Mimsy Were the Borogoves

A lot of my far-left leaning friends are confused about why media talking heads keep saying that Bernie Sanders lost the debate. A lot of the media is in Hillary Clinton’s camp, true, but a lot of them are openly pro-Sanders. And members of both camps say that Sanders lost.

Many journalists on both sides think socialism has never received a fair shake in the United States. They don’t seem to understand that socialism—especially the so-called Democratic Socialism that Sanders espouses, in which private industry remains free, mainly, to assist government—inevitably leads to cronyism and corruption. Socialism practically means cronyism and corruption.

They, the media, believe in a kind of magical socialism run by an angelic political elite, and that if socialism just received a fair hearing voters would approve it. That open hearing is what the pro-Sanders crowd—and a lot of the pro-Clinton crowd—hoped for in Bernie Sanders.

To an extent, I agree with them. Up to the debate, I thought it would be good for Sanders to be the Democrat’s nominee because Sanders could articulate an argument for socialism, it would receive a fair hearing, and one of the pro-freedom candidates in the Republican Party—Fiorina, Cruz, Carson—would provide an articulate argument in favor of freedom.

But the debate changed that. There were two ways for Hillary Clinton to win the debate: she could have provided a clear contrast between her progressive politics and Sanders’s socialism, or Sanders could fail to provide a contrast between Hillary and himself. That’s why his refusal to distance himself from her corruption was interpreted as a loss. The media talking heads are claiming that they think Sanders lost because he didn’t “bring the fight” to Clinton. That his compassionate absolution of the Clinton Foundation and State Department email scandal lost him the debate. But that narrative is lipstick on a pig. The pro-Clinton side doesn’t want to acknowledge her corruption, and the pro-Socialism side (which of course overlaps) doesn’t want to acknowledge the truth that Sanders spoke about their ideology. Because Sanders spoke an important and inconvenient truth when he condoned Clinton’s corruption and cronyism—that this is socialism.

Mad scientists who work in an abandoned shed after school definitely need not apply.

I can’t be sure, because I don’t normally keep track of crackpot theories (not since high school, anyway), but I seem to recall that the idea that adult stem cells, which are abundant, could be used in place of embryonic stem cells was crackpot science back in the late nineties. I do remember that we were told that adult stem cells had practically no use. But when government funding for embryonic stem cells stopped, we suddenly learned that adult stem cells did have uses, and they were easier to get.

I am not saying that we don’t need embryonic stem cell research at all; only that the massive amount of government funding certainly seemed to hold stem cell research back.

The same thing happened with anti-virus medicines. In 1961 after realizing that the polio vaccine was based off of monkeys who had had SV40, a cancer-causing virus:

In 1960 Bernice Eddy, a government researcher, discovered that when she injected hamsters with the kidney mixture on which the vaccine was cultured, they developed tumors. Eddy’s superiors tried to keep the discovery quiet, but Eddy presented her data at a cancer conference in New York. She was eventually demoted, and lost her laboratory. The cancer-causing virus was soon isolated by other scientists and dubbed SV40, because it was the fortieth simian virus discovered. Alarm spread through the scientific community as researchers realized that nearly every dose of the vaccine had been contaminated. In 1961 federal health officials ordered vaccine manufacturers to screen for the virus and eliminate it from the vaccine. Worried about creating a panic, they kept the discovery of SV40 under wraps and never recalled existing stocks. For two more years millions of additional people were needlessly exposed—bringing the total to 98 million Americans from 1955 to 1963. But after a flurry of quick studies, health officials decided that the virus, thankfully, did not cause cancer in human beings.

After that the story of SV40 ceased to be anything more than a medical curiosity. Even though the virus became a widely used cancer-research tool, because it caused a variety of tumors so easily in laboratory animals, for the better part of four decades there was virtually no research on what SV40 might do to people.

It would have been very embarrassing to find out that the government had been forcing dangerous vaccinations, and so the government wasn’t about to fund such research, and researchers weren’t about to risk losing funding by asking to have such research funded.

Drunk drivers make it unsafe for politicians to live in Travis County.

I am continually amazed at the way the established political class has made being part of the established political class a requirement of governing in this country.

When I wrote that we should disband the state capital and let state officials work from outside the capital, I had no idea the law required some state officials to live inside the capital.

Texas requires state officers “elected by the electorate of Texas at large” to “reside at the Capital of the State during his continuance in office”.

Currently this includes the Comptroller of Public Accounts, the Commissioner of the General Land Office, the Attorney General, the Commissioner of Agriculture, and the three Railroad Commissioners.

Forget having to be a citizen of the United States, or a resident of the state; to be an officer of the state, you have to be a resident of Austin.

While I can understand why this was put in the constitution in 1876, I think it was a bad idea even then. If someone doesn’t do a good job because they live too far away, they’ll be voted out. Even if the requirement had been justified, this is also a good example of something that is better a law than a constitutional requirement.

