Ayn Rand's asshole utopia.

So I spent the last month reading Atlas Shrugged for my book club. My complaint with the book isn't so much with its politics. (As a philosophy, I think Objectivism potentially holds some value for managing one's personal life, but is pretty much shit as a guide for social policy or politics of any kind. In 1169 pages Rand never once engages with the arguments of Keynesian economics, with which she must have been familiar, or with the possibility of market failure. Though I have to say that Ragnar the Pirate stealing back everybody's income tax is pretty hilarious.) No, the big problem with the novel, I mean just as a piece of bodice-ripping escapism, is that John Galt is the most obnoxious "hero" I've ever encountered in a book. Not only is it impossible to sympathize with such a self-aggrandizing ass, it's also impossible to suspend one's disbelief enough to imagine Dagny Taggart leaving Hank Reardon for him. (At least Rearden has a conscience, trying with Dagny and Eddie Willers in the latter part of the book to get in the Minnesota harvest so the nation won't starve.)

Good Lord. Galt is, after all, the sort of man who has absolutely no qualms about sacrificing the entire human race - including millions of what he and his industrialist clique call the "neutrals" - in order to remake the world in his image and his rather frightening view of "justice". This pretty much amounts to being complicit in IQ-based eugenic slaughter. The bureaucrats and "moochers" who are the story's villains are never in much danger; at worst they'll have to abdicate and retire somewhere while leaving the government to Galt. It's everybody else who's left to perish in food riots all over the U.S. The only likely survivors of Galt's "strike" are the brilliant folks in the valley (brilliant in a technical sense, mind you, or at least in the service of effectively promoting a tech-fundamentalist worldview) or those wily, smart or mean enough to stay alive outside it until the brains within deign to return.

And even if you're willing to ignore Galt's willingness to help exterminate all those who can't appreciate his genius, Galt is a hopeless snob even among his potential allies. With a few token exceptions, everyone who gets invited to the Industrialist Utopian Valley is already rich and famous, or at least has invented some gadget that Galt can play with. On the other hand, the gangs of workers who abandon the Taggart Trains - although their own "strikes" pretty well proves they share Galt's meritocratic laissez-faire philosophy and rebellion against a corrupt system - just get left to the anarchist hell on earth that Galt and his buddies are doing everything in their power to hasten. The basic idea, lost in all the Invisible Hand rhetoric, seems to be that if all those railway men had been as brainy and otherwise perfect as Galt with his impossible motor and glowing copper hair etc. etc., they would have more than just railroad workers, right? And that's not even to mention Eddie Willers, the only moral character in the whole book, who of course gets to die melodramatically sobbing on the train track because, well, frankly he too just isn't smart - or, frankly, amoral - enough to go bide his time in Asshole Nirvana.

And that's just the big stuff. While Ayn Rand pokes good fun at a world of pretentious philosophic bores like Balph Eubank, for snooze-inducing hubris surely nothing can top Galt's 56-page radio speech to a starving nation, in which he mangles first year undergrad logic in the service of sneering about how screwed everybody is without him. He's the sort who feels it imperative to inform his lover at several crucial moments that only cares about her through his own rational self-interest, seeing as she's the best he can get. (This speech, variants of which are also made by Dagny's other lovers, is usually followed by Dagny getting thrown against some sort of surface or having her dress ripped off or - if time is lacking for violent intercourse - being given condescending instructions about what to wear the next time they meet.) Perhaps trying to compensate for something, Galt also thinks placing a giant gold dollar sign on a hill overlooking a village constitutes an appealing aesthetic statement.

Heroic novels sort of depend on having a hero worth rooting for. In Atlas Shrugged there's never even the tiniest bit of authorial uncertainty about who's going to turn out to be "right", yet the book works for the first 700 pages precisely because you're able to root for Dagny and Hank and Eddie as they try to save their own world - our world, more or less - from the horrors of Randism. In the end, they too, inevitably, are corrupted enough to shrug off the world, or - in Eddie's case - are destroyed by their refusal to do so. It's all pretty depressing.

Amazingly though, Galt may not actually be the epitome of Randian masculinity. I'm told that in The Fountainhead the hero actually rapes someone.

Last rites.

This short article in the New England Journal of Medicine about Oscar the "death cat" is terrific. I wonder though: what's Oscar's motivation? I always assumed it was logical for herd or pack animals to drive sick or dying comrades away to protect the integrity of the rest. Against that, there are plenty of stories of dogs keeping vigil by the beds of sick, or even by the graves of dead, owners. But that's also basically the reaction of a social animal who needs the other members of his pack to survive and feel safe. What motivates a cat to seek out and snuggle up to human strangers in their final hours?

Flacking Turkey

Not to overstate the obvious, but it really is absolutely appalling that Dick Gephardt has signed on to lobby (subscr req) on behalf of the Turkish government in its ongoing attempts to prevent the United States from recognizing the Armenian Genocide. Not to single out Gephardt or anything: Crowley's article reports that "The Turks also pay $50,000 monthly to the Glover Park Group, a powerhouse Democratic firm stocked with connected former Clinton White House aides Joe Lockhart and Joel Johnson, for p.r. services." But Gephardt's flackery is especially egregious given that, as the Armenian National Committee of America explains:

As a member of the House, Gephardt cosponsored legislation recognizing the Armenian Genocide, as recently as H.Res.193 in 2003, and dating all the way back to H.J.Res.192, more than 20 years ago, during the 99th Congress. In 1998, he offered remarks at the ANCA Armenian Genocide Observance on Capitol Hill.


It's hard to imagine a more despicable position to take. Possibly Gephardt believes that passing resolutions recognizing the genocide will upset foreign relations with Turkey, possibly complicating the situation with the Kurds in Iraq. But against that is the problem that, as Der Spiegel explained in 2005, Turkey's recalcitrance on the genocide is one factor reducing the likelihood of its eventual assention into the EU. More recently, European leaders, including Angela Merkel, who oppose full EU membership for Turkey have brought legislation recognizing the genocide forward for debate in their own legislatures, partly to create a point of contention with Turkey. In the face of these roadblocks, Turkish public support for EU membership has itself been falling over the past few years, as it has been across Europe.

If anything, denial of the Armenian catastrophe is working against the western-orientation of Turkey, and also against the further bridging of the Christian-Muslim world that its EU-oriented reforms represent. It's also a historical abomination, one, ironically, that was soundly rejected by modern Turkey's secular founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, only to be revived by Turkey's modern leadership. There's no moral or long-run geopolitical gain to supporting Turkey's quest to deny its past, the sort of fight countries nearly always lose in the long run anyway. So how exactly does Dick Gephardt sleep at night?

More Corner brilliance.

Stephen Spruiell casts more doubt on the "Baghdad Diarist" TNR flap by... mocking an imaginary converstation between Franklin Foer and Scott Thomas:

FOER: ... Right, okay, so in this part where you and your buddy are making fun of "IED girl," you write that he "stabbed his spoon violently into his pile of mashed potatoes." Would it be fair to say that, in a sense, the pile of mashed potatoes is Iraq and the spoon is Bush's illegal war?

THOMAS: Yeah, you could say that.


And so forth. Clever stuff. But it makes you wonder if Spruiell ever opened a copy of the New Republic which, you know, has pretty much wholeheartedly supported every US intervention since Vietnam.


Update: Matt Yglesias sums up the situation as of this morning.

Ghetto faux pas

This story - in which a staffer in Dalton McGuinty's office sent an email to her co-workers referring to a job applicant, Evon Reid, as a "ghetto dude" and accidentially cc'd Reid himself - is certainly bad.

But pretty much equally dumb was Progressive Conservative opposition leader John Tory's outrage-by-numbers response:

"That kind of language or inference is not acceptable," Mr. Tory said. "There's an awful lot of people struggling to get an opportunity, to get a hand up. They're not looking for a handout, they're just looking for a fair chance."


Right; because it's absolutely essential to point out - in the course of castigating the Premier's office for racial stereotyping no less - that a U of T honours student and graduate of a summer course in international management strategies at the University of Hong Kong (etc.) - is looking for a "fair chance" rather than a "handout".

Bush's gut is back.

According to the WaPo, Bush opposes expanding, or even maintaining SCHIP program at its current eligibility levels, "on philosophical grounds". That appears to be the paper's paraphrase but it's probably accurate.

The facts, as best I can figure them from various reports: since its creation in 1997, SCHIP has cost the feds $5 billion a year. The renewal under debate is for the next five years. In light of rising health costs and population growth, the Congressional Budget Office has calculated that SCHIP needs an additional $2.7 billion per year to maintain its current national enrollment rates without shifting recipients into other programs like Medicaid.(Currently, SCHIP covers about 4.1 million kids per month, or 6 million over the course of a year, and 350,000 adults, the latter in only 12 states.) The Senate Finance Committee has proposed a $7 million a year increase (to $12 million a year), that would expand coverage by around 3.3 million people. The White House wants to increase funding by only $1 billion a year, which under CBO estimates would mean a reduction in the scope of the program.


This actually reinforces one of my core beliefs about the Bushies and conservatives in general: they may quite often act like the tools of special interests, but they're really at their worst when they're following their guts and acting "philosophically".

And that must be the story here. As the CBPP points out in its excellent fact sheet (via Obsidian Wings and LGM):

SCHIP and Medicaid are not single-payer systems, and most SCHIP (and Medicaid) beneficiaries receive coverage through private managed care plans with which their state SCHIP and Medicaid programs contract. The American Medical Association (AMA) and the trade associations for the private insurance companies and the drug companies — hardly supporters of “government run” health care — support expanding SCHIP to cover more uninsured low-income children.


True enough. Not only are Senate Republicans pushing for SCHIP expansion (plus pretty much every mainstream editorial board in the country), but so is the medical-industrial complex. The AMA has been running newspaper ads on the subject. PHRMA's Billy Tauzin is flacking away for SCHIP. AHIP is also on board. These lobbies have nothing to fear from the expansion of SCHIP and Medicaid which employ their services. They're not looking for White House protection.

And what about the small business lobby? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes the current bill, but only because they don't like the tax hike on cigarettes proposed to fund it. Meanwhile, via the Boston Globe, during the same media tour in which he promised to veto the SCHIP legislation coming out of the Senate, Bush also mused on the predicament of small businesses faced with rising health insurance costs:

Bush spoke after attending a discussion at Man & Machine Inc. in Landover with small-business leaders the president said feel pinched by high health care costs. "They don't like the idea of having to make the decision between providing health care for their employees and not expanding their businesses," he said.


I don't know, but wouldn't this be a good argument for letting the government take over some of the insurance costs of the children of lower-wage employees?

Bush doesn't appear to be anybody's tool in this debate. He's just a moron who doesn't even let the things he knows interfere with his conservative "philosophy". Wrecking SCHIP is just insanely bad politics based on conservative anti-government ideals that the administration is backing up with pure bunk. (On a side note, Administration flack Al Hubbard's assertion that more government-funded health care would wreck “the important doctor-patient relationship that exists in the private sector” sounds like it was transposed from the "state-run health care breeds terror" bullshit heard on Fox last week.)

I'll take corporate shilling over what passes for "conviction" on the right any day of the week. Any corporate interest worth its salt at least understands the value of a reasonably content and complacent citizenry.

Some CCD facts

Slate has a good backgrounder on Colony Collapse Disorder and the honey bee-less future. The gist is that, whatever the direct cause of CCD, honeybees in the U.S. (and maybe also in Canada) have been screwed for awhile, as are their likely replacements also likely to be in the long run.

Eleven dollars I won't get back.

Ian Cohen's review of The Editors' new album made me laugh:

The lyrics, presumably shouldering the weight of all human suffering ("Escape the Nest," "The Racing Rats" and of course, "Weight of the World") sound like new age-y pick-up lines.... And that's even before Smith declares that "Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors" are "the saddest thing I've ever seen." "Who Do You Gotta Blow To Get On 'Grey's Anatomy'?" was deemed a bit too blunt for a proper working title.

Hee hee hee. On the other hand, the best album I bought last year was Gomez' How We Operate (title track: Grey's season 2 opener), and the worst album I bought was, by far, Snow Patrol's Eyes Open ("Chasing Cars": Grey's season 2 finale). ("Best" and "worst" are pretty subjective here, I know.) I will say this for the Editors' crappy new album: there's nothing on it as bad, IMHO, as "Chasing Cars".

What's wrong with this picture?

Regarding this hacktacular WSJ editorial page graphic, Kevin Drum points out:

Just for laughs, take a look at what the Journal's barmy graph drawing implies: Norway, with a corporate tax rate of about 29%, generates enormous amounts of corporate tax revenue. But then, since it's the only way to get an upside-down U out of the data, the graph goes nearly vertical. Even the Journal's editorial writers, normally a pretty barefaced bunch, were apparently too embarrassed about this economic singularity to follow the right side of their graph to its logical conclusion, but we can: at a rate of about 33% corporate taxes produce no revenue at all. An increase of a mere four percentage points destroys tax revenue entirely! Mirabile dictu!

