The State of the Union: On What Planet?

What planet was this guy talking about?

All this talk about manufacturing. Old-time rustbelt liberals have an infatuation with this word “manufacturing.” It’s so Twentieth Century; reflecting the notion that making things you can drop on your foot is the only kind of productiveness that’s “real,” that otherwise you have some sort of mirage economy.

It’s a fundamental mistake. What determines marketplace value is people’s willingness to pay – whether it’s for a tangible manufactured item or, equally, an intangible that “merely” makes them feel good (a song, for example). Production of either creates equivalent economic value.

 America still actually does quite well in manufacturing; our output continues to rise. But we’re doing it with ever less labor, because of technological and productivity advancements. That’s a good thing, the basic source of worldwide improved living standards. Once, it took almost the entirety of available human labor just to feed ourselves. Raising farm productivity enabled us to shift a lot of that manpower to making other things, thus expanding wealth. Now we can manufacture what we need with less labor too, empowering yet a further shift of human effort toward other endeavors, in services and intangibles, likewise growing our wealth. Thus (like farming before it) manufacturing’s importance in the world economy, and as a source of jobs, inexorably diminishes.

And anyway, manufacturing is not our “comparative advantage,” by which economists refer to what a nation does best. It’s the other stuff, where creativity reigns, that can keep America on top. Our future does not lie in manufacturing, and the President’s fixation on it is just wistfulness for a past that isn’t coming back.

He also continues to bleat about “sending jobs overseas.” It’s the same misguided mentality. America’s businesses can’t employ anybody if they can’t stay competitive by keeping costs as low as possible in a global economy. And America’s long term economic health is not served by attempting to keep people employed at high wages doing things that other nations can do more cheaply. That must fail. We have to be doing stuff that’s better or more valuable than what other nations can do, capitalizing on what is again our true competitive advantage in creativity.

Obama also keeps emphasizing economic inequality and unfairness. Well, life is unfair, but that’s not our real economic problem. That some people are doing very well is not the cause of other people struggling, nor is it that the former don’t pay enough taxes. Nobody pays enough taxes – not if we’re to continue spending as we do.

Actually, taxes high enough to sustain that spending level would cripple the economy, so that wouldn’t be sustainable either. I have confidence in the ability of America’s people and businesses to be economically productive and competitive, but that will be cut off at the knees if we can’t get a grip on out-of-control spending and ballooning debt. About this, the President was conspicuously silent.

All in all, Obama had much to say about things that aren’t our real problems, and nothing to say about the things that are.

Viva Peru!

We recently toured Peru. Yes, there are many poor Peruvians, much poorer than any Americans. But I’m always energized seeing a people like this, so manifestly striving to raise themselves and their nation – by producing things that improve the lives of others too. That Peru is bustling with economic vitality was very evident. One of its main industries is tourism.

At Machu Picchu

On our first day we were driven out of Cusco with a lunch stop in Urubamba. When our van turned at a nondescript little restaurant sign and pulled into a barely passable dirt road, I wasn’t expecting much. But the restaurant (Tunupa) was beautiful and faced out on a fantastic vista of a steep mountainside festooned with mountain goats like trimmings on a Christmas tree. The meal was a buffet, and among the best I’ve ever had, every dish unusually delicious; the exquisite desserts were to die for. And as I was tucking in, a musician was playing Pachelbel’s canon on Andean pipes. Altogether a peak experience that literally brought tears to my eyes and my wife’s.

I’m relating this because I honor the efforts of all the Peruvians who worked to make it happen.* They did it for profit, yes. I don’t hold this a dirty word. Great numbers of Peruvians made great efforts to give my family an enjoyable tour, thereby enriching us as well as themselves. Take profit, and the seeking of it, out of the world, and you won’t like the result.

Another thing Peruvians do to rise up is educating themselves. Our tour guide mentioned that 85% of Peruvian kids now finish high school (it’s required).** The American figure is far lower. In a world where a country like Peru is achieving 85%, how does America imagine it somehow deserves to maintain leadership with a graduation rate down in the 60s? (Quality of education is an issue, and America does still lead in higher education. But that doesn’t help the third of Americans who drop out of high school.)

And here’s something else I love seeing in foreign countries: electioneering. Peru was terrific for this. They paint candidates’ names in big letters on walls and the sides of their houses, and these daubings were still seen everywhere after the recent national elections – their proliferation showing how very much Peruvians celebrate their democratic choices.

