Month: March 2019

Can You Spot the Democratic Candidate?

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Back in the early 1970’s, Camel ran a series of magazine ads featuring arrays of colorful characters, each with an amusing “gimmick.” Each, that is, except for the Camel Filters smoker, who didn’t need a gimmick: he was confident, secure, rugged, good looking, relaxed — and usually had a jacket hooked casually over his shoulder. A key on the page, or occasionally on the reverse page, named the gimmicky characters and described their particular affectations.

I loved those ads when I was a kid.

I thought of those ads recently while listening to Joe Biden struggling to make himself relevant to an identity-obsessed Democratic party. Biden’s pandering misandry was cringe-inducing, as he groveled for his failure to be something more than a pathetic male while taking part in the attempted Clarence Thomas lynching, and then debased himself (and men in general) in a weird riff about old world wife abuse half a millennium ago, and how it relates to 21st century American sexual relationships. It didn’t make much sense, but this is Joe Biden we’re talking about: his thoughts wander as much as his hands.

Poor Joe. He isn’t gay, or a member of a minority, or a woman, or an ersatz Native American, or a hip skateboarder, or some winning intersection of the above. In a Democratic Party that demands a gimmick, he comes up short, and so he’s having to fall back on self loathing, claiming for himself a toxic masculinity that, while it might describe his penchant for being “handsy,” still rings hollow.

He could call himself a socialist, but that’s pretty much the universal gimmick for this crowd. And when everyone’s a socialist… well, then you still need another gimmick.

Or he could be the guy without a gimmick. He could be a plain old liberal, from back in the days when liberals were wrong and destructive, but not obviously crazy. He could be the voice of substance and reason in an increasingly unhinged party.

But then he wouldn’t be Joe Biden. And he’d still have the problem with the hands.

Mueller: This Should Not Be The End

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Mueller has concluded that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. After two years of concerted attacks by a biased press and a corrupt bureaucracy, the collusion fantasy has been laid to rest.

Now let’s talk about collusion.

In 2016, and for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting administration used the power of federal law enforcement to spy on the opposition party during a presidential election. It justified that spying by citing a fraudulent document (the Steele Dossier), payed for by its own party’s candidate, as the basis for the warrant. The spying was overseen by fiercely partisan officials in the Department of Justice openly contemptuous of the opposition candidate. Other administration officials tried hundreds of times, without explanation or plausible justification, to gain access to confidential information collected during the spying.

If the administration’s party’s candidate had won the election, it seems certain that none of this would ever have come to light: an administration and Department of Justice shot through with corruption would have welcomed its successor, and its misconduct would have been buried forever.

That didn’t happen. Now the lingering corruption of the Obama era must be exposed and removed.


Whiskey Politics: Life After Gilder

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Dave Sussman of Whiskey Politics interviewed George Gilder recently, and that interview is the latest Whiskey Politics podcast here. I was eager to listen, both because Dave is a terrific interviewer and Gilder a fascinating visionary, and also because I’d read Gilder’s latest book, Life After Google, and found it unsatisfying. I hoped that Gilder would offer something that I missed in his book, and that would make sense of what I thought was a rambling and unconvincing work.

If anything, my opinion of Life After Google is lower now than it was prior to this interview. Far from supporting his various and vague assertions, I think Gilder has doubled down on what increasingly seems, to me, to be nonsense.

Gilder undoubtedly knows all sorts of things I don’t know; he lives his life in communion with deep thinkers and profoundly successful entrepreneurs, futurists, and inventors. He is not a trivial man, which leaves me wondering why this latest work is, in my opinion, a trivial book. I will be watching closely as his next book comes out, to see if he’s again hit his stride.

It has been observed that one can read an article in a newspaper on a topic with which one is familiar and scoff at the ignorance of the author, and then turn the page and read an article on a topic of which one knows little and comfortably assume that that author knows his stuff. I know math and computing pretty well. I don’t know fractional reserve banking or foreign trade or monetary theory or corporate finance, but math and computing, that I’ve got.