Not only that, but by following the Editors' advice and cutting the corporate tax rate from 33% to 29%, the US would miraculously increase the corporate tax revenue share of GDP by over 7 percentage points, six of which would be lost by further decreasing the corporate tax rate down to Ireland's level! Behold the potency of the Laffer Curve!

Unfortunately, the OECD data used for the graph costs money. But the only way to get the graph to look like it does is to assign an enormous (basically infinite) weight to Norway relative to all other countries (although the word "Norway" doesn't appear in the editorial). And there's something humourous about the notion of the WSJ editorial page rigging weights to highlight the primacy of Norwegian policy given that in 2005 Norway had the fourth highest overall tax share of GDP in the OECD.

Perlstein on Lady Bird Johnson

His obit is a passage from Before the Storm. The passage was actually the first thing I thought of when I read that she had passed. I was just thinking of digging it out to read again when I stumbled on the post.

Allah vs. the Hippocratic Oath.

TMP tracks the "terrordoctor" meme through several incarnations.

Phallic symbols everywhere!

Oh man this is funny. Although I have to wonder if the city worker who provided the info about "retrofitting the posts with metal collars and chains" did so with a straight face?

It does seem to me though that people today tend to see phallic symbols everywhere. Tall buildings are especially common targets. But I've heard cracks made about nicely arrangements of of carrots and cherry tomatoes, about dead trees, about fountains... and that's just recently. (Maybe I'm just especially sensitive given that I've been spending some part of my meager vacation time reading Ayn Rand, inventor of the phallic sentence.) I'm not sure though that Dave is right to complain that it's because we're a society of "ridiculous prudes". Sometimes it's just so irresistible to laugh for no reason in the middle of the day and make a giant fuss. I bet those Oregon residents are having a ball, and that they'll miss their phallic cement traffic cones when they're gone...

Stupidity like a virus.

Larry Kudlow maintains the high standards of logic at The Corner:

Is China trying to poison us, our kids, and our pets? Are Beijing’s communist hardliners waging some clever, clandestine, economic/military war against U.S. citizens?

...According to China’s own findings, almost 20 percent of Chinese goods fail to meet quality standards. 20 percent. Now, when you factor in that China was responsible for issuing the report, and that its China’s own quality standards that are at play here, one needn’t go out on a limb to reach the conclusion that safety problems are likely far more widespread than what’s being officially reported.


The Chinese government is admitting to major problems with national industrial quality control. So, of course, one needn't go out on a limb to reach the conclusion that they're secretly trying to kill American kids and pets.

The conservative clown show.

The newest angle on the failed London and Glasgow car bombings emerged on Fox yesterday as Jerry Bowyer of NRO explained why state-run health care makes terrorism more likely:

Doctors in America tend to sort of cluster together in these practices... maybe a dozen partners... And if one of your partners is a jihadist, spending all this time online reading Osama Bin Laden fatwas, somebody's going to notice that. But the National Health Service is more like the Post Office. You know, there's a lot of anonymity. It's easy to hide in the bureaucracy. And more to the point, if you're a physician and you're in partnership with another physician and they turn out to be a terrorist, the practice is blown. You know, there are severe economic consequences for you. But in a big bureaucracy, that's not the case.


The ideas were maybe a little unformed - under this logic, shouldn't we also eliminate single-doctor practices (something incidently that is taking place in Britain) - but by the time the new brilliant idea reached MSNBC and its military-affairs (!) sage Jack Jacobs, the emotional thrust was really less about state-run healthcare per se and more about about the horrors of pluralistic states that allow things like this to happen:

A very large proportion of the medical practitioners are foreign -- not just foreign born medical practitioners, but foreign-born medical practitioners who aren't even British subjects, something you've got to keep an eye on.


It's hard to know whether to laugh or get very drunk.

Time wasting.

I love Stylus Magazine for a lot of reasons (like hosting this great single-mind-at-work debate) - the latest being alerting me to the fact that this song from my youth was actually a beautiful thing done live and acoustic as well. Amazing.

Fear of Thompson.

Ezra explains why, however obnoxious is Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson is the worst Republican in the field: he's clueless, and that's just how the GOP establishment, and the lobby groups who depend on the GOP establishment, like it.

Plus, the claim that Canadians pay "nearly half their incomes in taxes" is bogus. Moreover, by OECD estimates, our share of taxes this year - 39.9% - will be only 5.7 percentage points higher than the U.S. share of taxes and 1.2 percentage points higher than the OEDC average.