Notes

And then there is Andrew Sullivan:

I don’t particularly like this set of facts; but what my ideology tells me should be put aside at all times by an engagement with reality. That reality suggests a country veering fast into two countries, and one party, the GOP, proposing to accelerate the shift. I’d lean on the rudder right now somewhat toward getting revenues from those currently enjoying a boom, while the rest try slowly to recover from excessive debt. Not because I hate the successful, or despise the wealthy. But because that’s the obvious way to stabilize the polity and economy.

And, you know, I’m a conservative in part because I like political stability. Pity today’s Republicans have never seen a stable politics they didn’t want to smash up.

How many more conservatives coming to their senses and waking up to reality will it take before rank-and-file Republican voters realize that the Tea-Party-infested, big-money-infused Right is just going to run their beloved nation into a ditch? We’re not looking at two equal sides of a well-balanced coin—we’re dealing with stark, raving lunatics masquerading as reasonable people on the Right, versus earnest but pedantic and ineffective politicians on the Left.

All your old-timey colloquialisms about the weaknesses of politicians still apply to the Left, which has only recently begun to realize how totally insane are their opponents on the Right. But you’ll need your elephant gun—two or three of them, positioned on jeeps—if you’re going after the Right: they are not trying to conserve anything; they’re trying to dismantle just about everything.

Just look at Newt Gingrich, who somehow managed to become a “front-runner” in the race to the White House. Here’s a guy who fancies himself an intellectual. But what’s his plan for Social Security? Privatize it, so citizens have to manage their own retirement investments, but then have the government make up any losses by issuing checks to retirees so they still have as much as they would have had if the program had not been privatized. I.e., tell citizens to do their own investing, but then take away any incentive to avoid bad, high-risk investments. Oh, and leave taxpayers on the hook. Yes, this is what passes for conservatism today. (Then you have Mitt Romney, the two men trapped in one body. He’s pretty much the John Kerry of the Republican Party, isn’t he?)

Stop voting for these imbeciles. Seriously.

From the etymology-makes-everything-more-fun files:

So last night my wife and I, after cleaning the house, inaugurated the next phase of The Holiday Season by watching White Christmas. And when we got to that great song, “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep,” I suddenly remembered that “bless” comes from a word for sprinkling blood on altars. (Yes, really.) Sheep make excellent sacrifices, so that must be why the song is not about counting blessings and sheep, right?

If you you read the piece by Mike Lofgren, you should also read the one by David Frum. They’re both Republicans lamenting that their party has become a pack of lunatics. Here’s Frum:

Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”

We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.

Paul Krugman observes that “Frum himself isn’t completely free of this alternative reality. He still insists that Obama is building a much bigger government, which just isn’t true; there’s health reform, which will require subsidies in the vicinity of 1 percent of GDP to operate, but there are no other major expansions of government on the table.”

Even so, opening your eyes halfway is still much better than keeping them closed.

Everything you are, everything you have, and everything you ever will be came from something or someone else. From the moment you were born to the moment you die, you will always be dependent. So thank the people who contribute.

Here’s Frank Rich’s interesting shotgunned answer to the question, “Generally speaking, what happened to the GOP over the past fifty years to get us to where we are today? What hardened it over time?”

My own and no doubt highly simplistic CliffsNotes version of the overall half-century drift toward that hardening is this, more or less: 1) The old Southern Democrats bolted from their Party for the GOP, just as LBJ predicted when he embraced the civil rights juggernaut; 2) Those aggrieved whites eventually merged with other new Reagan Republicans — most of them also white, some of them (not all) older, some fundamentalist Christian in values, some lacking the skills to compete in the ruthless new globalization marketplace; 3) This retooled GOP base, a far cry from the old Yankee Republican Establishment, is as much a victim of the 99 percent–1 percent inequality as their counterparts on the left. They hold not just government and the elites in contempt but also resent newly empowered minorities (racial and otherwise), whom they see as stealing their lunch and undermining their values. This is the 75 percent or so of the GOP that will never warm to Romney.

Which seems like a decent approximation to me. Eventually, the fever will break and Republicans may be worth voting for again. But I’m not holding my breath.

This time of year makes me philosophical, or something. Maybe the early nightfalls turn me more inward than usual. So I find myself in a dispute with someone called “Atasca.” Here’s a synopsis:

Atasca: How can there be a natural explanation for the supernatural occurrence of the creation of the universe?

Me: You have already answered your own question. If you have already decided that the creation of the universe was a supernatural occurrence, then by definition there could not be a natural explanation for it. You might as well ask how a triangle could have four sides.

What makes you think “the creation of the universe” was supernatural? And if the universe were created by some sentient being who transcends the universe, why would you call that “supernatural”? Why not take it to mean that “natural” includes more than you thought it did? Moreover, how do you know that there even was an “occurrence” that might be called “the creation of the universe”?

Atasca: I haven’t decided anything except the definition of supernatural: ‘of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe.’ Merriam Webster decided this, not me. The evidence (most scientists believe this I understand) suggests that there was a beginning to the universe. You may believe there wasn’t a beginning and that is fine but you are going against the evidence. At the beginning everything we know was created (or came into being) – either by design or by chance/accident/ whatever. Nature was created at this time. Nature or anything else cannot create itself so there must have been something not natural – supernatural – that explains it.

Me: How do you know that?

Atasca: I am having trouble with your question about how do I know that something cannot create itself. Please explain how “something” that did not exist, was nothing, non-information, what rocks dream about, is able to create anything, much less itself?? This is as much a philosophical question as scientific.

Me: I don’t know, but I’ll go out on a limb here and say there’s a 100 percent chance that you have never seen anything created ex nihilo. So you don’t even know if that’s possible, do you?

There might be more by the time you read this post. But there it is for now. It’s been a while since I’ve bothered with one of these disputes. Aren’t they all pretty much the same? That’s what I argued in “Getting Beyond Irrelevance,” almost a year ago:

A God that is said to exist because it is supposed to be logically necessary, like an Unmoved Mover, or something similar, is nearly meaningless. The logical necessity of God does not affect how people live their lives, provides no moral or ethical guidance, and will not suddenly reward us with a rash of theophanies when enough people apprehend the argument.

Likewise, even if we knew whether the universe had a beginning, what difference would it make? Even so, some people want to keep talking about it. Maybe there is still something to learn.

Most of my responsive questions in the dialogue above were intended (perhaps clumsily) to suggest that admitting ignorance of how or whether the universe was created is only the least honest one ought to be. But more thoroughgoing honesty might even compel one to admit that it’s not even possible to know what it might mean to say that “the universe had a beginning” or “the universe was created.”

That makes at least two tough conundrums. They’re related. On the level of language, what happens when we put words together to say things whose meanings are impossible to fathom? (Or can we?) And in thinking about reality, can you even imagine what the beginning of the universe or creation ex nihilo would look like?

Knowing the answers won’t make a lick of difference to anything. But they sure are fun to think about. Enjoy.

This is a pretty interesting explanation for why investing in efficient energy creates jobs. But maybe I’m missing something—doesn’t a big part of their argument assume an economy where profits aren’t disproportionately sucked up by a tiny fraction of people?

[E]nergy efficiency generates energy bill savings over the life of the investment, which frees up funds to support more jobs in the economy by shifting jobs in the energy generation and distribution industries (lower labor intensity: 10 jobs per $1 million) to jobs in all other industries (higher labor intensity: 17 jobs per $1 million on average).

Why assume that energy efficiency is going to create savings that will be “free[d] up to support more jobs in the economy”? It seems more likely that those savings will just join all the other cash that’s accumulating at the top and not creating jobs. But what do I know? If you have a different view, I’d like to hear about it.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Bank of America Corp. learned a lesson from its now-abandoned debit card fee and will work to provide transparency and fair pricing to customers while producing a return for shareholders, Chief Executive Brian Moynihan said on Tuesday.

I’d sure like to know what lesson that is. A recent article from the New York Times does not make me optimistic.