Let’s start with a quick note about the zettabyte, a quantity which Gilder says “preoccupies me these days.” Gilder claims (about 12:30) that the zettabyte is “about as big as it gets, two to the three hundredth, it’s more than all the atoms in the universe.” Gilder then goes on to claim that it approximates all of the data currently connected to the internet.

That should throw a flag, as it did with me, in that it suggests that we are somehow storing vast quantities of data per atom; otherwise, it would be impossible to have more data connected to the internet than there are atoms in the universe. So obviously Gilder misspoke, either about the size of a zettabyte or the amount of data connected to the internet.

In fact, a single cup of water contains 16 thousand zettabytes worth of hydrogen atoms. No one really knows how many bytes of data are machine-accessible in the world; no one can even make a very good guess. That’s okay, as that’s irrelevant to any coherent argument about the future, or about pretty much anything other than the future market for storage devices.

But it isn’t irrelevant to Gilder, who somehow sees a significance to his estimated one zettabyte of global storage and the interconnectedness of the human brain, which he also claims is on the order of one zettabyte. From that, he leaps to his conclusion — and here the lack of both logic and humility frustrate me — that the human brain is more efficient than the global internet, and that therefore artificial intelligence will never achieve the dreams of its proponents.

There are other odd bits thrown in as well: comments about machines being deterministic and so incapable of true learning (I think the jury is actually still out on whether or not the universe is deterministic.); the suggestion that blockchain and cryptocurrencies would somehow prevent investment bubbles and bad government policies; the fanciful idea that blockchain is immune to the security vulnerabilities of other computer architectures (It isn’t, as cryptocurrency thefts demonstrate.); and a bizarre nonchalance about the extraordinarily inefficient energy demands of blockchain and cryptocurrency compared to traditional architectures, even has he attempts to compare the computation efficiency of the human brain to the global electrical demands of the internet.

Finally, Gilder touches on what seems, to me, to be the only truly topical issue, given the title of his book: the vulnerability of Google to competition. In the book, Gilder’s descriptions of Google’s vulnerabilities seem more metaphysical than financial, strange comments about the company’s structure being antithetical to some kind of ultimate philosophy of data and its ownership. In the interview, he focuses on the real prospect of foreign competition — specifically, Chinese competition — to the search/advertising juggernaut. I think he’s right that Google is vulnerable: history teaches us that every business, however apparently entrenched and powerful, is vulnerable to competition. Gilder’s own examples of the dramatic shift, over the past decade, in the ranking of global enterprises, and of the ascendency of Apple, Microsoft, Google/Alphabet, and Amazon, should suggest that the one constant truly is change. We don’t need George Gilder to tell us that.

I can’t speak for Dave, but I thought I heard a hint of reserved skepticism in his tone. If so, I think it was well warranted. I have long enjoyed Gilder’s work, and I hope he recovers from his infatuation with “blockchain” and its vague and improbable promises, and returns to the more clear-headed futuristic vision that has typified most of his writing. Unfortunately, I did not find his performance in this interview encouraging.

The Mueller Report: A Damning Indictment of… Something

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As we wait more or less breathlessly for the release of the Mueller Report, the assumption appears to be growing that it will be, in the eloquent words of Secretary Clinton, a “nothing-burger.”

But it will not be a nothing-burger, even if it reports no evidence of collusion. Because we’ve spent more than two years obsessing over this, driven by a press that pronounced almost daily the beginning of the end for the Trump administration. If there always was no there there, then someone has some explaining to do. Because many of us thought this was pretty obviously cooked up from the start, to hide either Clinton campaign embarrassment or, worse, Clinton/Obama collusion to undermine the 2016 Trump campaign. And if that’s true, then it should not have been the big story for the last two years.

The ladies and gentlemen of the press fancy themselves the guardians of democracy, the bulwark against ignorance and tyranny. If it turns out, as I suspect it will, that they have wasted most of their time and energy and resources, and our attention, over the past many months on a trumped-up non-story, an improbable bit of misdirection foisted on us by a failed candidate with the assistance of a corrupt former administration, then they have made a further mockery of the fourth estate. Democracy dies in darkness — or by being run over by the mainstream media clown car.

If the whole Russian collusion story is without a basis in fact, America’s journalistic “professionals” should consider finding a job they can do without embarrassing themselves.

