is no lesson.

MacBird was play in New York in 1967  that was a parody of MacBeth but in that parody was something really very serious:  The suggestion that Lyndon Johnson was responsible for JFK's death.


Sarah Palin never said “I can see Russia from my house.” Tina Fey did. During an interview with Palin in September of 2008, ABC’s Charlie Gibson posed this question: “What insight into Russian actions, particularly during the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of this state give you?” She gave an earnest, but widely ridiculed, response: “They’re our next-door neighbors. And you can actually see Russia, from land, here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”
Russia as our neighbors! How absurd! What a hick!


Parody requires some strength in its target; its target must not be weak or vulnerable. You can always tell when parody loses its essence: When it becomes righteous. And relentless. And, most important, when it becomes cruel.

Ehrlich

Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich is a longtime environmental icon and author of the 1968 book "The Population Bomb."

Ehrlich confidently predicted in a 1970 issue of Mademoiselle: "Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years."

He assured readers of The Progressive in 1970 that between 1980 and 1989, 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the "Great Die-Off." In a 1969 essay titled "Eco-Catastrophe!" Ehrlich said "most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born."

This has passed, like Peak Oil. And the Left forgives, albeit  quite selectively.

And, like a bearish stock market goldbug, Ehrlich persists. His thesis is always that we are doomed, the mechanism just gets updated.

He predicted in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich continued that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).

In 1975, Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

He now has a new theory. In a July 2017 issue of "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" he predicts that human civilization stands in peril from an ongoing mass extinction on Earth: "Dwindling population sizes and range shrinkages (of vertebrates) amount to a massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilization. This 'biological annihilation' underlines the seriousness for humanity of Earth's ongoing sixth mass extinction event."

Is it any wonder that the public get inured to these alarms?

Goldbugs and Erlich will, like a stopped watch, be probably right some day but shouldn't we have the right to make more demands than that?

War

The Broken Body Fallacy


This is really worth some thought:

Ian Morris from Stanford, in his recent book War: What Is It Good For? has argued for the utility of war. The bigger the war, the better things become in the long run. War gives the state the power to make their citizens’ lives safer and richer. This is strange stuff that could come only from a university. "The utility of massive, random death."

 

Scheidel has a book called The Great Leveler which is pleased to inform us that income inequality is attainable only through war, savage revolution, disease periods and the implosion of the State. I guess once you start writing, you just can't stop. But you can stop. Look at this: “Whether communism’s sacrifice,” Scheidel writes, “of a hundred million lives bought anything of value is well beyond the scope of this study to contemplate.” Apparently, what you stop at is judgment.

Scheidel is also from Stanford; maybe there is something in the water.

“Whether communism’s sacrifice of a hundred million lives bought anything of value is well beyond the scope of this study to contemplate.” It is hard to believe someone wrote that--and got it past an editor. As an indicator of a political mindset, it should be memorized by everyone and never forgotten.

Ledgett/Snowden

Richard Ledgett Jr., 58, has worked at the National Security Agency since 1988. He was recently interviewed by the WashPo. Some excerpts:
 
So we’re code makers and code breakers. That’s what we were formed to do, and everything we do grows from that. ...And on the code-breaking part, our mission is to break foreign codes.

[as to Snowden's motives:] The narrative that he’s told publicly about this actually doesn’t track if you parse the timelines. He says he was motivated by Jim Clapper’s remarks to Senator Wyden and the revelation that those remarks weren’t accurate. If you look at the timeline, Snowden was actually stealing material and in contact with reporters eight months before that, so that doesn’t track.
I probably spent more time than anybody but our chief investigator on the actual investigation on this. I know a lot that I still can’t talk about because it’s sensitive investigational stuff. And if he does ever come back to the United States it will be part of the government’s case against him. The things that I can say, I think a lot of what was in the House Intelligence Committee’s report where they talk about him actually being mad about being disciplined — I think that actually tracks more with motivation.

I think if you weigh the benefit and the harm, the balance comes out pretty far on the harm side. That doesn’t mean that there was absolutely no good to what he did. And I think that’s an important nuance. It’s heavily weighted towards harm. The little bit of good is forcing a conversation that we probably should have had earlier. And for me that was a lesson learned. That we should have talked about the particular authority, the Patriot Act authority, earlier in the process.

On balance I think he should go to jail. Assuming that he gets a trial and is convicted, which I think the case is very strong. I would vote for conviction. I think I would be disqualified from the jury.

Accord2

Sandra has noted, critically, that I have not condemned Trump's exit from the Paris Accords. What is interesting about the Accords is why some people are so passionate about them. The basic American objection--and mine--is that it is a treaty Obama structured to enact by dodging the constitutional requirements for treaties. I think that wrong. The motives--arrogance, elitism, vision of higher good--are interesting and instructive but not as important to me as preserving the country's foundational laws. So I oppose the effort to side-step the basic, clear rules that make the democracy up. 

Foreigners in European capitals may have no real interest--or knowledge--of that objection but, if they will excuse me, this is my country. Our rules are important to me. 

They may be entirely concerned with the practical problems of global warming and willing to do anything to improve matters. Accepting that as their motive, what do the Accords actually do? The most complimentary assessment I have read is that it brought nations together for a common and important cause. The effectiveness of that effort is not in question. But it should be.
The debate over global warming centers on several elements. The earth seems to be warming, how do we measure that, what are the factors and how can we, if possible, influence the process?

Current political belief is that the climate is changing, not through regular and natural processes but rather as the side effect of  human activity, particularly as the result of carbon fuel use. The data has been argued over but computer models have been developed to predict the future effect and they are dire. The problem is that many do not think the data accurate and, more import, the models using that data to predict future activity have not been correct. That raises questions--reasonable questions--as to the accuracy of the original data and/or the models based upon them. 

The second objection is the Procrustean distortions the Accords go through to accommodate the various signers. Nations are to assess themselves on their progress, progress which is very different for each nation, and culturally based. So China continues to build coal-fire plants at the rate on one a week. Nor is there any enforcement program. Nor is their a mechanism approved for the nations to use; that is said to be coming.

One definite position is that carbon as an energy source will have to go, certainly in the next generation and a half. All of the power of transportation, temperature and information will have to come from a new source, a source we do not have or use. An entirely new power source for humanity will have to be invented, developed and put into service to replace the abundant and cheap carbon power we use now. If one is worried about disorder, imagine the effect of turning off the world's industrial carbon power switch without an adequate, affordable replacement.

And this effort will have to be financed, financed by someone.

This may look like a good plan to Europe but, constitutional objections aside, it looks like a lousy idea to me. It doesn't look like an idea at all; it looks like a wish. And, somehow, my bet is that we, more than anyone, will be financially responsible for this long term project.
Actually, this looks like a placebo, therapy whose benefit depends upon the optimism of the participants. And an unending series of proclamations, good ideas, unasked for leadership, interventions and great dinners for the participant ruling class that will go on and on as a make-work project for the rich forever.

Scruton/Žižek

Scruton on Slavoj Žižek



Roger Scruton has a very funny--and bothersome--article in The City Journal on the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, his many influences, the recent history of Marxist thinking and the seemingly zombie-like persistence of leftist revolutionary thought. Some selections are below but here is a link to the article: http://www.city-journal.org/html/clown-prince-revolution-14632.html

Clown Prince of the Revolution www.city-journal.org On Slavoj Žižek, a new kind of leftist thinker

Assuring the world that they had never really been taken in by Communist propaganda, leftist thinkers renewed their attacks on Western civilization and its “neoliberal” economics as the principal threat to humanity in a globalized world.

Lacan’s collected Écrits, published in 1966, were one of the sources drawn upon by the student revolutionaries in May 1968. Thirty-four volumes of his seminars followed, published by his disciples and subsequently translated into English, or at least into a language that resembles English as closely as the original resembles French. The influence of these seminars is one of the deep mysteries of modern intellectual life. Their garbled regurgitation of theories that Lacan neither explored nor understood is, for sheer intellectual effrontery, without parallel in recent literature.

Unexplained technicalities, excerpted from set theory, particle physics, linguistics, topology, and whatever else might seem to confer power on the wizard who conjures with them, are used to prove such spectacular theorems as that the erectile penis in bourgeois conditions is equal to the square root of minus one or that you do not (until worked on by Lacan) “ex-sist.”

For Lacan, the big Other (capital A for Autre) is the challenge presented to the self by the not-self. This big Other haunts the perceived world with the thought of a dominating and controlling power—a power that we both seek and flee from. There is also the little other (lowercase a for autre), who is not really distinct from the self but is the thing seen in the mirror during that stage of development that Lacan calls the “mirror stage,” when the infant supposedly catches sight of himself in the glass and says “Aha!” That is the point of recognition, when the infant first encounters the “object = a,” which, in some way that I find impossible to decipher, indicates both desire and its absence.

Lacan’s ruminations on the Other appear constantly in Žižek’s writings, which offer proof of one feature in which the Communist system had the edge on its Western rivals: they are the products of a seriously educated mind.

As an indication of Žižek’s style, here are some of the topics touched on in three consecutive pages, chosen more or less at random, from his engaging 2008 book In Defense of Lost Causes: the Turin shroud; the Koran and the scientific worldview; the Tao of physics; secular humanism; Lacan’s theory of fatherhood; truth in politics; capitalism and science; Hegel on art and religion; postmodernity and the end of grand narratives; psychoanalysis and modernity; solipsism and cyberspace; masturbation; Hegel and objective spirit; Richard Rorty’s pragmatism; and is there or is there not a big Other?

The machine-gun rattle of topics and concepts makes it easy for Žižek to slip in his little pellets of poison, which the reader, nodding in time to the rhythm of the prose, might easily swallow unnoticed. Thus, we are not “to reject terror in toto but to re-invent it”; we must recognize that the problem with Hitler, and with Stalin, too, is that they “were not violent enough”; we should accept Mao’s “cosmic perspective” and read the Cultural Revolution as a positive event. Rather than criticizing Stalinism as immoral, we should praise it for its humanity, since it rescued the Soviet experiment from “biopolitics”; besides, Stalinism is not immoral but too moral, since it relied on the figure of the big Other, which, as all Lacanians know, is the primordial mistake of the moralist. We must also recognize that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is “the only true choice today.”

...all this might have served to discredit Žižek among more moderate left-wing readers, were it not for the fact that it is never possible to be sure that he is serious. Maybe he is laughing—not only at himself and his readers but at an academic establishment that can seriously include Žižek alongside Kant and Hegel on the philosophy curriculum...

From Lacan, Žižek also takes the idea that mental processes fall into three distinct categories: fantasy, symbol, and the reaching for the Real. Desire comes through fantasy, which proposes both the object = a (the objet petit a), and the first subjectivization: the mirror stage, in which desire (and its lack) enter the infant psyche. The notion of fantasy is connected with that key term of Lacanian analysis—a term that incidentally entered and dominated French literary theory under the influence of Roland Barthes—namely, jouissance, Lacan’s substitute for the Freudian “pleasure principle.” Fantasies enter our lives and persist because they bring enjoyment, and they are revealed in symptoms, those irrational-seeming fragments of behavior through which the psyche protects its achieved terrain of enjoyment from the threatening realities of the world beyond—from the unvisitable world of the Real.

This thought gives rise to a spectacular emendation to Freud’s idea of the superego, expressed in terms that unite Kant with the Marquis de Sade:

It is a commonplace of Lacanian theory to emphasize how [the] Kantian moral imperative conceals an obscene superego injunction: “Enjoy!”—the voice of the Other impelling us to follow our duty for the sake of duty is a traumatic irruption of an appeal to impossible jouissance, disrupting the homeostasis of the pleasure principle and its prolongation, the reality principle. This is why Lacan conceives Sade as the truth of Kant.

Ideology, in the classical Marxist analysis, is understood in functional terms, as the system of illusions through which power achieves legitimacy. Marxism offers a scientific diagnosis of ideology, reducing it to a symptom, showing how things really are behind the fetishes. By doing so, it “opens our eyes” to the truth: we see exploitation and injustice where previously we had seen contract and free exchange. The illusory screen of commodities, in which relations between people appear as the law-like motion of things, crumbles before us and reveals the human reality: stark, unadorned, and changeable. In short, by tearing away the veil of ideology, we prepare the way for revolution.

...this brings me to the heart of Žižek’s leftism. The Real, touched by Lacan’s magic wand, vanishes. It is the primary absence, the “truth” that is also castration. The wand waves away reality and thereby gives fresh life to the dream. It is in the world of dreams, therefore, that morality and politics are now to be implanted. What matters is not the discredited world of merely empirical events but the goings-on in the dream world, the world of the exalted intellectuals, for whom ideas and enthusiasms cancel mere realities.

 

Thus, in a singularly repulsive essay on “Revolutionary Terror,” Žižek praises the “humanist terror” of Robespierre and Saint-Just (as opposed to the “anti-humanist, or rather inhuman,” terror of the Nazis) not because it was particularly kind to its victims but because it expressed the “utopian explosions of political imagination” of its perpetrators.

For what matters is what people say, not what they do, and what they say is redeemed by their theories, however stupidly or carelessly pursued, and with whatever disregard for real people. We rescue the virtual from the actual through our words, and the deeds have nothing to do with it.

There is the kind exemplified by the English Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1783, in which essentially law-abiding people attempt to define and protect their rights against usurpation. And then there is the kind exemplified by the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, in which one elite seizes power from another and then establishes itself by a reign of terror.

In Žižek, we find astonishing evidence of the fact that the “Communist hypothesis,” as Badiou calls it, will never go away. Notwithstanding Marx’s attempt to present it as the conclusion of a science, the “hypothesis” cannot be put to the test and refuted. For it is not a prediction or, in any real sense, a hypothesis. It is a statement of faith in the unknowable.

As in 1789, as in 1917, as in the Long March of Mao, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, the work of destruction feeds on itself. Žižek’s windbaggery serves one purpose: to turn attention away from the actual world, from real people, and from ordinary moral and political reasoning. It exists to promote a single and absolute cause, the cause that admits of no criticism and no compromise and that offers redemption to all who espouse it. And what is that cause? The answer is there on every page of Žižek’s writings: Nothing.