Mostly they paint only the candidates’ first names. At one spot my wife pointed with a laugh to a big “Elvis” painted on a wall, but it soon became evident that Elvis was indeed the first name of a local candidate. (Another, perhaps oddly in such a Catholic nation, was Darwin.) I mentioned to my wife that in the presidential race a multiplicity of candidates had gone to a run-off between the top two, and unfortunately the best candidate had placed third. “Exactamente,” our tour guide chimed in.

Humala

The winner was Ollanta Humala; a former army officer, he had lost the previous election campaigning as a left wing clone of Hugo Chavez. This time he moved to the center and in office has proven to be a nonideological pragmatist, running the economy in a responsible way to boost growth. A major issue is a mining project with a lot of nimby opposition; Humala is pushing it forward. That such a politician would see such a path as the way to go is highly encouraging.

Viva Peru!

* Our tour was booked with Sunnyland Tours; locally in Peru, via Fiesta Tours. We were extremely satisfied with how they treated us. With LAN Airlines, not so much. Details: http://www.fsrcoin.com/lanairlinesbadservice.htm

**  I couldn’t confirm this by googling, but from other numbers I saw, it seems in the ballpark. 

 

Faith versus Reason

Frequent commenter Lee recently pointed me to a blog essay by philosopher Michael Lynch, “Reasons for Reason.” 

He says current American divisions are rooted in fundamental differences about what makes a belief believable. Lynch sees a problem of circularity in validating reason by using reason, with all beliefs thus ultimately premised on something arbitrary. Nevertheless, he argues for the importance of defending reliance on reason as an epistemological position, and the need for a “common currency of shared epistemic principles” for discussing such divisive issues. (“Epistemology” concerns how we know things.)

I was reminded of an episode in Rebecca Goldstein’s novel, Thirty-six Arguments for the Existence of God – a Work of Fiction. In a formal public debate on whether God exists, the “yes” advocate argues that when one relies on reason and science, it is because one has faith in reason and science; that’s ultimately no different from religious faith; so reason and science stand on no firmer foundation than religious belief. At bottom it comes down to faith either way, so take your pick.

This is indeed a commonly heard argument. But it’s a semantic flim-flam. The very definition of religious faith is belief that is not grounded in evidence. And this is an exception from the normal way in which brains work. All brains – animal brains too – work by gathering factual information from sense organs, and then drawing logical inferences from that information. If you hear a growl, smell a liony smell, and see something large moving in the underbrush, you deduce it’s probably a lion. This is reason.

 You don’t believe in the lion’s existence as a matter of faith but, rather, because it’s rational. And to say that one has “faith” in this kind of rationality is merely to say that there is no other way in which thinking can occur. Or at least coherent thinking. It’s no analogy to religious faith.

Put another way, we believe the lion is lurking not because of any faith, but because we have reasons. And we furthermore have reasons – excellent ones, in fact – for relying on that kind of thought process. Let me be more specific:

First there is the power of logic, and the concept of cause and effect. All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal. This kind of logic is not some mere human construct. It’s woven into the fabric of the Universe. It’s not even possible to conceive of an alternate Universe without it.

Secondly – while we know that rationalism can sometimes lead us astray, because our senses are imperfect at gathering information, and our brains are imperfect at processing it – and perhaps some questions can’t be resolved that way – nevertheless, experience teaches that rationalism produces the right answer in the overwhelming majority of cases – on questions like whether there’s a lion in the bushes. Other types of issues, that rationality (at least arguably) cannot resolve, are a very small part of daily human life.

Religious believers don’t reject any of this. To the contrary, the great bulk of their own day-to-day mental functioning employs exactly this rationalist model. It’s just that when it comes to religion, they carve out a seeming exception.

Here’s why I say “seeming.” It is in the nature of our brains, and of all thought, that we have reasons for what we think. (Again, cause and effect.) And this includes religious belief. The believer may insist his belief is premised on faith rather than reasons, but that cannot be so. The question becomes why have the faith? There must be reasons!

It is true, once more, that the very concept of faith entails belief without regard to evidence. Yet still the question is why someone chooses to opt for such faith in the first place. There must be reasons. To say “I believe because I have faith” is mere tautology, explaining nothing.

So in the novel, the debater’s “faith in reason” argument actually has it completely backwards. It’s not that the nonreligious have “faith” in reason – rather, the religious have reasons for faith.

God

But what are those reasons? Believers do often claim that there’s something about existence that they view as evidence for God. But few people actually move from such “evidence” to faith, it’s the other way around; they start from faith and then look for ways to rationalize it. People are very good at rationalizing reasons for believing the things they already believe.

But meantime the biggest true cause of their faith is simply that they’ve been acculturated to it. Parents, community, society, pushed the belief, so you just go with the program. They said the Bible is God’s word. What were their reasons for believing it? Their parents and community believed it. And so on back. Had you been born into a Hindu, or Muslim, or Wiccan community, it’s overwhelmingly likely that your faith would attach to Hindu, Muslim, or Wiccan beliefs (and you’d find ways to rationalize them).

 In the end, it’s not faith versus reason, it’s strong reasons versus weak ones; it’s embracing the evidence of reality versus abjuring it. And the persistence of the latter suggests that those who say human reason is fallible may have a point after all.

Liu Xiaobo and Moral Relativism

Liu Xiaobo

I don’t normally do this, but the Times Book Review recently had an essay about Liu Xiaobo that I could not improve upon, so I’ll just point you to it (click here). Liu was the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Winner who remains imprisoned in China for his advocacy of democracy and human rights. (Click here for my own blog essay about Liu.)

The Times piece, by Jonathan Mirsky, was very inspiring to me. China’s intellectual landscape is a grotesque hall of mirrors due to six decades of contorted ideological logic and repression. That anyone can come out of such an environment able to see straight seems almost miraculous. Yet Liu Xiaobo does have a shining clear vision embracing the highest human values. Plus the courage to endure a life of privation and pain in service to those ideals.

This is an answer to all-too-prevalent misanthropy. Heroes like Liu Xiaobo make me proud of the human race.

*   *   *

My recent posting about Charles Pierce’s Idiot America has been published as a book review in Moral Relativism magazine. I had met the editor, Tucker Lieberman, at last year’s Humanist congress, and was intrigued by the publication’s title! It is indeed a very interesting mag; check it out by clicking on the link.

Politics and Religion: A Mormon President?

It’s now increasingly probable that the Republican nominee will be Willard Mitt Romney. He might still lose Iowa; Paul only needs a quarter of the vote and his supporters are way more passionate. (Why such a trivial result among a small sample of comparatively extreme isolated voters should matter much is a mystery.)

 But Paul simply is not going to be the nominee; sorry, Paul fans, this is the real world. As Karen Tumulty says, the GOP is going through the Five Stages of Grief with regard to Romney – the final stage being acceptance.

So at least we’ll avoid the dismal prospect of an election with a lousy candidate against an impossible one. The Republican party had a pretty good brand – as The Economist observes, muscular foreign policy, responsible fiscal policy, emphasizing individual freedom and social responsibility, and entrepreneurial pragmatism – until the crazies took over. Just possibly a Romney presidency could make that an aberrant episode.*

Romney is, of course, a Mormon. When stuck once in a Salt Lake City hotel room with the Book of Mormon, I read much of it: an amazing work of imaginative creativity. I was particularly intrigued that its author, Joseph Smith, could get a bunch of local worthies to attest seeing the golden plates he’d supposedly “translated.” There were no plates. Smith was a consummate con artist. (I’ll resist the temptation to elaborate, except to note: 33 wives.)**

Having such a poor economic record, it looks like the Democrats will rely on a smear campaign against Romney, with personal attacks, including his religion.*** Mormonism is an easy target, what with Jesus running around in ancient America and all. Religions generally stretch credulity, but why pick one flatly contradicted by archaeological evidence?

Yet more mainstream faiths might seem less weird only by grace of familiarity. Beliefs that would be labeled clinically insane if held by a few must be considered normal when held by the many. From my perspective, Mormonism versus Christianity is a Hobson’s choice. But I recognize that I live in a nation where religious belief predominates. Thus again I do not consider the majority of Americans deranged; if a majority believes something, then that belief is normal.

And, further, separating church from state, I try to keep religion out of my politics. The Constitution (Article VI, Paragraph 3) expressly stipulates that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Thus I ignore religion when choosing a candidate. And that’s pragmatic as well as principled. If I didn’t ignore religion, there’d be few candidates I could vote for.

Admittedly, a president’s religious beliefs can influence his actions. That was certainly true of George W. Bush. Nevertheless, there is still a strong national consensus along the lines of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech to the Houston ministers, making clear that a president’s actions cannot be in service to his particular church. This clarified a line which no president, not even Bush, could in practice actually cross. Bush did act in line with his moral code; his moral code was shaped by religion; but we all have moral codes; certainly atheists do. The alternative to a president heeding his moral code would be an amoral president.

Joseph Smith seeing double

So when it comes to Romney, I’d rather he wasn’t a Mormon, about equally as I’d prefer non-Christians, but since only in a dream world will I get to vote for an avowed atheist, it’s irrelevant to me that Romney is a Mormon rather than in some other church.

I said “avowed atheist” because in reality many presidents have been nonbelievers – from the first up to the current one. And anyway, I wouldn’t necessarily vote for an atheist, just because she’s an atheist. I didn’t vote for Obama; religious belief was indeed basically irrelevant; my vote was guided by other considerations.

But I also take seriously that this is a free country, and that includes the freedom of other people to do things I detest. It is the essence of democracy that people can vote freely for whomever they want, for whatever reasons they want. If someone won’t vote for Romney because of his religion, that’s their prerogative in a free country.

* His disgusting promise to veto the “Dream Act” admittedly does not bode well.

** Ever notice how with “religious prophets” it’s so often ultimately about getting laid?

*** Also, in contrast to 2008 when he vowed to end partisan bickering and work with both sides in Congress, this time Obama is running against Congress – thus effectively promising that if he wins, he won’t be able to get anything done.

Inventing Modernity: Charles Babbage and Ada Byron King

Just about 200 years ago, a group of youthful British math aficionados were kibitzing. At the time, things like logarithm tables were indispensable but required immensely onerous computations (prone to error, moreover). Queried the young Charles Babbage, “Couldn’t a machine do this?”

Babbage

An excellent – and timely – question. For most of human history, our sole energy source was our own muscles. Eventually we harnessed animal energy; horsepower was ten times greater than manpower. But the real quantum leap was just starting in Babbage’s day, when we could tap the power in fuels, and commenced developing the machines to exploit and multiply it. Thus began humanity’s climb – slow at first, then rocketing – up from meager subsistence.

I’ve been reading about Charles Babbage (1791-1871) in James Gleick’s book, The Information, a history and analysis of information’s role in the development of human society. Babbage was a (half?) mad genius whose story reads like a Steven Millhauser phantasmagoria.

Part of the Difference Engine

Babbage set out to design, and then actually build, the calculating machine he’d dreamed of, calling it the “Difference Engine.” It may not sound very sexy to modern ears, but what he envisioned was way ahead of his time, and consequently hugely difficult to actually engineer. Through decades of obsessive devotion to the project, Babbage was never able to achieve a fully operating device that realized his vision. And meantime, his vision transmogrified into what he wound up calling the “Analytical Engine” – something much beyond a glorified adding machine.

You can see where this is going. Gleick’s book mentions the Jacquard Loom. That made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It was just a simple little innovation: fitting a loom with a card in which holes were punched in a configuration that would direct the loom’s moving parts to create a desired color pattern. This, from my modern perch, I recognized as the first tiny embryo of a concept that would transform the world. Babbage wasn’t privy to that history when he first saw a Jacquard Loom; but the hairs on his neck stood up too because, presciently, he too grasped the profound implications.

Portrait by Margaret Carpenter

Babbage’s collaborator was Ada Byron King (1815-52, Countess of Lovelace, the poet Byron’s daughter), with a prodigious intellect at a time of huge barriers to female intellectual achievement. But, brainstorming together with Babbage, with his ideas for the “Analytical Engine” and extrapolating the Jacquard system, it was Ada Byron King who – in the 1840s! – actually invented computer programming.

Or at least she invented the concept. It virtually defied expression, when there was nothing remotely resembling a computer, and they didn’t even have the words for talking about such things. Nobody else knew what they were talking about either, nor could anyone else see its value.

Why am I telling you all this?

Most of us take modernity for granted, rarely pausing to contemplate its stupendous achievement. Indeed, it’s chic to mock it, even denounce it, as a Faustian bargain we should repent.

But I for one am ever mindful of the titanic efforts and creativity of human beings across time that were required to give us the cornucopiae enabling us to live so hugely better than our forebears.

The story of Charles Babbage and Ada Byron King exemplifies this. They struggled mightily, and ultimately failed, to properly conceptualize, let alone realize, their grand idea. Much more had to happen first, much more effort and discovery, before their vision could bear fruit. And oh what fruit.

Gleick’s book also relates the history of the telegraph. We imagine that Morse one day just up and invented it. Not so; the idea went through a very tortuous history of false starts and dead ends, and gigantic problems to be solved, by numerous people, before wires finally started carrying messages. And of course, that idea of transmitting information has metastasized far beyond what anyone could imagine in Morse’s time.

Thus goes human progress: an almost infinite synergistic complex, not of leaps, but of baby steps; but millions of baby steps turn into leaps, like droplets of water coalescing to create a thunderous ocean wave.

And so we sit down with our modern “Analytical Engine” and press a button, and summon forth . . . well, as Arthur C. Clarke remarked, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Local Food From Cave 73

“Buy local,” “Eat local,” and watch your “food miles.” So say earnest people who sincerely want to live responsibly and make a better world, helping both the environment and neighboring farmers.

The general sentiment is admirable. But, as so often, the specific policy is actually misguided.

First, regarding environmental impact, “food miles” are relatively unimportant. Modern technology makes food transport so highly efficient that its cost, and carbon footprint, are not a big part of a food item’s overall profile. Far more important, environmentally, is the manner of production. It’s better to produce a food where climate and other factors are most favorable, and then transport it, than to produce it locally: to grow lettuce in sunny California and ship it to Maine than to grow it in an energy-guzzling Maine hot-house. This is true even if the best production site is half a world away. (One study found it more energy efficient for Brits to buy apples, lamb and dairy items from New Zealand than from British farmers.)

But there is a mentality that simply hates the idea of products coming from all kinds of foreign places; as if it’s somehow lamentable that a car is today made from parts crafted in 18 different countries. Maybe it’s romanticizing a supposedly simpler time when everything you consumed or used came from nearby (and life was pretty wretched, partly in consequence). And maybe it’s the deeply embedded ancestral human xenophobia and distrust of strangers. Thus the hostility to globalization in all its manifestations. Not much anyone can do about it; but the “local food” thing does provide at least one way to strike a blow against globalization.

And, in fact, this strikes a blow against non-local producers – many of them actually poor people overseas – whose poverty anti-globalizers are also always bemoaning (and blaming on capitalism). “Eat local” helps keep poor foreign farmers poor. (And that poverty is far worse than anything in America.)

The locavore movement deems it admirable local loyalty to buy your neighbor’s products rather than others. Likewise do many feel that buying something made in China betrays our own kind, whose jobs are being poached – rather than feeling they are actually helping some poor peon in China become a bit less poor. (Why else would Chinese peons flock to these “sweatshop” jobs?)

Carl Reiner with Mel Brooks as the 2000 year old man

Thus I find the whole locavore and anti-globalist attitude small-minded and ugly. Its tribalism reminds me of Mel Brooks as the “2000 Year Old Man” recalling how cave-dwellers invented national anthems. This (in full; sanitized version) was his:

Hooray for Cave 73!
Everybody else can go to Hell!

It also reminds me of the Biblical injunction, “Love thy neighbor” – which was meant literally, applying only to your own tribe-mates. All other people could be freely slaughtered (as God himself often commanded). Yuck.

The rise of an integrated, globalized world economy is beneficial, for both people and the environment. It’s good when a car’s parts come from 18 different nations. Promoting production in the places where it’s most efficient makes more and better goods available to more people, with actually smaller environmental impacts. And, by enabling more people to participate in the global economy, and to benefit from the resulting efficiencies, it gives the average world citizen a better quality of life.

Sure it’s imperfect and there are downsides; some lose jobs or pay; but the gains of the winners – people in rising nations, as well as consumers everywhere – are vastly greater. Globalization reduces world poverty. Period.

It also helps to overcome the Cave 73 (and Biblical) mentality. Adam Smith commented that an Englishman who’d suffer torments about the loss of his little finger would sleep like a babe after the earthquake deaths of a million Chinese – because he did not know them. Well, today, because of globalization, we do know them. It is making for a world in which we not only trade with each other more, but understand each other better, trust each other more, care about each other more, and help each other more. To me that’s a better world.

Think globally. Act globally. Eat globally. Rise up from Cave 73.

Idiot America?

Charles Pierce’s 2009 book, Idiot America was a Christmas gift. So I read it. Basically it says anyone who doesn’t share his views – on politics, science, religion – you name it – is an idiot. No, worse – a lunatic. (He’s politically leftie, anti-fundamentalist, probably an atheist but unwilling to say so.)

Pierce posits Three Premises of American culture: 1) any theory is valid if it sells (books, or candidates); 2) anything can be true if proclaimed loudly enough; and 3) a) Fact is that which enough people believe, and b) truth is determined by how strongly they believe it.

The two parts of Premise 3 are kind of redundant, as indeed are Premises 2 and 3. But, of course, premises must come in threes.

I fail to find this informative. Facts are facts and beliefs are beliefs; two different animals. Beliefs can be wrong. Duh. Pierce is giving us here not social science but merely rhetorical snark. And his premises are all (including both parts of #3) – if taken literally – as plainly false as any of the notions the book so relentlessly (and repetitively) excoriates.

And, yes, he calls people he disagrees with not just idiots – but also lunatics, crazy, insane, out of their minds, mad, and so forth. Pierce’s book is actually just a less sophisticated entry in a long line of insufferable tomes by lefties diagnosing non-leftie viewpoints as forms of mental illness. (The latest is Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind, laughably arguing that conservatism is about nothing but keeping “the lower orders” down.)

Exemplifying Pierce’s shtick is his attack on “Intelligent Design” (or so-called “Creation Science”) believers. Now, I too happen to think creationism is wrong. But unlike Pierce I do not think its adherents are idiots or lunatics. How and why people can become ensnared in such beliefs is actually a very complex, fascinating and important subject, which Pierce pretty much ignores amid all his invective. Michael Shermer provides far more enlightening analysis in his books, Why People Believe Weird Things, and The Believing Brain.

 One key factor, for instance, is confirmation bias – we embrace information that supports our pre-existing beliefs and shun contrary information, creating self-reinforcing feedback loops. Thus liberals and conservatives, believers and atheists, come to inhabit divergent mental universes. And, as Shermer explains, smart people are actually more likely to believe untrue things because they are more skillful at rationalizing their views!

So I try to stay mindful that, just as I feel certain regarding evolution versus creationism, others (some smarter than me) feel every bit as certain of their contrary view. I can say that one view is based on evidence and the other on moonshine. But so would they. How do we resolve this epistemological divide? Ultimately perhaps we cannot, because no human mind has a direct pipeline to truth, it’s always mediated by a great complex of fallible mental processing. This gives me at least a modicum of intellectual humility.

Not Charlie Pierce.

What really frosted me about this book was that for all its trumpeted devotion to “facts,” “truth,” and “reality,” Pierce repeatedly plays fast and loose with them. For example, he has the field day one might expect from a leftie regarding the Iraq War, harping on weapons of mass destruction. Pierce tells it as though all intelligent people knew from the get-go there were no such weapons and war supporters were idiots about this. Excuse me, that re-writes history. Practically all serious observers believed Saddam had the weapons, for excellent reasons. It was wrong, but not stupid (or a lie). And Pierce’s account omits any of the war’s larger context. Reading it, you’d suppose Saddam was running his country quite nicely, hurting no one and minding his own business until we barged in like a gang of home invaders.

I know some people do see it that way. They’re not idiots; but I think that view is as mistaken as any of the “idiocies” flayed in Pierce’s book. It’s confirmation bias again; indeed, Pierce’s book itself is a monument to his own confirmation bias.

Pierce quotes Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in a discussion about the TV show “24,” remarking that Jack Bauer may have broken the law in using torture to save Los Angeles from a terrorist attack, but he (Scalia) doubted a jury would convict Bauer. Then, a few pages later we find this: “Antonin Scalia . . . citing a fictional terror fighter as a justification for reversing literal centuries of American policy and jurisprudence. . . ”

Obviously, that’s a gross twisting of Scalia’s words. This is what I mean by Pierce’s playing fast and loose. It treats his readers as — dare I say it – idiots.

But of course the book’s very title casts this country as a nation of idiots. Some Americans just love to hate America. And some pose as tribunes of the common people while regarding them with smug contempt.

Time For (Yet) Another Russian Revolution

Recent Russian parliamentary elections were blatantly rigged. Putin’s ruling party got just under 50%. This shows his regime is not only corrupt but incompetent.

Oh, for the good old days of Soviet elections, with their solid 99% results!

"Make him an offer he can't refuse"

Now thousands are on the streets protesting and demanding change. Putin not long ago said that anyone so demonstrating should – should – expect to have their heads whacked.