Proposition 3 aims to remove this requirement, and let people also live in the surrounding cities—or anywhere in Texas if they wish. In the comments by supporters in the Analysis of Proposed Constitutional Amendments, November 3, 2015, is:

The capital residency requirement was included in the 1876 Texas Constitution when state officers traveled to the state capital by horse and buggy and has not been amended since. Advances in transportation, communication, and technology have rendered the residency requirement obsolete and have provided the possibility of performing official duties from other locations. In addition, state officers’ duties extend to locations other than the state capital, and performance of those duties may require the officers to spend a majority of their time away from Austin. Further, the residency requirement creates for statewide offices an elite class of candidates who live in or can afford to move to Austin.

It’s the emphasized section that makes this relatively minor change important. The residency requirement helps limit state offices to those who live in or would like to live in—and can afford to live in—Austin.

The opposition comments include:

Twenty years later, you still don’t have to panic.

IBM has reported Macintosh computers are still less expensive over the long run than Windows computers.

Previn continued the Mac@IBM conversation by saying the the upfront cost of PCs is lower, but the residual value of Mac is higher. “A Mac still has value three or four years down the road,” he added. With the provisioning and automation practies used to manage Mac, IBM does not need to create images for all of their machines—saving their IT staff significant time.

“Every Mac that we buy is making and saving IBM money,” Previn said.

I’m honestly surprised that this is still true twenty years after I wrote Save Me Time, Save Yourself Trouble: Buy Macintosh. I continue to use a Macintosh, but that’s for things that aren’t work-related, such as the ease of managing iPhones and iPads and the availability of must-have apps such as Nisus Writer Pro; or that aren’t ease-of-use related, such as having Unix under the hood. I appreciate that they continue to be easy to use, but had assumed that Windows would be easy to use by now, too.

This was what really struck me, in reference to my twenty-year-old rant back when I was part of the help desk:

One stat that particularly stood out was that 5% of Mac users call the help desk, compared to 40% of PC users.

Remember that this is during a transition. Those Mac users are new Mac users, at least in the work environment—interacting with other work-related resources, getting on the company network—and still called the help desk an eighth of the time that Windows users did.

It also struck me that they still call them PCs and not Windows computers. The term “PC” for those computers hearkens back to an ancient time when IBM made a brand of computers called the IBM PC. But IBM doesn’t make them anymore; it’d be sort of like if we called Kleenex tissues “tissues” and only referred to other tissues by their brand name. PC on its own is a generic abbreviation for personal computer!

On Thursday night, the Round Rock City Council voted unanimously to give Mayor McGraw the authority to cancel the red light program. It sounds like he’s going to do it. Before the roll call, McGraw said something very, very smart. The purpose of the red light cameras when they started was to reduce deliberate red light runners, not punish people who accidentally missed the light by a fraction of a second because of circumstances that everybody meets once in a while.

But, a lot of people were not paying their red light camera fines. And the Mayor realized that very likely, the people paying their fines are not the people we meant to target. The people we meant to target were the people who are now also not paying their fines.

It is always very easy, when faced with deadly lawbreakers, to focus on the easy catches, the people who aren’t being deadly to begin with. After last week’s shooting, for example, the left wants to punish law-abiding gun owners. Well, that’s no surprise, they always want to punish law-abiding gun owners. They don’t like putting more criminals in jail, or even, sometimes, calling criminals criminals. Those are hard choices. It’s a lot easier to target non-criminals; they are once again literally discussing banning all guns.

However, they recognize that the choice they want us to make is completely unreasonable—take away everyone’s firearms. So they can’t contrast that choice with the reasonable options, such as allowing qualified teachers and administrators—those who pass the stringent concealed carry background check and tests—to carry if they choose. And protecting our children with the same resources we use to protect our politicians, such as the police officers who show up at city council meetings. No, they have to make up something that sounds as unreasonable as disarming all non-criminals for what criminals do. Here’s a typical meme:

A kid on the playground throws a rock at another kid on the playground. The teacher gives rocks to all of the kids since, after all, only a good kid with a rock can stop a bad kid with a rock.

This is typical leftist thinking: if you aren’t in favor of complete surrender, you want total war. This has been a tactic—or intellectual failing—of the extreme left since at least the writing of Advise & Consent, which I reviewed yesterday.

What’s noticeably missing is any sense that they care about keeping the one kid from throwing rocks: no detention, no suspension, and despite the crazy zero tolerance at schools nowadays no punishment for that one kid. The more realistic meme, given what the left wants, is:

If you crossed The Three Musketeers with House of Cards, you’d have a bastard child who looked a lot like Advise & Consent.

And the writing truly is brilliant. I will not reproduce it here, because it would be too much of a spoiler, but the ending of Brigham Anderson’s Book (the story is divided into four “books”, one for each of the Senators who make up the main characters) is hauntingly beautiful. I read it several times, and had to rest before going on to the final section.

There were many nights I stayed up far too late because I just couldn’t put it down.