Let’s Try Socialism

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I’m serious. Let’s do it. This appears to be an idea whose time has come [again]. A lot of the people who tried it in the 20th century, 100 million or so of them, are unfortunately no longer alive to tell us that it didn’t work. And, also unfortunately, it seems that we are not teaching students that socialism didn’t work, and so they’re naturally enough assuming that maybe it does.

So let’s give it a try. We can chalk it up as a learning experience.

But let’s not start with those precious luxuries, food and medicine and toilet paper and hot and cold running water, that we have grown to take for granted. The people of Venezuela have learned not to take any of those things for granted. Let’s try not to repeat their mistake.

Let’s try socialism in the entertainment industry. Let’s try it in Hollywood first, and not roll it out to the rest of the country until we are satisfied with the results there. There are an awful lot of rich people in Hollywood, and a lot of them are socialism enthusiasts, so it seems the perfect microcosm in which to experiment with this old new idea.

I don’t care what flavor of socialism we try. Make it real socialism, or “democratic socialism,” or tax-all-their-money-away-and-spend-it-on-social-services socialism. Let a thousand socialist flowers bloom — but let them bloom in Hollywood.

Sure, it will tend to destroy everything it touches, but I am willing to make that sacrifice, if that’s what it takes to teach the next generation. I really, really like food and medicine and toilet paper and hot and cold running water. I can live without Hollywood.

So come on, Hollywood. Show us how it’s done. I can hardly wait to see what central planning produces in the way of great art.

Species of Deception

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I’ve been thinking about the nature of President Trump’s dishonesty, and about why it seems somehow more acceptable to a large number of people than one might expect.

We are resigned to the idea that politicians lie. We expect them to make promises during their campaigns that they have no intention of trying to keep once elected. We expect them to triangulate, to position themselves during the primaries and then reposition themselves for the general election. We expect them to propose ideas that we all suspect can’t work, and to paint a rosy future that none of us expects will ever materialize. To varying degrees, we see this kind of behavior as normal for politicians and candidates.

We are less sanguine about deeper deceptions. It’s one thing to listen to a candidate promise us the moon, while suspecting that he probably knows he can’t deliver on that promise once in office. It’s a very different thing to believe that he has a secret agenda, and that he is withholding his true intentions because he understands that, if we knew them, he wouldn’t have our vote.

The distinction has to do with the motivation behind the dishonesty. We know the candidate wants to be elected and, once elected, he wants to continue to curry our favor. We understand that. But we do not want to believe that he has political goals that he keeps secret from us, because that would suggest a kind of betrayal that goes beyond simply failing to deliver on the promises he’s made. Lying to us to get into office is not the same as lying about the reason he wants to be in office and the things he intends to do once he gets there. One is salesmanship, the other borders on treachery.

While President Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true, his dishonesty seems not to conceal a secret agenda. So far as his political plans and ambitions go, he has been a remarkably transparent President. His general rejection of convention is part of this: he seems not to care if people think him outrageous, and one never has the sense that he’s holding something back — indeed, he seems incapable of it. One may tire of his sometimes absurd overstatements and boastful claims, but one rarely suspects that he is a sinister figure bent on fulfilling his own secret ambitions.

His major goals seem anodyne: a growing economy, fairer trade, more manufacturing jobs, secure borders, less regulation, greater employment. Nothing about his conduct suggests that he has further ambitions which he keeps shrouded in secrecy, or which he reveals only to a small number of like-minded associates.

What all this means is that, while we can’t necessarily trust what the President says, we can generally trust that we know what he’s trying to do. For those of us who generally like what he’s trying to do, that makes the other, less consequential dishonesty easier to accept.

This isn’t a defense of dishonesty, but rather a suggestion that all kinds of dishonesty aren’t equally objectionable.

One of Those Parenting Moments

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I don’t get many late-night calls from my children. I don’t get many calls from them at all, really: they’re pretty independent, and they’ve put up with years of me talking to them and at them. I can forgive them for not wanting to volunteer for yet another lecture on whatever political or cultural issue is my current obsession. (Having put up with me for years, many of you can probably relate to that.)

Parents understandably dread the late-night call. So when my 19 year old daughter, my youngest child, called me from college an hour ago, my first words upon answering were “is everything okay?”

Everything was fine. More than fine: this was one of those rare and delightful moments of parental affirmation, when your kid decides that maybe you were right all along.

She was walking home from a guest lecture by Jonathan Haidt. His topics were largely those covered in his latest book, The Coddling of the American Mind: the social justice movement and the related and debilitating hypersensitivities of gen-Z (or whatever we’re calling the current crop of college students), the negative impact of safe spaces and social media, and the way our obsession with safety has created fragile, vulnerable young people unable to deal with conflict or consider alternative views.

She enjoyed the lecture, which she says was well received, and she stayed on the phone for almost an hour telling me about it — and this a girl from whom I’m lucky to get three texts a week.

But what I loved best was when she told me, in her characteristically frank, even blunt way, that the speaker said the things she’d heard from me for years, and that it felt good to her to hear them affirmed by someone of his stature and reputation — in short, that maybe Dad wasn’t as crazy as she and her brothers had always agreed he was.

Ah, sweet vindication.

Israel’s Soft Landing

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The moon’s distance from Earth varies from approximately 225,000 miles to about 250,000 miles. Because the moon is much smaller than Earth, and so has a weaker gravitational field, most of the trip to the moon — the first 200,000 miles or so — is up hill: Earth is still trying to pull you back, albeit with an ever-diminishing attraction as you get farther away.

It’s hard to get there, and even harder to land once you do. Several countries have crashed objects on the moon, but to date only three — the old Soviet Union, the United States, and China, and in that order — have managed to achieve soft landings on the moon.

The Soviets were the first to actually land a spacecraft on the moon, back in 1966; the United States was just a few months behind them. The United States, of course, was the first to land a man on the moon, in July of 1969. Though a dozen American astronauts have walked on the moon, no other nation has sent a man (or woman) there.

China, the third country to soft-land a spacecraft on the moon, took a long time to do it: it wasn’t until 2013 that they joined the exclusive club of lunar-landing nations. China can claim, however, to be the first and only nation to land — as opposed to crash — a vehicle on the far side of the moon, the side we never see from Earth. They did that in January of this year.

The moon will be about 225,000 miles away in early April when the Israeli Beresheet spacecraft is scheduled to arrive there. The trip will require the craft to make three orbits of Earth, each a little more distant than the last, until it finally breaks free of Earth’s gravity and establishes an orbit around the moon. The Beresheet will then, if successful, make Israel only the fourth nation to achieve a soft lunar landing.

It will also be the first time that a private concern, as opposed to a government, has landed a vehicle on the moon. In that sense, the Beresheet — which means “genesis” or “in the beginning” in Hebrew — will live up to its name, as it ushers in the age of private, albeit unmanned, lunar travel.

The Beresheet was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 21st, and is scheduled to land on the moon on April 11th. The spacecraft is flying on a shoestring, without the budget for the normal backup systems and redundancies of a normal big-budget space flight. Everything will have to go right for it to successfully complete its mission.

But if it does, Israel, this tiny and beleaguered nation, will once again demonstrate its exceptional ability to stand with the biggest and most powerful nations.

VDH and The Bulwark

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I have a great deal of respect for Victor Davis Hanson. I’ve read and listened to him extensively, and he has always impressed me with his thoughtfulness, decency, humility, breadth of knowledge, and quiet sanity.

The Bulwark, this new anti-Trump publication staffed by Charlie Sykes, Bill Kristol, and other people whose narrow-minded smug superiority I find impossible to stomach, has placed Hanson on its list of sell-outs, dupes, and traitors to the conservative cause, and set its sights on discrediting him and others who hold his, to me, quite sensible views.

It has long been true that I would like Trump a lot less if I liked his enemies more. Folks like those at the Bulwark are much of the reason I refrain from criticizing the President more than I do. I’m not much of a joiner, but I’d rather have Hanson on my team than any number of these others.

[Update: I wrote this post not knowing that Victor Davis Hanson has a new book coming out. The Case for Trump will be released this week.]