Like the good mafia don he is, Putin does rule by whacking. The list of pesky journalists and lawyers who’ve been murdered grows ever longer. Each time Medvedev, the puppet president, solemnly declares the perpetrators will be found and punished. Of course they never are.

Medvedev also keeps giving platitudinous speeches about the need for democracy, reform, modernization, etc., while Putin chortles mordantly behind the curtain.

Putin & Medvedev

Now the puppet will be whisked away and the puppet master will reoccupy center stage. Despite all Russia’s political roiling, and the anemic (and phony at that) 50% vote for Putin’s party, in upcoming presidential elections there’s no sign that a candidate opposing Putin will even be allowed on the ballot.

Putin runs a gangster regime whose total raison d’etre is power and lucre. Oil and gas revenues substitute for any genuine economic development. This Putinism was exemplified by the affair of Yukos Oil, once actually Russia’s most modernized and transparent enterprise. That didn’t save Yukos from being effectively stolen by Putin’s kleptocracy, with Yukos’s leader Khodorkovsky tossed into a Siberian prison (on absurd charges) where he remains. (See my 4/25/10 post.)

This is not what Communism was overthrown for – any more than Communism was what Czarism was overthrown for.

Poor Russia. It’s said that Russians are by nature obtuse and servile, caring nothing for politics, accepting autocracy so long as they’re merely fed. What rubbish. Russians have been endlessly beaten down. But haven’t we learned that nothing can finally beat the humanity out of people?

Workers of Russia arise! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

The Postal Service Mails a Suicide Note

The U.S. Postal Service has announced a plan to close hundreds of mail processing centers, to stem its red ink. This will delay all deliveries, and virtually eliminate any next-day delivery for ordinary mail. Meantime, there has already been a round of post office closings, and a further round is in process.

For me, running an active mail order business, this is a big deal. My local post office was closed in April. Though initially told my P.O. Box could be moved to another (equidistant) post office with no address change, this was not done. The address change (which they botched) was a major hassle. And now that I’ve settled into the new post office, it too is on the chopping block. I’ll be moved again, to a smaller post office, rather farther away, with inadequate parking, and likely longer lines.

The Postal Service’s financial trouble is understandable. The internet is eating its lunch. I used to mail over a thousand pricelists annually that I now send by e-mail. And many customers now pay me electronically too.

But surely the answer is not to keep mindlessly raising prices and degrading service. That’s a death spiral. The higher the prices, the poorer the service, the greater the inconvenience, ever more mailers will look ever harder for ways to avoid using the Postal Service altogether. Netflix, for example, has had a nice thing going with its quick turn-around, and must be contributing mightily to postal revenues. Kill next-day delivery and you probably kill Netflix – or at least the Netflix service using the U.S. mail. Great thinking, Postal Service guys.

Of course one doesn’t expect great thinking from a bloated quasi-governmental quasi-monopoly bureaucracy.

Here’s some more great thinking it has produced. In the past, postal rates were based on weight and distance. Now they’re based on weight, distance, size, shape, and thickness, a crazy-quilt of different rates that nobody can really apply properly. (And, when they change prices, just try getting them to provide you with the new rate charts.)

Rule One for any business: make it easy for customers.

Actually, if service must be cut (and it probably must) the no-brainer would be to end six-day delivery. At least that would not be a serious imposition on mailers like me. While eliminating Saturday delivery has been discussed, I have a better idea: Tuesday. Cutting Saturday would create a 3-day gap between deliveries (and a Monday pile-up); Tuesday, only a 2-day gap. Further, because so much mail is already delivered on Mondays, Tuesdays are very light mail days. Yet all the carriers still have to make their rounds. Eliminating this would be a huge and sensible efficiency.

But the problem is that any such change requires Congressional approval. ‘Nuff said. Even if Congress were not so dysfunctional anyway, why would a Congressperson risk the inevitable “He voted to cut your . . . “ campaign ad? Acting responsibly carries little political reward in today’s America, it seems.

It’s easy to make mock, but this is serious. American “exceptionalism”? I’d be happy with American normalcy. Fact is, in a lot of ways, we are on a path to becoming a second rate country. Normalcy among advanced nations in today’s world, in things like rail service, airports, broadband, and other aspects of infrastructure, is at a higher level than what we’ve got. Normalcy is a health care system that costs less than ours and produces outcomes as good or better. And normalcy for a first-rate country does not encompass a shambolic postal service that’s in a death spiral.