Interestingly given recent news, one of the underlying conflicts is, when are immoral past deeds hypocritical and when are they irrelevant? The real underlying theme is, how best to serve? What does it mean for a necessarily flawed person to be a servant of the people?

The basic idea is that rising star Robert J. Leffingwell has been nominated for Secretary of State after the previous Secretary announced his resignation. Leffingwell is a modern man, he thinks we’ve been too hard-line with the Soviets—the book was published in 1959 and appears to take place in the sixties—and that is why they’ve been too hard-line with us. He recognizes that there are no winners in a nuclear war and wishes to avoid a nuclear war at all costs.

But the argument devolves into the very modern one that there is no choice between appeasement and war, there is nothing in between conducive to a lasting peace and the betterment of mankind.

“… They cry surrender or they cry war; they try to prevent us from discussing the other possibilities that still exist, the only possibilities, it seems to me, of ever achieving that genuine peace they are always yapping about.”

The fictional Senator from the sixties who said this could have been discussing President Obama’s arguments about Iran.

Interestingly, the book, written while Eisenhower was president, got some things right and some things wrong. The White House is in the second term of Republican President Eisenhower’s successor, who was a Democrat—just as happened in real life. The Senate Majority Leader, also a major character, is Democrat as well. In the elections of 1958, likely while this book was being written, Democrats drastically increased their control of the Senate and the House. So extrapolating a Democrat as President was probably not a stretch.

Ann Althouse noticed some basic math this morning that seems to have eluded the New York Times. The Times complains that only 158 homes donated nearly half of the early money to campaigns, and used Monopoly graphics to illustrate the point. Ann first makes some smart points about the poor reporting, but then goes on to the newspaper’s math defects:

That said, what I really want to talk about is that pile of Monopoly houses, far, far outnumbering the hotels. There are 120 million households, and 158 spend half of what is spent, and amount that’s only $176 million. If all of the households gave just $5, that would be $600 million, vastly overwhelming those supposedly fearsome, overspending, rich, white men. That money could be given directly to that candidate (since it comes, obviously, nowhere near the limit).

Instead of complaining about 158 families spending $176 million (which strikes me as a fairly paltry amount, especially since only $2,700 can be given to a candidate), the clamor should be about the need for everyone to give just a little money to someone. Skip one cup of coffee, one cheeseburger, one movie, and give the money to the candidate you like best. It could be so easy.

There’s a reason that the Times doesn’t consider those 120 million to be a solution: they might donate to the wrong candidate. Left to their own devices, those homes might donate to a Trump, a Carson, a Fiorina, a Cruz, or even a Lessig. They can’t be trusted to donate wisely.

The laws that the Times supports are just as likely to deprive those 120 million of the right to support the candidate of their choice as they are to deprive the 158; more so, because the 158 have the money to find ways around the law.

I expect that the Times considers this a feature, not a bug, since they, also, give significant resources to candidates, and they don’t want the 120 million empowering a candidate they disapprove of to fight back against biased coverage that the Times donates to their preferred candidates.

The Times doesn’t want to even the playing field between the rich few and the middle class; they want to tilt the playing field in favor of the New York Times and other news organizations, who, they assume, will not be forbidden from reporting the news and will thus be able to continue their biased reporting.

The only way the New York Times would support mass donations is if they were filtered through a government program, to ensure that the donations went to an approved candidate; the Times would really like a candidate approval committee such as Iran’s.

I’m on the mailing list for Texas Campaign for Liberty, and just learned that the Round Rock City Council is considering “a resolution authorizing the City Manager to execute a letter terminating the contract with Redflex Traffic Systems, Inc.”, on this coming Thursday (tomorrow, that is, October 8, 2015, at 7 PM at 221 East Main Street). This is the letter I’ve written.

Dear Mayor McGraw:

There are better alternatives to red light problems than red light cameras. Wherever they are tried, red light cameras tend to increase corruption, and, eventually, the temptation to reduce safety is too great to resist. Red light cameras tempt the camera company and local officials to reduce yellow times to dangerously low durations so as to increase revenue—currently millions for RedFlex, according to KXAN’s news reports. And the very nature of the revenue-sharing method that red light programs use is a temptation to bribery and other forms of corruption. Wherever they are tried, it seems, eventually somebody falls.

I used to live in San Diego; it is a fine city with fine public officials. But when they brought in red light cameras they lowered yellow times so low in places such as Mission Boulevard that people driving the speed limit would be unable to stop before the light turned red!

RedFlex, the company we currently use, is notorious for both increasing the dangers of intersections by reducing yellow times, and for corrupting local officials. They have been found guilty in Chicago for “one of the biggest bribery scandals in the city’s notorious history”, and according to the Chicago Tribune one of the witnesses said bribery is standard practice for the company across several states. Given that independent investigations, as reported on KVUE, show little if any improvement due to the red light cameras, it would be best to sever ties with this company.

There are several technical solutions that should be tried before risking red light camera corruption: